Page 181 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 151

through his jockstrap. He reached down his big blond arms to help Ryan
lift the barbell into place. His pecs bulged and his armpits bloomed. The
smell of his warm sweat filled Ryan’s lungs as he inhaled and began the set.
Sometimes life was perfect.
Other times it wasn’t.
“You think,” the snitty bodybuilder breezed by, “that you’re some
kind of sex cop? Well, you’re not, Blanche. You’re not.”
Later in the Corvette, Ryan said, “Maybe Mr. Steroid is right. I’m
bored with the Manifesto controversy. I should have listened to my father.
He always said never to talk about sex, religion, or politics. But that seems
all any of us ever talk about. We should have listened to our dads.”
“What’s worth having,” Kick said, “is worth fighting for.”
Political correctness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. One
man’s Uncle Tom is another man’s Tom Paine.
From drag-queen transsexuals, from leather clones to cowboys, Ryan
wanted everything possible for consenting adults, every kind of consent-
ing adult, who kept their outraging kinks—but not their homosexual-
ity—in the privacy of their own homes.
“So much,” Solly said, “for the best of gay sex being public sex.”
Ryan and Kick maintained privacy. They kept secret their nights of
musclesex and bondage. They saved their public exhibitions appropriately
for Maneuvers and for the stages of Kick’s physique contests.
That night in his Journal, Ryan wrote:

Kick’s presentation of muscle and manliness communi-
cates with people; he doesn’t alienate them. (Even though I do.)
Straight boys and young men want to be like him. Nobody wants
to be like an outrageous drag queen spinning through the Civic
Center Plaza except another drag queen. What is the need so
many gay men have to outrage the citizens and then wonder why
the citizens fag-bash them? The public street may be theater of
assault for some and theater of absurd for others, but you don’t
need Julian Beck and Judith Malina to tell you where theater
stops and reality begins. I can’t buy the notion of gays and clones
and drag queens as street actors busily raising the political con-
sciousness of the American middle class taking Gray Line Tours
through the Castro. Why should they bother? The secret of the
American bourgeoisie is that they will tolerate everything as long
as you don’t alarm them. These boys have about as much to do
with real politics as Richard Nixon. They’re not patriots of the

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