Page 140 - Some Dance to Remember

110 Jack Fritscher

Ryan loved to ruffle feathers.
In San Francisco, it was never individual people seeking their indi-
vidual rights who dismayed him. It was more the crazy-quilt mix of too
many politically correct movements all stampeding together down Mar-
ket Street to City Hall every time there was a left-field anniversary of
Harvey Milk’s birth, Harvey Milk’s Death, Harvey Milk’s circumcision,
Harvey Milk’s bar mitzvah, Harvey Milk’s coming out, Harvey Milk’s
election, Harvey Milk’s last brunch, Harvey Milk’s last zit, Harvey Milk’s
last orgasm.
How many indignant parades could attach themselves to Harvey Milk
without trivializing the assassinated supervisor? Every politically correct
group in town dragged Harvey out as its champion. “Harvey Marches”
from Castro to City Hall became a ritual act of public necrophilia. Ryan
thought the marchers’ signs would be more accurate if, instead of “Harvey
Milk,” they read, “Milk Harvey.” Harvey, politicized in Death, was more
of a media star than he had been in life. Women idolized Harvey; he was a
safe man; he could not betray them and fuck them over; he was dead. Gay
men pumped their pecs behind Harvey’s face silk screened on tee shirts
sold in the Castro. When gay shops sell your image, you know you’re dead,
you’re a saint, and you’re commercial.
Ryan would have objected to none of the hoopla if only the blind
hadn’t tried to consolidate the blind under one unified banner. Finding
Harvey had become as trendy as born-again politicians and convicted
murderers finding Jesus. The milk train, that Tennessee Williams said
doesn’t stop here anymore, was parked on a rail siding at 18th and Castro.
“Whatever happened to George Moscone?” Ryan asked. No one
marched in the name of the mayor who was gunned down at the same
time as Harvey Milk. Was Moscone too much of a straight white male to
be reverenced by gay men and lesbian women?
The Manifesto proclaimed it was time for men to be interested in men’s
masculine rights. “God knows, no one else champions men anymore.
We’re out of fashion. One imbalance has replaced the other.”
He questioned the wisdom of outrageous drag queens, transpersons,
El Salvadoran refugees, and feminists hitching their causes to the band-
wagon of male homosexuality, which they disrespected. They could have
their empress coronations, their expensive gender operations, their San-
dinista banners, and their Constitutional amendment, but they couldn’t
sully the purity of homosexual masculinity that the priest in him, encour-
aged by the bodybuilder at his side, had begun, right or wrong, to cham-
pion in words in the press, the way Kick was its model in the flesh on

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