Page 103 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 73

place. The red lights of Sutro Tower blinked like terrestrial signals west
against the moon. Kick’s arms embraced him. His warm breath through
his blond moustache touched Ryan’s mouth making one breath between
them. The moment was so right, so pagan, on the rock-slab steps of the
raw mountain only three circuitous blocks from the hyper-civilization of
Castro, that Ryan’s old Catholic heart pounded with superstitious fear.
“We’ll have to pay for all this.” He recovered with a small laugh. He
remembered the line from The Boys in the Band about every one of them
willing to trade their immortal souls for a half hour of skin-deep beauty.
But Kick’s beauty was more than skin deep and Ryan hardly cared if for
all this mortal joy he should burn forever in hell. He was head over heels.
The intensity between them that first New Year’s Eve was the same
as the night they had won Kick’s first physique contest. They had driven
back to the motel with four trophies. Kick never said, “I won.” He always
said, “We won. You and I, coach. We won.” Kick took the Most Muscular
trophy to a jewelers and had it engraved with both their names, “From the
Champ to the Coach.” He gave the golden trophy topped with a victorious
bodybuilder to Ryan for his own.
Ryan certainly had helped Kick with his posing. Their muscle movies
and videotapes exhibit the talent of both men: one before the lens, one
behind. Ryan once said when he visited my apartment that he watched
his tapes of Kick when Kick had to return to El Lay on whatever business
he had there.
“I think,” he said, “that the ultimate ritual act of worship in the twen-
tieth century is a grown man, stripped, naked, stoned on grass, with pop-
pers by his side and clamps on his tits, greasing up his dick, kneeling on
the floor with his face four inches from the video screen, masturbating to
glorious closeups of bodybuilders flexing and posing.”
He gazed somewhat idly into one of those designer mirrors that looks
like a chrome hubcap surrounded by seashells. “My face will probably fall
off from terminal video burn.” He palmed his hand up his high forehead.
“Maybe that’s why I’m balding.” He turned to me. “Do I look hot?” He
didn’t wait for an answer. “For my type, and I am a type, I look hot.”
Life and lust, as much as Death, led Ryan to the discipline of body-
building. And to the worship of bodybuilders. He was little different from
straight males turning rowdy when they see athletes they adore exhibiting
their flesh and muscle in arenas and rings, on stages and playing fields; but
he, more than they, understood how homomuscularity was different from
homosexuality. The attraction men, even straight men, have for other men
who are athletes proves that men can love and admire other men as long

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