Page 135 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 105

cohesive, with a larger sense of purpose.
Something indefinable was happening on Castro. Everything changes.
In the years after the first flush of gay liberation, more than one voice was
asking where do we go from here.
Ryan, more than ever, wanted that over-the-rainbow answer.
Kick was the key to their future.
Kick was not gay. He was beyond gay. He was post-gay. He was a
masculine man who preferred masculine men.
Kick had first said to Ryan, “The hardest thing to be in the world
today is a man.”
Ryan cut from whole cloth the distinction between radical manly
homosexuality and gay popular culture. Looking at Kick, he knew one
thing for sure: not all gay men are sissies. He wanted young men coming
out into the gay world to know they had more options than screaming
effeminacy.
Ryan, the former seminarian and almost priest, played devil’s advo-
cate. The Manifesto questioned gay style: why pronouns like he changed
to she in gaytalk; why gay men carried their cigarette packs in their hands
instead of their shirt pockets; why gay smokers gestured dramatically with
their cigarettes like a bar filled with a thousand Bette Davis’s in a trash
compactor; why gay clothes fit tighter than straight clothes; why gay men
had their hair styled like mommy instead of getting their hair cut like
daddy, all the while looking for older men, but not too much older, for
godsake, to play dominant daddy in bed; and where did those gay boys
learn those mincing, sibilant S sounds that betrayed them faster than
wearing a sweater while walking a poodle?
Seventy percent of Castro was doing “Their Mother’s Act.” The Mani-
festo suggested that some entrepreneur could make a fortune by opening
the Castro Village Academy of Movement and Speech, with beginning
and advanced seminars titled “Your Father’s Act.” It would be a Butch
Academy where students could dance in and walk out. But, of course, the
Divine Androgynes would bitch. The queens would say, “But, my dear!
Who needs it?” Probably the only takers with any sense would be dykes.
Ryan shook out a grain of salt, placed it on his tongue, and put his
tongue firmly in his cheek. He aimed the outraging barbs of the Manifesto
to catch the hearts and minds of those wondering if being terminally
outrageous was their only way to be. After all, outrageous exaggeration
was the Castro vernacular and the Castro style. To meet and match it,
Ryan wrote the immodest proposal of the Manifesto with a large brush
on a large page.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK