Page 125 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 95

“It’s a...mortal sin of impurity,” Ryan said. The head of his cock glis-
tened with a dear pearl of anticipation. “Isn’t it?”
“Not,” Leslie said, “when it’s done with love.”
Ryan regretted more than ever the lost moment with Dave Fahnhorst,
but the muscles of Leslie’s arms and chest felt good to Ryan’s tentative
touch. “Hold me,” Ryan said.
“Trust me,” Leslie said. He fell to his knees and put both his big hands
on Ryan’s butt. His warm, wet mouth descended slowly down the length
of Ryan’s hard shaft.
For the first time, the time he realized he had been waiting for all his
life, Ryan was made love to by a man, and more than a man, his uncle,
a priest.

4

From the first, in those early liberated days after Stonewall, as the
sixties became the seventies, men slid easily from nights on Folsom to
afternoons on Castro looking for ways to kill time till another night South
of the Slot. Castro was a street awakening with a certain post-Beat and
post-hippie style. Like time-lapse photography, the Castro Cafe, Tommy’s
Plants, and Paperback Traffic kick-started the funky revival of the lazy old
neighborhood.
The Castro merchants who weren’t charmed were alarmed. They
remembered how fast Haight Street had declined to a hippie skid row in
the three years after the famous Summer of Love in ’67. Some jumped
at the chance to escape. Homosexuals in a changing Catholic neighbor-
hood frightened them more than blacks. Gay sex reared its head. The
shopkeepers sold cheap and doubled their money. They fled from brisk
new businesses like the Jaguar Bookstore. The Jaguar, with its twenty-five
cent admission to its backroom rendezvous, made turnstile sex, with In-
and-Out privileges, a convenient trysting place for strangers cruising the
streets for tricks with no place to go.
Bars blossomed on Castro with trippy acid names like the Midnight
Sun, Toad Hall, and Bear Hollow. A gay man could buy a used book at
Paperback Traffic to read over eggs and coffee in the Castro Cafe before
having sex at the Jaguar, drinking a beer at the Midnight Sun, getting
some steam and some more head at the Castro Rocks bath, and heading
home with flowers from Tommy’s Plants.
Communes and salons sprang up. The artist Cirby, Robert Kirk, the
star bartender at the Midnight Sun, lived above the Owl Cleaners at 19th

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