Page 127 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 97

refugees, moved to El Lay.
Meanwhile, on Castro, Attitude, the ultimate gay posing routine, was
born and found a welcome place to hang out. Attitude was the style.
Attitude leaned against lampposts and lounged in doorways on Castro.
Attitude was the invited guest at brunch and the meat pursued at the
baths. Attitude determined who was hot and who was not. Attitude was
an aggressive statement of gay identity and fraternity. Attitude found
strength in numbers; and there were more numbers on Castro than any of
the immigrants had ever imagined hiding out in their closets in Keokuk,
Kokomo, and Kalamazoo. Attitude gave the finger to everything that was
past. Attitude was calculated to scare the horses. Attitude saluted the free
new lifestyle that each day invented itself at the ground zero of 18th and
Castro.
The fragile alliance of gays began to build to a strong sense of commu-
nity on the Castro strip. When the closet doors opened all across America,
the gay men walked out with their bags packed and headed to the Mecca
of Sodom-Oz.
Who were all these strange young men and what did they want?
How exactly did Castro happen? I want to know what it was that
suddenly summoned such a vast variety of homosexuals to San Francisco.
What was the mysterious call they heeded during the very early 1970’s,
congregating from all across America into the freewheeling spin of the
most permissive City in the nation’s most progressive state? What jungle
drums called so many living so singularly to come at the same time to
the same place?
“It’s a divine call,” Ryan said. “Gay people have a vocation.”
“A vocation?” Solly said. “To what?”
“To finally show the world, once and for all, what homosexuality is
really all about.”
“Call Anita Bryant,” Solly said. “Call Jerry Falwell.”
“I came to San Francisco following the same voice that called me to
Misericordia and the priesthood.”
“Nu-nu nu-nu,” Solly hummed the “Theme from The Twilight Zone.”
“What movie are you?” I asked.
“I’m not any movie,” Ryan said.
“You’re Close Encounters. You’re Richard Dreyfus piling dirt in his
living room. You’re all those characters in the movie trying to get to that
mountain where Truffaut played a musical light show for the aliens.”
“Aliens?” Ryan said. “I think we homosexuals are the aliens. The out-
siders. The outlaws. The refugees.”

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