Page 339 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 309

Castro to City Hall to focus attention on the government’s lack of funding
for immediate AIDS research. The gay view was that Legionnaires’ Dis-
ease, and the toxic shock syndrome that afflicted young middle-class girls,
had both been funded immediately to find a fast cure. The news said noth-
ing so well as the fact that AIDS was untreatable. It had no prevention.
It had no cure. And the people with the money hardly seemed to care.
The initial medical opinion warned that nearly all gay men had come
into contact with the immunity-suppressing virus. After fighting through
to the grudging acceptance of gay liberation, which was only a dozen years
old, gay men found they were suddenly social pariahs once again. Straight
San Francisco treated the Castro like a leper colony as subtly as some had
tacitly approved the gun in Dan White’s hand. Almost overnight, fewer
and fewer straights dared to come to the Castro for a chic supper and a
movie at the Castro Theatre. In downtown offices, straight people gath-
ered around Xerox machines and wondered if they could still go to lunch
with the amusing gay men with whom they worked.
The uncivil tension between Pacific Heights gays and Castro gays and
Folsom gays widened momentarily. Cocksuckers blamed the fuckers who
blamed the piss drinkers who blamed the fist fuckers who blamed the
scatmen; and everyone blamed the shooters with their needles. Finally,
even while the panic—and it was real panic—rose in those first months,
they all knew they had no choice but to band together to save themselves,
because no one else would save them. Their history taught them that.
Not everyone who was gay had come out to their parents and family,
and suddenly some of the dying had to make long-distance phone calls
to announce the double punch of news that they were gay and they were
going to die of AIDS.
From San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York the phone calls
and letters reached out across the whole country. Parents who knew their
sons were gay, and parents who suspected their sons were gay, feared for
the lives of their boys. Some could talk of it and some could not, anymore
than they could overtly acknowledge what they knew to be their son’s
sexual essence. Annie Laurie, I’m sure, was praying her rosary for Ryan
and all the friends of his she had ever met, Kick included.
Kick was unmoved. He had the antidote: a sound mind in a sound
body. Positive Attitude was everything. For him, bodybuilding was the
key to health. He quoted to Ryan from Sun and Steel, the Yukio Mishima
book about bodybuilding that Ryan had given him for his thirty-fourth
birthday.
Mishima, complaining that men are weighted down by the same

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