The repeating island of gay Manhattan in Andrew Holleran's Nights in Aruba

Abstract

This article examines Andrew Holleran's unflattering portrayal of the sexually voracious gay milieu of 1970s and 1980s New York, a world characterized by mesmerizing and tedious repetition. Nights in Aruba and other works suggest that, in contrast to Africans forcibly sent to the Caribbean during previous centuries, men participating in the voluntary diaspora of gay exiles in Manhattan shunned the very things that the relocated slaves once longed to reclaim: their birth families, their traditional religions, their original cultures. And, in turn, they lacked the survival instincts attributed by Cuban-born theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo to inhabitants of the repeating islands of the Caribbean. As Holleran documents it, the 'doomed queens' peopling his autobiographical fiction wielded no defenses when the AIDS epidemic hit. 'The things on which we based our lives had proved disastrous', he laments.