Page 17 - Some Dance to Remember

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Some Dance to Remember:

How the Boys in the Band Played On

by Mark Hemry

People don’t usually move to San Francisco to write novels, but when
novelist Jack Fritscher got off the train in 1961, he knew instantly that San
Francisco was a story telling itself.
In the way Christopher Isherwood was a camera in 1930s Berlin docu-
menting gay culture collapsing from viral politics, Fritscher was a camera
during the Titanic 1970s in San Francisco. The journals he wrote were
the footage he shot while “the first-class party was cruising on, full speed,
innocent of the icebergs of HIV, steroids, and political correctness that
lay ahead.”
“At Stonewall,” Fritscher wrote, “gay character changed. Everywhere,
including San Francisco.”
As an eyewitness participant, Fritscher took notes. As editor in chief
of the legendary Drummer, San Francisco’s longest-lived gay magazine, he
turned those personal “oral history” notes into authentic stories reflecting
the way we were during the wonderful window of sexual freedom between
penicillin and HIV.
Citing Fritscher’s distinguished work collecting a vast archive of gay
history from which he fact-checked Some Dance in the last analog age
before laptops and the Internet, Willie Walker, co-founder of the GLBT
Historical Society San Francisco, honored him as “...the pioneer writer
who since the 1960s has documented the gay world and the changes it
has undergone.”
The Advocate praised Some Dance as “epic, comic, mythic, the Castro’s
gay Gone with the Wind.” The Lambda Book Report honored Some Dance
on its finalist list of the five best novels of 1990. The ForeWord Awards
named Some Dance the Best GLBT Book of the Year.
“I didn’t write Some Dance. The book wrote itself,” Fritscher said.
“Back in the day, I’d watch the local color of what went on in the streets,
bars, cafes, baths, and discos, and go home and write it down. It’s a pica-
resque comedy, a character-driven satire of a rather needy yet roguish pro-
tagonist surrounded by sex adventurers.
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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