Page 221 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 191

“I mean we’re all wizards, descendants of the Druid priests of the
old phallic religions that predate the goddess religions of virgin-mothers.”
“I’ve read that chapter,” January said. She meant the Manifesto, Chap-
ter Three, “Magic: Homomasculinity as the Old Religion.”
“I raised you,” Annie Laurie told Ryan, “to be independent.” She had
taught him to cook and to sew and to clean, so that he would not marry
some poor girl to have someone take care of him. “No one should marry
forth wrong reasons. Besides,” she said, “if you grow up to be poor, you’ll
know how to do all these things for yourself, and if you grow up to be rich,
you’ll know how to manage the servants.”
Her infusion of radical Irish independence knocked Ryan’s world-
view off the straight and literal and gave him a parallax, metaphorical
vision. As much as Misericordia had been his upwardly mobile way out of
the corn-fields of Peoria, his acquired independence lacquered his inborn
homosexuality and gave him fast and rebellious exit from the Midwest
standard of a nine-to-five life, a split-level wife, and 2.3 children stuffed
in a two-car garage.
His homomasculinity was his declaration of independence from the
norm. He wrote in a letter to me, dated Friday, August 26, 1977:

I despise what is normal. It’s too expected. I choose to be
homomasculine. I could have shut my eyes, bitten my tongue,
denied my preference, and managed a wife and children; but I
chose the harder path: to make love to men. I need certain men
the way certain men need me. Some men need to be loved more
than women can love them. Few people ever realize that men can
dry up and die for lack of love from other men.
No one knows what causes homosexuality anymore than
they know what causes a boy to answer to a religious vocation
to the priesthood. No one ever asks what causes heterosexual-
ity. Both are their own special calling. Neither is better than
the other. Merely different. Some people are called sexually to
procreate. Some are called to recreate. If I had children, I could
not truly live the creative, intellectual life. If Fundamentalists are
having personal relationships with Jesus whispering in their ears,
then they have to accept that Jesus, or whatever the Primal Force
is named this time, can call me too. When a muscular, sweaty,
young carpenter blows in my ear, I’ll follow him anywhere.
If I could choose, and I did not choose, I would choose to
be exactly as I am. Homosexuals are forced to choose—not what

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK