Page 347 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 317

And what was, was that Kick was about to break Ryan’s heart as he himself
lost the heart Ryan had first immediately loved that El Lay enchanted
evening when Kick came through the door and walked, more than he
walked into the room, into the fulfillment of a magnanimous image Ryan
had always carried in his heart of what the perfect man should be.
“Of course I’m in-love with you,” Ryan said. “And you’re worth fall-
ing-in-love with. No offense to Logan, but is he worthy enough for a man
like you?”
“Logan has his faults. He’s learning. Maybe he’ll learn some worth
from me. The way I learned true worth from you.”
Worthiness was not Logan’s long suit. He had arrived from San Diego
where he had survived dealing grass and working some not-so-vague
bodybuilding scam. He had been hustling musclesex and he had worked
his way through every buyer in town. He found no problem in splitting
for San Francisco. When he first played his hand at the corner of 18th and
Castro, he epitomized what the street was about, and he dragged Kick
down into the thick of it. The two of them became showboats.
“Showgirls,” Solly said. “A gay man with a lust for bodybuilders is like
a straight man with a thing for Vegas showgirls.”
Castro had been Ryan’s stomping ground long before it became
Logan’s and Kick’s. Solly had given up on the Castro completely, and like
many men no longer went near the neighborhood. But Ryan had found at
the intersection of 18th and Castro a certain vitality that, for all its faults,
he wished to chronicle in his writing. He wanted to capture it. He may
have knocked it, but down deep he liked it. The gay emergence was the
only shell game in town. Castro, after all, was what was happening in San
Francisco, the way that, years before, the Haight-Ashbury had produced
the flower children, and before that, the North Beach of Kerouac and Cas-
sady and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti had produced the Beat Generation.
I understood Ryan’s analytical genealogy. It matched mine as a pop
culturist. The Castro was the latest manifestation of the libertine dream of
Kerouac and Cassady who both finally gave up on the travesty that media
attention had made of the Beats. Like them, and the Kesey hippies after
them, Ryan saw the gay dream desaturated, gutted, by people who lost the
essence of what it all meant, and went instead for the glitz, exchanging life
for lifestyle, encouraged by types like January Guggenheim who had their
own reasons of gain to exploit gay liberation. Nothing ruins a popular
grass-roots movement more than making the cover of TIME magazine.
Ask Leonard Matlovich. His face on that pioneering 1975 cover with the
declaration, “I am a homosexual,” ruined his life.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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