Page 268 - Some Dance to Remember

238 Jack Fritscher

1980” at the Mabuhay Gardens on Broadway near Polkstrasse. “Zola!
Z-O-L-A. Emile Zola. Girls will be boys and boys will be toys.” She tipped
the top hat crowning her Dietrich tuxedo drag. “Marlene was a man...
and so was Zola. Z-O-L-A. Zola.” She was triumphant returning from
Hollywood after a small part January had cadged for her in Allan Carr’s
ill-fated Can’t Stop the Music!
As fast as they had come together, things in San Francisco began
to fall apart. Camelot had blown up in John Kennedy’s face. The little
expanding universe of the Castro imperceptibly reached its farthest limit
and began to collapse back on itself in motion so slow no one felt gravity
change or the Earth quake. The Old Man’s boys grew older. Faces that
looked so inviting under the red lights of bars and baths looked vam-
pire white at high noon on Castro. The first generation of free gays was
no longer the newest generation. There were new kids in town. Fresher
faces showed up the old faces the way dewy milkmaids new to the palace
grounds always anger old queens in fairy tales. The first generation had an
acid Look etched into their high thin cheekbones.
“Never, my dear, lean over a mirror and look at your face,” Robert
Opel had said, “not even for a line of coke. Sagging is gravity’s revenge.”
Opel’s fame fused with another Robert: the fetish-face-and-flower
New York society photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. Some even
thought both men were one and the same. Both artists hated the third
Entity many believed existed: a man named Robert Opelthorpe.
“Beware of third Entities,” both Roberts said to Ryan.
The gallery owner Opel had showcased the photographer Mappletho-
rpe’s chronicle of the new Drug Look in his leather fetish shots. Dark
circles under the eyes became a trademark of faces marked by drugs the
way an even older generation of gays, who had grown up oppressed in
the fifties, were marked in the face by the puffy dead-giveaway Look of
alcoholics.
A kind of un—Civil War broke to a smoulder.
“Just because he’s gay, Mary, doesn’t mean he’s your sister.”
Or your brother.
Power trips abounded. Slaves needed masters. Empresses needed
courtiers. Women needed villains. Old queens needed fresh meat. Politi-
cians needed voters. Hustlers needed johns. Everybody needed a lover.
Only their dealers needed nobody. The gay community broke into factions.
At an A-Group Pacific Heights party, a blond, big-shouldered swim-
ming captain, three months graduated from Stanford, sat with the elder
gentle-queens sipping their aperitifs while the younger gay men rose

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