Page 356 - Some Dance to Remember

326 Jack Fritscher

The festive air of the Castro caught him up in its spell. He had no tree at
home, but he could not resist the huge Hibernia tree with its six thousand
lights and ornaments that came from all around the neighborhood. Some
wit had hung a sequined red high heel way up on the tree. Gay Santas
set up their chairs under the tree and let gay men and lesbian women sit
in their laps for charity. For a buck, fairies and dykes told Santa over a
handheld mike what they wanted for Christmas. The proceeds went to
the AIDS support fund.
Christmas made the Castro a neighborhood reclaimed from their
collective childhoods. Ryan stood on his tiptoes to see the title of a book
hanging on a green ribbon from one of the strong lower branches. It was
James M. Barrie. Was it innocent irony? Barrie had ventilated his own
terribly British thing for young boys in Peter Pan. He was the author of the
one book common to most gay people’s childhood. At Christmas, more
than any other time, the recovery and exhibition of the childlike quality
that once was the essence of gayness rose flamboyant and decorative across
the festooned streets of the Castro. Ryan hated the Peter Pan he had loved
as a boy. Peter had never wanted to grow up. “God,” Ryan said in the last-
minute crush of the evening crowd, “I’m such a Scrooge.”
Ryan knew he had to buy at least one gift for the even greater Scrooge,
Solly Blue. He spent nearly an hour in the Obelisk boutique as the eager
line of frenzied shoppers, bobbing to the disco version of “Scarlet Rib-
bons,” bought pretties on charge cards as fast as the clerks could move
them in handout of 489 Castro, wrapping the merchandise in smart gray
boxes with smarter gray ribbons and elegant black ostrich feathers tucked
under the bows. Straight people crowded up next to gays. They knew
where to shop; and, protected by the denial of disease, they even brought
their children down to tour the streets, window to window, to see the
lights and the animated manikins and the candy houses and, of course,
the Big Tree with the two, well, so what, gay Santas: one male and one
female and both whiskered. It was all so much Christmas whimsy, and
so much more traditional than that offered by the downtown merchants.
Ryan bought Solly the same clean-lined glass-cylinder oil lamp that
Kick had bought for his mother. “Everybody in town,” the clerk at the
Obelisk said, “has at least one size of this family of lamps. It’s a sleek
design. A Wolfard. Tasteful. The Whitney declared it an American clas-
sic. It goes with everything. You can’t go wrong buying it. Frankly, I hate
them.”
The perversity of perversity, Ryan thought. He carried his shopping
bag out to the warm dark of the night. To his right the marquee of the

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK