Page 338 - Some Dance to Remember

308 Jack Fritscher

5

“Oh, Magnus,” Ryan sat with me in a Castro restaurant, “identity is
like AIDS. We should have listened to our mothers. Our mothers were
right. Be yourself. Don’t do what others do. Always wash your hands after
you go to the bathroom. Don’t eat after other people. Don’t take rides and
candy from strangers.”
“At least with the plague on,” I said, “you’ve more time to spend with
me.”
“I need to talk to someone sometimes,” Ryan said. “I’ve always liked
you, Magnus. I’ve made you executor of my will. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I’d mind if anything happened to you,” I said.
I truly feared for him, for Kick, for Teddy, for all of them. The news
from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta was not good. Two cases
of AIDS were diagnosed every day and the diagnosis was a Death sentence.
“I’m leaving everything to Kick and Kweenie and my mother and
Solly, but I’m leaving you enough,” Ryan said, “to handle all my papers,
writings, photographs, and videotapes.”
“You’re being overdramatic.”
“These are dramatic times.” He looked at me and raised my water
glass. “This very tumbler may be infected,” he said. “Remember the tea
scene in Cabaret when Liza told Marisa Berenson they could get VD from
teacups.”
I remembered.
“I know it sounds alarmist,” Ryan said, “but what are we doing eating
in a gay restaurant?”
A certain paranoia rode a pale horse down Castro. I watched things
change in San Francisco. The six-o’clock news was a nightly dirge. AIDS
was a surefire pull for viewers. The terrifying news was not good. AIDS
was associated with four groups, three of whom were people who weren’t
all that socially acceptable to the real Mr. America and his Mrs. From the
start, hemophiliacs, dependent on the public blood supply, had the public
sympathy. The rest were third world Haitians, intravenous drug users, and
the group most widely infected—gay males.
“The worst thing to be in the world today,” Solly said, “is a gay Hai-
tian hemophiliac junkie trying to maintain his job as a waiter.”
AIDS was a medical mugging. The disease hurt the image of gay
men worse than any fag-bashing had ever hurt any gay men kicked to the
sidewalk by young toughs in from the burbs of Orinda and Moraga to bag
themselves some queers. The gay press called for candlelight marches from

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