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| Another PNW Classic  |
Set in a small Montanna
town, The Fancy Dancer examines the struggle of a young Roman Catholic priest to come to terms with a personal
life that is contrary to the teachings of the church. Father Tom Meeker is curate at the rural parish of St. Mary's
in Cottonwood. His Pastor, Father Vance, is a crusty old man, but not necessarilly out of touch with reality. It
is amidst the combines and cattle ranches that Father Tom meets Vidal Stump, a native American with a reputation
for drunken street fighting, a wife and child, a prison record and a job as a mechanic at the local garage. But,
like Father Tom, the public view of the man is cloaked to hide the truth. Vidal Stump was not a church-going person. So when he suddenly appears in Father Tom's confessional, the young priest becomes somewhat suspicious of Stump's motives for being there. He had seen Vidal around town and admits to us that he found him attractive, a feeling, we soon learn, that was mutual. The two become friends and eventually fall in love. Stump's marriage is really a cover and the child not even his. His wife, a developmentally challenged girl, had been abused and when she became pregnant, the young Indian took her in. Their relationship was a mutual convenience. But Stump continued to foray into the gay world to satiate his physical and emotional needs. As their relationship develops, so too, does the conflict that haunts Father Tom. His love of God and the Church is constantly countered by his desires and his love for Vidal, often to the point of physical and emotional discomfort and pain. |
| Another PNW Classic |
When he learns of a new organization amongst Gay Catholics,
he arranges to attend a conference out of state so that he might explore Dignity and learn how it might
help him in his quest for balance between service to God and individual identity. Vidal meets him on this journey
of discovery and they are confronted with some of Father Tom's past, as well as Cottonwood's biggest busybody,
who is also attending the conference dealing with abortion that Tom used as his vehicle to discover Dignity.
Now that she has seen him with members of that radical new group of church rebels, she becomes the ticking time-bomb
in Father Tom's closet. Exploring one of the most controversial issues of the late seventies, Patricia Nell Warren has, once more, reached into the closet and helped open the doors to gay equality. Patricia has a knack for looking into the most secretive worlds where homosexuality is locked away, frowned upon and never admitted to exist, and opening the doors for freedom. Again, she has moulded her characters so that they are real, because the people she created in the seventies would have been in the closet, hiding for fear of destruction in the fields she has chosen to set them in whether it be sport or theology or in any high profile, male-dominated endeavour. What makes Warren's work stand out is the way she makes her characters face themselves and their situations and makes them deal with it toward more productive lives as gay people. |
| Another PNW Classic |
This is a much different read than the Front Runner novels. Unlike sport, which tends to be a more 'brutal' environment to 'come out' of, the church tends to deal with it's undesired secrets in a more covert fashion which, none the less, is still a vicious assault on the people it attempts to repress especially in terms of the psychological pain it inflicts. The Fancy Dancer explores some of the avenues available to help deal with the pain and crisis of coming out and stands today as an encouraging testament to those who, two decades later, still find themselves trying to open their closet doors. |
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