Page 172 - Some Dance to Remember

142 Jack Fritscher

attracting, gays prefer to ball with other gays who match their
degree of Animus or Anima.
Like seeks like.

For the first time, Ryan came back to his basic conclusion.

What you’re looking for is looking for you. What you’re look-
ing for is like you. So you’d best be careful, both for what you
wish for, and what you allow yourself to become, as you create
your own best creation: yourself. Tell me the company you keep,
and I’ll tell you who and what you are.

Ryan one night had stumbled onto something basic about love. Trip-
ping on blotter acid at the Barracks, through a tangle of bodies, he had
accidentally cruised an orgy-room mirror. He was turned on by the guy
before he recognized his own reflection. The next day he was embarrassed
at what he thought was narcissism. Later, he figured from the surprise
encounter with his own physical Look, that he really deep down must like
himself. He was an accomplished masturbator. “If I don’t make good love
to myself,” he said, “how dare I make love to someone else?”
If Ryan had stuck to masturbation, or at least settled into the uncom-
plicated calisthenics of California sex, and if in his private life and pub-
lished writing he had never mentioned the word love, no one would have
freaked out. Certainly, without love, he was a sportfucker-well-met having
the time of his life at the baths.
“Impersonal sex?” he wrote. “I’ll tell you about the necessity and
beauty of impersonal sex. When you’re up to your ass in interpersonal
relationships and want some temporary relief from the ongoing demands,
the only balance is the glory of impersonal sex. Try it.”
Ryan knew his pleasure. He invented gay vocabulary by sandwiching
between the polarized classifications, dominant top and submissive bot-
tom, the more realistic middle ground of mutualist.
In Maneuvers he wrote:

Some say keys hanging on the left side of a belt signify a top
man. Keys hanging on the right, a bottom. One wise observer has
clarified that keys on the right do, in fact, always signify a bottom.
Keys on the left, he insists, mean no more than negotiable. For
that reason, a man should save the keys on the left until he’s in a
true top mood.

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