Page 138 - Some Dance to Remember

108 Jack Fritscher

“You’re not,” Kweenie kicked him in the shins, “politically correct.”
“I’m not a separatist,” Ryan said. “I’m not a chauvinist.”
“You’re an intellectual bully the way Thom is a physical bully.”
“I’m a sexual pluralist. Don’t knock a manly idea and masculinist
ideal whose time has come.”
“You’re a fascist.”
“And you’re a fag hag,” Ryan said. “My own sister.” He took her hand.
He was sixteen the summer she was born. “You’re too young...”
“I hate it when you say ageist things like that!”
“...to remember how things were before Stonewall.”
“Don’t condescend to me, Ry.”
“We were all better off when all queers were outlaws,” Ryan said.
“Now we’ve all got Attitude. At the top, there’s the very-A-Group of mil-
lionaire gays, the Delta Nu guys, with their mondo exclusive fly-ins they
plan once a month strategically around the country. Kick told me. They
hire bodybuilders for weekend bondage and muscle worship. When in
Rome,” Ryan shrugged, “hustle a gladiator and watch the empire fall.
There’s rich gays and poor gays and political gays and rainbow lesbians.
Folsom gays think Castro gays are twits and clones. Castro gays can’t
stand Polk Street gays who are of no use to Pacific Heights gays except as
cheap hustlers. There are designer gays born under the sign of Lacoste. I
kid you not. There’s even a gay cemetery in New York state. The designer
caskets have little crocodiles on the lids. There’s landlord gays and tenant
gays and gay Jews for Jesus. There’s chubby gays and chubby chasers and
gays who hate fat guys. There’s even hot, hairy old gays! If Castro were a
neighborhood, people would speak to one another. But no! Hello on Cas-
tro means ‘Wanna fuck?’ Even Randy Shilts says so. The fact is, you can
have a wonderful time at the baths with a guy on Saturday night, and by
Sunday brunch, neither of you acknowledges the other’s existence. How
gay can men get?”
How gay can men get?
There’s the ironic thousand-dollar rainbow question.
One of Solly’s street hustlers watched some drag queens’ bitch fight,
and commented: “How gay!”
Out of the mouths of babes.
How gay!
Ryan flashed on the straight boy’s razor-sharp slam. “What’s the dif-
ference,” he wrote, “between straight people and gays? Straights don’t
stand you up for supper.” He wondered why the Castro Theatre featured
festivals called “Great Women of the Silver Screen.” It was three years

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