The Sex Squad

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The protagonist of Leddick's second novel (after My Worst Date) is Harry Potter, who danced in the corps de ballet for the Metropolitan Opera Company in the 1950s (as did Leddick himself). The story is related mainly in flashback by a present-day Potter--now a doctor, husband and father--who begins and ends the novel at the deathbed of an ex-lover from the Met. Leddick's well-turned phrases and apt aper us never answer the question that drives his novel: What could have turned the youthful Harry's passionate, exclusive, quite open early sexual interest in men into Dr. Potter's dutiful, heterosexual domesticity? By the end, we're told that the dissolution of one "all-consuming love" for fellow dancer Rex Ames robbed Harry of all his passion and much of his volition. Leddick gets across the trauma of their breakup, but too little of their love. Young Harry seems so lacking in self-awareness that his story conveys little more than his aesthetic and sexual appreciation for his lovers' bodies. This failure leaves the novel without a center, and the would-be tragedy on which it ends comes across flat and vaguely confusing. (Oct.)

Megan Harlan

[A] breezy, chatty novel....Leddick evokes a delicate air of melancholy as his narrator considers the ravages of time and illness. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Vivid recollections of a dancer's life at the old Metropolitan Opera house in 1950s New York round out a thin story of gay first love. Leddick, a former ballet dancer with the Met of the period, gives his story a certain authority, but it's often overwhelmed by his too-abundant evocations of the past. The narrator, Dr. Harry Potter, begins his tale in the 1990s when, on his rounds, he encounters an old lover, Illy, hospitalized for AIDS. The meeting prompts Harry to recall how he had once been a ballet dancer and member of the "Sex Squad" (the 10 most sexually desirable dancers) at the Met. Raised in the Midwest, Harry began to dance when his divorced mother, smitten with the movie "The Red Shoes," moved to Chicago to take up ballet, bringing her teen-aged son along. Talented and good-looking, Harry himself was soon performing at the Met. Though he realized he was gay, he remained a romantic, disdaining casual sex and yearning for true love. He was drawn to fellow dancer, Illy, but increasingly realized that their relationship was based more on lust than love. The latter he found with Rex, another dancer, but Rex was greedy and ambitious, using people (including Harry) for his own ends. Borrowing all Harry's money to pay for an alleged trip to Hollywood, he ran off instead, taking Illy with him to the Caribbean. Before Harry flew there to confront them, he turned down a sexual proposition from the Met's choreographer and was fired from the ballet. A perceptive survivor, Harry went to college, became a doctor, and married, but now seeing the dying Illy reminds him that he has never forgotten what he felt for Rex—-or for dancing.