Page 274 - Some Dance to Remember

244 Jack Fritscher

bashing and Death, goes into a dangerous sense of denial. With the serial
gay Death toll rising, the whispers rose to a nervous rash of “dead” jokes.
Whenever some man in the burgeoning gay population died unexpect-
edly, naturally, or from an overdose, or from murder, someone somewhere
sometime always said, with an oily laugh, “At least he didn’t have to grow
old.” That, of course, in a City jammed with Dorians and Peter Pans, was
a fate worse than Death.

3

It was a fire out of control. Solly Blue heard the first explosion and
looked up from the small light tray where his color transparencies of his
latest boys were spread out for review. The front curtains glowed orange.
He was not at home. He was spending the evening at a photographer’s
apartment studio on Hallam Street, a tiny mews of ancient wooden apart-
ments off Folsom that catered to the leather crowd. He pulled back the
curtains and saw the ball of flame rise up the back corner of the four-story
Barracks Baths. It had closed the year before and was under remodel. He
opened the door and ran down to the grille of the wrought iron safety gate.
Another explosion knocked him back on the terrazzo steps. He ran back
into the apartment and called the fire department.
“It’s bad,” he reported.
He hadn’t realized how bad. Hallam Street, with its ancient warren
of old wooden buildings, had only one entrance/exit. It was just his luck.
He rarely went out. This night was an exception, and to make matters
worse, he was alone. The calendar-clock read July 10, 1980, 10:37 p.m. His
friend, the art photographer known only as Dane, who had invited him
to his studio, was off on a quick errand to the Boot Camp bar to deliver
proofs he was completing for an ad campaign.
Solly looked around the unfamiliar apartment. He had nothing of
his own with him but two trays of slides to show Dane. On the walls sur-
rounding him hung the work of a lifetime. After Robert Mapplethorpe,
Dane was the most famous, and undoubtedly the most talented, of all
gay erotic photographers. He had immigrated from New York, taken the
Hallam Street studio, and remodeled it into a living space behind a two-
room gallery. He was one of the first artists to stake out the light industrial
area of South of Market, dubbing it SOMA, the way South of Houston in
Manhattan had become the avant SOHO. What original work was not
on loan or in the hands of private collectors hung on the gray felt walls or
lay stored flat in huge drawers.

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