Page 214 - Some Dance to Remember

184 Jack Fritscher

wearing leather chaps and chrome armbands available through the mag’s
800-number shop. Slender pages of fiction and drawings were a fat-cat
publisher’s thin come-on to get readers to subscribe to a monthly maga-
zine that was a glorified mail-order catalog to sell leather toys and poppers
and his lover’s disco records. In the first rise of gay magazines, it was
fast-buck publishing. For guys not knowing the difference, Leather Man
passed as the real thing.
“Lips that touch Naugahyde,” Ryan said, shaking his head at his com-
petition’s latest issue, “shall never touch mine.”
The Manifesto made masculinism a theory. Maneuvers made it a fash-
ion. A Different Drum reviewed the tempest with sympathetic amuse-
ment. Leather Man didn’t get it at all. Ryan was prick-teasing everyone,
even his own kind, and having a wonderful time doing it.
“Homomasculinism,” he said to January Guggenheim, “is homosexu-
ality theorized, idealized, and applied man-to-man.” He showed her the
collection of his incoming mail. She aimed her video camera at the enve-
lopes. Men from all across the country had begun to write to him in ways
less salacious than before. One of them was straight. They joined him in
their resistance against, “not women and feminism per se,” he said, “but
against the predatory version of radical separatist feminism.”
Solly Blue sat bemused across Ryan’s living room, listening to the
bullshit roll, and rather enjoying one of his excursions from his penthouse.
Ryan found himself in an ironic situation.
“So,” January said. “At first your tongue was planted in your cheek.”
She had set up her Panasonic video camera on wide angle to record the
interview. The big cameras and crew would come later. Little did any of
them realize the video would end up in my piles of research. “Where is
your tongue planted now?” She fanned the stack of mail Ryan had given
her to read. “I mean now that quite a few men, judging by these letters,
have responded to your masculinist position?” She wanted him to hang
himself. “Queer theory? What is it, darling? Really...”
Solly turned to Ryan. “She wants your talking head on a plate.”
“We’re in the second phase of sexual liberation,” Ryan said. “These
aren’t the good old days on Folsom or the early days on Castro.”
“It was simpler then,” Solly said. “You blew your mind with drugs and
fucked your brains out. Hardly a period for intellectuals. But there they all
were, all these college professors on sabbatical, snorkeling at the bottom of
a pig pile at the Barracks researching gay pop culture.”
“First we had to prove we were strong in numbers.”
“Because,” Solly tweaked, “we had all been in solitary confinement

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