Page 156 - Some Dance to Remember

126 Jack Fritscher

Much of San Francisco sex in those early first days was sanctuary sex.
The war was on. Students protested in the streets. Nixon was president.
The baths were safe haven from the world. There was no tomorrow. There
was only the night. The music never stopped and there was no piper to pay.
Ryan was ecstatic. The intensity of male Energy, he was convinced,
was religious. They were men, as bonded as ancient priests, assisting in
the reincarnational birth of a kind of homosexual religion that predated
Christianity. There was the night and the music and the drugs and the
men. It was ritual. It was sex. It was raw male bonding.
“Eons have passed,” Ryan wrote, “waiting for this specific convergence
of so many old souls to worship the Old God who predates Christianity.
Our spirits have been harvested from time older than time, collected here
and now out of all the uncounted ages of men for this reincarnation in
unison. I have no father, no brother, no son more than these men gathered
here in this time, in this flesh, in this space more auspiciously than any of
us realized at first. Never on this planet have so many men of such similar
mind gathered together to fuck in the concelebration of pure, raw, priapic
manhood. If the mythic Saint Priapus has never been canonized by the
Catholic Church, then he has been made a saint in San Francisco in these
halls, in the temples of our conjoined bodies, tangled in passion, slick with
sweat, and glazed with seed.”
In the Barracks on those nights, dragging Teddy in tow, Ryan, always
the outsider, experienced his first great sense of fraternity, of belonging,
of being one of the boys. He knew then, those first years after Stonewall
and the Tool Box, despite the nightly body count from Vietnam and the
first mumblings of Watergate, that it was their Golden Time. He wanted
to remember how it was. Life was so fragile. Everything changed. As
spontaneously as their lifestyle had combusted, he knew it could burn
them down.
Stoned, on his hands and knees at 5 a.m. on the sidewalk outside the
Barracks, he watched the sun rise over his car.
“Nothing this good can last forever.”

9

“Ry has a number of opinions on a wide variety of topics,” Kweenie
said, “and all of them subject to change.”
Ryan’s was a wild presence. Kick was intent and enigmatic with the
smiling Command Presence common to strong, silent men. At first it was
hard to get a take on him. Ryan kept him all to himself. But some notes

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