Page 174 - Some Dance to Remember

144 Jack Fritscher

that one tries to stamp out in others what one most fears in oneself. Do
you, Ryan Steven O’Hara, maybe harbor secret thoughts of becoming a
mustachioed drag queen?”
“Piss off.” Ryan considered the options. “I lack the talents to be a drag
queen or a saint.”
“What if there’s no difference?” Solly asked.
“I’ll just have to go fuck myself.”
Ryan was, I think, as he went about writing for others, wrestling
within himself about the deeper, unspoken feelings men in our society
are afraid to speak about themselves, especially when they need real affec-
tion and sometimes sexual soothing that the world of women cannot give
them.
Ryan wrote:

Heterosexuality is older than homosexuality but only by one
couple. Heterosexual unions are mixed marriages. And all reli-
gions believe mixed marriages don’t work.

He punned and played his way through concepts: what was real and
what was a put-on?

The Women’s Movement has insisted that men can’t give
women everything they need. Ah-ha! Just so! Neither can women
handle all of a man’s needs. What’s true of the goose is true of the
gander. After a year or two of procreational fucking, and a couple
of kids, the husband starts going out with the guys, and the wife
with the gals. That’s when extramarital affairs pick up: when one
or both of the couple starts needing the solace and relief of a little
recreational, as opposed to procreational, sex.

Up in Sonoma County, more than one married man knew enough to
pull his pickup into the discreetly shaded lane leading up to the barn set
far back behind Ryan’s ranch house. Ryan had a room set up in one of the
old granaries off the main barn. Thom knew it was private and he kept
Sandy and the triplets away.
Ryan hunted straight men in the county the way gays hunted gays
on Castro. He frequently met blue-collar daddies, working construction
or driving truck, who, somehow or other with him, shit kicking in the
dirt parking lot outside a county bar, let go, and let him take them to
him and hold them the way they needed, the way only a man can hold

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