Page 333 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 303

Auschwitz was around the corner from 18th and Castro.
The real breach in the civil war between gays was between those who
favored civil rights and those hysterics who chose a medical quarantine for
health. Who was right? Who was wrong? Who could say in the disfiguring
face of the A-Word? The truth was, straight San Francisco grew frightened
of the gays in their midst. They feared for the purity of the City blood sup-
ply in the local banks. They sounded like Nazis worrying about the purity
of Aryan blood. But the gays would be nobody’s Jews. They marched
against bath closure in Harvey’s name. The baths shut temporarily, then
reopened with safe-sex guards patrolling the halls to prevent exchanges of
bodily fluids. The Marx Brothers could have starred in an impossible new
comedy: A Night at the Baths. Attendance dipped, then rose slightly, and
leveled. Sex became even more than ever an ironic denial of Death. The
late-night back rooms, never ready to say die, invented Safe Sex Jerk-Off
Nights. Free condoms. The bars stayed busy as ever.
Kick, two days after the Castro Street Fair, had fled the Castro for Bar
Nada. The City and the plague were too much for him. Every two weeks
or so he drove to the Victorian to let himself go, to vent the kind of sex he
could have only with Ryan.
Between times, Ryan pined away, his depression deepening, keeping
himself sane by beating himself to orgasm with Kick’s image before him,
posing in slow motion on the video screen.
Half a loaf was better than none.
Ryan was preparing the Christmas issue of Maneuvers when the door-
bell rang. It was late on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving and
he was expecting no one. He was doubly surprised when it turned out to
be Kick standing on the doorstep of the Victorian with his suitcase in his
hand.
“I’ve come back from the ranch,” Kick said. The implication which
Ryan could neither acknowledge nor question was that Kick’s affairette
with Logan was over.
“Where will you stay?” Ryan asked. He knew the answer.
“Birmingham,” Kick said. It sounded like a major threat. “Unless you
let me stay here with you.”
Ryan could not help but think he had won. He was like the long-suf-
fering wife in so many Warner Brothers movies, bearing up courageously
while her husband took a ridiculous header with some bimbo showgirl.
“It worked off and on for a couple of months or so,” Kick said.
“Where is he now?” Funny that neither one mentioned Logan’s name.
“He’s still at the ranch. He has no place to go. I told him you wouldn’t

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