Page 32 - Some Dance to Remember

2 Jack Fritscher

stage. He felt himself moving in slow motion through air as thick as
celluloid.
The gun was in his hand.
His hand was pulling the gun from the holster of his pocket.
The man he loved more than life itself was turning, nearly naked,
smiling with intensity in the cone of hot overhead spotlight, into a double-
biceps shot...

2

Rewind. Back up. Whiz. Whirr. Click. Bang.
“I want to belong,” Ryan Steven O’Hara wrote in his Journal. “I want
to belong to that tiny, terrible elite: men who live their lives beyond the
limits and never die in their beds.”
His life was a pursuit of manhood. Ryan O’Hara fancied himself
Orion, the star-hunter stalking the Constellation of the Bear. Sometimes
reality slapped him up against the side of his head.
“You’re one kind of man,” Julie Andrews said to James Garner in
Victor/Victoria. “I’m another.”
“What kind is that?” the virile Garner asked.
“The kind,” Julie Andrews said, “that doesn’t have to prove it.”
Ryan tried not to protest too much. He knew he was as much a man
as Julie Andrews. He adored her ideal purity.
Ryan’s masculinity, and in some quarters I run the up-front risk of
immediately losing empathy for him, ran exclusively homosexual. He
never apologized for it; nor will I for him. You may stereotype him, or
dismiss him, or chalk up what happened to him during what the media
called gay liberation as the just desserts of a faggot who immigrated to San
Francisco, tried everything, risked everything, and maybe lost everything.
But don’t. Don’t put his story down.
Sometimes outlaw men and defiant women, who dare to stand outside
our normal pale, reflect back a bit more of our straightlaced selves than
we first imagine. When all’s well ends well, we call that comedy. The
rest is tragedy. But, sports fans, that’s all entertainment. There are more
questions here than the simple one: how gay liberation, so happy, outra-
geous, and political, wound up critically wounded in an intensive care
unit. Mainly, what I want to know is, how men and women lose their
balance in the high-wire act of love.
This all began, once upon a time, back in the madcap days before
real estate boomed in San Francisco; in the days when the first Irish and

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