Page 199 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 169

“I’m here as a friend,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said. “You’re welcome. We’re both in the same
business.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Icons. I make them. I merchandise them. I enjoy them. You, one step
behind, like Inspector Hound baying at the arts, critique them. And me.
And the people like Kweenie and Ry and Kick who make things happen.”
“I suppose you’re right.” I could hardly deny my interest in this man
about whom the quick-witted David Niven, laying his finger aside his
noses aid, “Isn’t it amazing that this man has gotten the biggest laugh he’ll
ever get in his life by exposing his short-comings?” Opel’s performance
that memorable Oscar night was the one breath of real life that year in
what everyone agrees the morning after is the longest, most boring tribal
ritual that one billion people consent to endure every spring.
Even naked, Opel wore a fine edge of gay rage. He had a talent for
gaining media attention for his politics. My clearest image of him, five
years after the Academy Awards, was the front-page photo of him standing
in the sun outside San Francisco City Hall. He was costumed like “Gay
Justice.” Nothing overturns a verdict like a gun. Opel pointed his pistol
loaded with blanks at a fellow actor dressed as the assassin, “Dan White.”
In a ritual skit, Opel shot “Dan White” down in the very Civic Center
plaza where, forty-eight hours before, the White Night Riot had erupted
when thousands of gays, protesting the court’s verdict, began a candlelight
protest march from Castro Street, down Market, to City Hall. Almost ten
years exactly after Stonewall, the crowd, growing outraged at the light
sentence given to Dan White, turned angry. The mob roared up, conjur-
ing the birth of aggressive gay power, and attacked City Hall, setting fire
to police cars that burned with huge flames that lit up the dark evening
thick with smoke.
The riotous 1979 night began on a MAYDAY! MAYDAY! May Day
afternoon, the 21st, when at 5:30 the jury found Supervisor White guilty
of two counts of manslaughter (one could hear the man’s laughter) in the
shooting of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Rush-hour
radio news mixed with Happy Hour outrage. Runners, alerted by activist
leader, Cleve Jones, crisscrossed the Castro calling lesbian women and
gay men from their apartments. “Out of the bars and into the streets!”
Dan White had gotten away with murder. “No Justice! No Peace!” His
ultimate fag bashing merited only a slap on the wrist. “MURDER! Not
manslaughter!”
What began that twilight as a peaceful march from Castro Street

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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