Page 348 - Some Dance to Remember

318 Jack Fritscher

Sex, more than love, was the Castro style, but lover was the word most
used. For every real lover, ten imposters lurked. Vampire tricks cruised the
night. Anne Rice, who lived in the Castro, knew. Ryan knew. He tried to
drive a stake through such love’s heart.
Ryan understood the intersection. Both its joys and its dangers. He
knew how to move counter to its beat. “What movie are we?” he asked
Kweenie. They had stood, her first weekend in the City, when she was still
Margaret Mary, at 18th and Castro. “We’re Blow-Up.”
He had warned his sister to be careful to maintain herself against the
Castro beat. He had told her how David Hemmings had coached Vanessa
Redgrave. “Hemmings,” he had said, “takes Redgrave home and puts a
jazz record on the stereo. She begins to snap her fingers to the insistent beat
and she is very uncool trying to get with it. Hemmings stops her, tells her
no, teaches her how to snap her fingers off the beat, shows her how to move
to her own rhythms against the rhythms of the record. He shows her how
to remain herself and still enjoy the music. He teaches her how to be cool.”
Kweenie built her meteoric singing career on that advice alone.
Ryan at first maintained his own beat. It’s not the drinking that makes
a person an alcoholic; it’s the inability to function. A man following his
cock around can’t be too careful. One morning he might wake up caring
about nothing but sex, and call into work dead. The Castro style spit in
the face of function. Something in the Castro afternoons and the Folsom
nights drowned out the pure message of the siren call that had brought
them all to San Francisco. The downward mobility of gay men became
a street virtue on Castro where SSI checks were waved as victory flags
against the straight system.
Did the quality of orgasm suffer? In the Manifesto Ryan theorized:

As there are women who have never cum, so are there men
who have often ejaculated, who have often spasmed, but have
never really cum. Perhaps a man can’t truly know his own mascu-
linity until he has transcended simple ejaculation and truly cum
in his head and his heart and his body with another man. The
coming together of gay liberation in San Francisco is a chance for
the great rebirth of masculinity Whitman predicted. Where else
can one see so many males, many highly talented, most educated
to the nines, the majority of them from middle-class families who
had spent a fortune on orthodontia?
The potential was staggering. He saw their mass vocation as a call to
productive grace which, if applied correctly, could lead to a rebirth of the

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