Page 105 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 75

to Death. Bodies, healthy, well-developed bodies, spit, if ever so briefly,
in the face of Death.
Kick and Ryan agreed that the death of El Lay’s most famous pro-
fessional bodybuilder, this side of Arnold Schwarzenegger, had been an
avoidable disaster. The former Mr. America was the talk of the gyms.
He had taken so many steroids to beef up his mass over the course of his
professional career that his liver had grown terminally hepatic, his hair fell
out, his muscle collapsed, and he died less than six months after diagnosis
of cancer of the bone marrow.
“Steroids kill,” Kick said. “It’s a shame. Bodybuilding is supposed to
be a health sport.”
“It’s as far,” Ryan said, “as a man can get from Death.”
“We’ll stick with coke and MDA,” Kick said.
“And poppers,” Ryan said.
“Definitely poppers.”
You needn’t be a student in my American pop culture class to see
that Ryan and the general public had some differences of opinion about
bodybuilders. Straight folklore knocks bodybuilders as the dumbest of
big dumb jocks. Gay folklore insists that bodybuilders are hung like stud
mice. Kick suffered neither debility. Ryan’s sex videos of Kick, in com-
petition condition, jerking off in front of a mirror visualizing the Look
he was perfecting, show both a Zen master sculptor at work and a male
animal “with,” as Ryan wrote in his Journal, “probably the largest piece of
dirty-blond meat in captivity.” Kick outstripped even the legendary blond
muscleman, Frank Vickers, in the Colt Studio classic, Pumping Oil.
Living with Kick, Ryan learned to read the person living inside Kick’s
muscles. If gay boys on Castro recognized Kick’s appearance, Ryan went
them one farther, penetrating the difference between Kick’s appearance
and Kick’s reality. Kick was an itinerant apostle of manhood. He was not
a clown cruising Castro like an orangutang in a spray-painted tee shirt.
Most massively big bodybuilders, gay or not gay, up from El Lay for a
visit, hunkered down Castro, to see and be seen, all their muscles competi-
tively flexed, parading in pose-downs of two or three, each outcrunching
the other, exaggerating every movement, pulling at their crotches, walking
shoulder to shoulder, clearing the sidewalk. In front of them like offen-
sive linemen, Muscle Fucks from Outer Space, shoulders and lats and arms
spread wide like a squadron of vampire bats.
Kick was a champ not a chump.
“You develop muscle,” he said, “to show it. But you want the Look
to read right. You want Command Presence, but you don’t want gay bar

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