Page 134 - Some Dance to Remember

104 Jack Fritscher

“You’re not one of them,” she declared, as only southern women can
declare. “You’re not one of them, are you?”
“No,” Kick said, and he said it truthfully. He knew even then he
was the stuff of a different breed. “I’m not one of those...people...you see
downtown.”
“I’d rather be dead,” his mother drawled, “then evah, evAH, EVAH
to think you were like them.”
Kick met his mother’s searching gaze. “Me too,” he said. “I’d rather
be dead than ever be like that.”
Holding her in his muscular arms, he hugged the accusation from her
eyes. His father smiled in relief. He was their golden boy. He was their
big, handsome, athletic son, and his hug around his mother’s small body
answered all their questions.
“Too bad, too bad,” his father said, “about young Miss Catharine.”
“I can understand,” his mother said, “if you never see her again. I
pity mean-spirited girls who lie with a vengeance when they lose their
gentleman caller.”

6

The mind of a writer is a wild country. Anything can happen there.
Maybe that’s what made Ryan an aggressive success with his Maneuvers
readers. They wrote him obscene fan mail. They sent him sweaty, piss-
soaked jockstraps, used rubbers, and cigars they asked him to shove up
his ass and return to them. Ryan never wrote back.
“I don’t want fans,” he said. “You gotta have friends.” He was a maga-
zine writer, not a letter writer.
“My writing to readers is my published stuff. Anything personal I
have to say I say in print. My private self is not much different from my
public self, but never try to read anything I write as actual autobiography.
I always twist the slant on anything that might be true. You have to juice
it up to give them what they want, or at least what they think they want.”
Over Ryan’s desk Kick hung a handlettered sign: “You have to live it
up to write it down.”
Ryan’s stories and articles, and his Masculinist Movement tract, are
a matter of public record. The Masculinist Manifesto was startling because
it was not his usual erotic fiction. It was an essay, a broadside, that upset
what the Chronicle and Examiner both called “the gay community.”
“Whatever that is,” Ryan said. “Bars and baths and bedrooms and
brunch do not a community make.” He held out for something, something

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