FICTION

DOES FREDDY DANCE by Dick Scanlan (Alyson: $19.95; 207 pp.). These 16 connected stories are gay fiction that reaches out for--and deserves--a wider audience. Lively, funny and moving, they describe how Freddy Donovan survives alcoholic parents and teen-age trauma (his Julie Andrews imitation at a ninth-grade talent show ends with him stripped of his dress and wig and beaten up in the school restroom); how he works as a bank teller and Bloomingdale’s salesman before going off to New York to wait tables and do stand-up comedy; how he emerges as a stage and TV actor and, more important, a decent human being.

This is Dick Scanlan’s first book, but he sidesteps formulas and cliches with the aplomb of a veteran. The best stories here detail Freddy’s friendships with unconventional women and his strained but by no means severed ties to his family. Toward the end, after his lover has died of AIDS, he visits Amsterdam and embraces a handsome curator in the Secret Annex that once hid Anne Frank--somebody else who found meaning in life despite the threat of death, who looked out her narrow window to see “a chestnut tree; past that, a church tower; past that, the sky.”