Page 118 - Some Dance to Remember

88 Jack Fritscher

horseshit. All I know is Ryan is holed up with Kick. Solly Blue is pissed.
He has—how do you say in English?—no love for Kick.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t ask,” Kweenie said. “Solly says he has reasons.”
“Such as?”
“He won’t say. At least, he won’t tell me.” She signaled for an orange
juice. “I think he’s jealous. Ryan told him that Kick’s the Most Original
Thinker he knows.”
“That used to be Solly’s title.”
“Precisely,” Kweenie said. “But these days nobody’s as good as Kick.”
She threw her hands up. “Ryan says they discuss stuff. He calls it stuff”
“Stuff? What kind of stuff?”
“Mantalk,” Kweenie said. “Ry told me it was mantalk.”
“He means it’s none of your business.”
“And none of yours.” She disliked her brother excluding her with a
word like mantalk. She knew if she had been born Ryan’s brother, their
relationship would be quite different. They would have made love, which
he denied her and himself, not because she was his sibling, but because
she was female.
“They’re in-love,” I said.
“They’re two gifted boys playing grown-ups and getting away with it.”
Because of Kick, Ryan’s life, like his erotic writing, had assumed a
creamy, dreamy, soft-core porno look: everything slightly more real than
real. Kick was one of his fictional superheroes incarnated like Pygmalion’s
Galatea and Henry Higgins’ Eliza. Their life together was an enameled
dreamtime: clothes by Gentlemen’s Quarterly, sets by Architectural Digest,
bodies by Colt Studios out of Iron Man, script by Ryan out of Lewis Car-
roll by de Sade.
“Living off center is a necessity,” Ryan said.
What neither Kweenie nor I knew then was that Ryan was in the last
throes of his final draft of his Masculinist Manifesto, which he subtitled A
Man’s Man. I think he had some idea of the sensation, but had no idea of
the controversy, the long essay would cause when printed with erotic pho-
tos and distributed in tabloid format on San Francisco street corners. Not
that Kick and Ryan invented everything in the Manifesto. More that Ryan
pulled together something growing and mobilizing toward a confronta-
tion in San Francisco: the singular popular front of freshly uncloseted
male homosexuals was breaking up into subgroups of politics and attitude
fueled by lesbian feminist separatist women.
Ryan intended the Manifesto as the very off-center voice of the most

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