Page 269 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 239

eagerly from the table to wash the dishes, run the Hoover, and empty the
ashtrays from the grand piano.
The piss-elegant host walked over to the stunning blond swimmer and
said, “We have a custom here for all new boys. Part of your initiation into
our little group. You, my boy, must needs help tidy up the place.”
The swimmer remained seated. “What in me makes something in
you think I’m your boy?” he said. “I’m from Stanford. I don’t clean up
after anybody.”
The host touched his gold-ringed pinky to his Liberace eyebrow and
said something like you’ll never eat lunch in this town again.
The swimmer rose up from his chair to his full six foot three and ten
inches, and groped himself. “You silly old queen!”
The Hoover died like a soul being sucked into a dirtbag. A cryogenic
silence froze the room.
“You...you...you...”
It was a queer kind of civil war. Males turned against males. Gay
love turned to drugged sex. Sex turned to competition. You were hot or
you were dead. The Castronauts didn’t need straight bullies anymore.
They bullied each other. Gay style fragmented. Nelly queens were out, but
didn’t go away. Butch behavior was in. There were a dozen ways to the new
“man-style.” One way or another each faction identified and segregated
itself.
Ryan had pages of notes detailing a Montage of Rank: rich gays and
poor gays, homomasculine men and sissies, carpenters, hair burners, and
church fairies who attended Temple and Dignity with organ fairies who
thought worship was a Bach recital. Everyone was rated on a Double-10
Scale. Dance? 10. Looks? 3. Total 13 out of a possible 20. Some guys, who
in the “dance” department—which meant “sexual prowess”—were 10s,
but who in their “Looks” were only 3, Ryan explained to me, you boffed
on the sly in private because you didn’t want your hot friends to know
you were balling a semi-dog who was a pro sex-artiste in the sack. Other
guys, who were a drop-dead 10 “Looks” in everybody’s book, you made
certain to ball in public at the baths and in the back rooms, “Because,”
Ryan said, “when you fuck with a ‘Looks: 10’ your own sex number goes
up, even though you don’t tell your brunch buddies at the Norse Cove that
Mr. 10’s dance performance was zip.” On Castro the pecking order was
maybe more sophisticated than the old high school pecking order, but it
was also more deceitfully vicious, and everybody kept track of the gossip.
It was Castro versus Folsom in a Costumerie of Drag: leathers, feath-
ers, construction, cowboy, pec-pumper jock, gender-benders, piss-elegants,

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