Page 271 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 241

It was a Ton of Attitude. The immigrant Manhattanite A-Group
crashed San Francisco, intent on Manhattanizing “The City That Knows
How.” They hosted huge, super-produced bashes, draping their first three-
story Night Flight party with Christo’s Curtain, and hiring, for their sec-
ond extravaganza, a full San Francisco pier for the jammed “Cecil B.
deMillions” Ultimate 1970s Party, Stars. Attitude pressured everybody
who was anybody to dance and fuck till dawn. Reaction to the Manhat-
tanization of San Francisco’s public sex style inspired Steve McEachern
to redesign his Victorian basement for private fisting parties; he dubbed
his exclusive, Invitation-Only boite “The Catacombs,” and vied with the
commercial baths, the Slot Hotel, the Handball Express, the Barracks,
and the Hothouse for rough-and-tumble midnight athletes who were
Olympic jocks long before the International Olympic Committee ever
thought of highjacking the 4,000-year-old classic word, Olympics, to their
trademarked, corporate hearts. “Fuck them,” Ryan wrote. “The real Gay
Olympics never happened in any sunlit stadium.”
Attitude dictated who was hot and who was not, who swallowed what
expensive drugs, who snorted, and who shot up at what right or wrong
address. Attitude crept on little cat feet, seeping fast, like the nightly gray
fog, through the streets and consciousness of the oldest hands and the
newest refugees escaping from the latest Anita Bryants and Jerry Falwells.
If without pecs, you were dead, without Attitude you could not succeed
or survive.
It was SFO gays versus El Lay gays versus Manhattan gays. The Great
Gay Triangle of three cities turned positively Bermuda. Attitude was
psychic territory. With men, ultimately, it’s always territory, all of them
ranked, dragged up, giving Attitude, pissing on their San Francisco patch
like Latino gangs fighting for their turf in the Mission. Each kind saw
need to take refuge in fraternity with its own kind. If the Castro in San
Francisco had a sibling city, it was Berlin with its wall.
Attitude assassinated characters, reputations, and motives with more
venom than Dan White ever knew. Dishing was second only to fucking.
Only orgasm was more pleasurable than a good gay Attitude put-down.
The Attitude Game was great sport, and great hurt. It would take years,
and, finally, political and medical terror, before the perverse-rainbow ban-
dana flag of intragay separatism even began to surrender to the Rainbow
Flag of Gay and Lesbian unity pulling the fussing, feuding dissidents
together in some semblance of community.
Males, during the Golden Time, all but abandoned politics to righ-
teous lesbians. Ryan paid his dues among those rogue males, cruising hard

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