Page 367 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 337

asserting the New Femininity. Ironically, while the feminist movement
aimed to render women upwardly mobile, gay liberation engineered, with
a petulant backhand English I’ve never really understood, the economic,
moral, and physical decline of far too many homosexual men.
For all the noble talk of gay politics and consciousness raising, gay
liberation looked to be ending in the intensive care units of San Francisco’s
jam-packed hospitals.
“Never fear,” Solly said. “Some dinosaurs always survive the crunch.”
AIDS spread its incurable Kaposi’s sarcoma cancer and pneumocystis
across the City, across the nation, and around the world. It decimated gay
men. Even as they became AIDS’ chosen victims, their once-proud politi-
cal victories became academic, pyrrhic. They had gained the City’s voting
booths and the legal protection of the outrageous baths and bars. But for
all their human rights, they died daily. They kissed each other good-bye as
the City’s doctors switched off the machines supporting life in the bodies
with which they had once so prided and preened themselves, and with
which they had loved each other so much.
The City’s morticians made a fortune shipping the remains of AIDS
victims “back to Kansas.” Kansas was where Dorothy returned from Oz.
Kansas was where you came from if you were gay. It became a cliché of
greeting for awestruck newcomers to the gay heart of San Francisco: “You
know, Toto. I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” But Kansas comes as
Kansas will, as Death will.
Solly found it ironic that the newly founded gay Atlas Savings and
Loan at the corner of Market Street and Duboce had previously been a
mortuary. When the vast stucco building first went up for lease, Ryan
had suggested that it be turned into a gay disco called “Death Takes a
Holiday.” Upon seeing a Chronicle business section article on the affluence
of gay males, Solly phoned me.
“Magnus! Have you seen the Chronicle this morning? We virtually
have wagons trundling through the Castro with the drivers calling, ‘Bring
out your dead!’ What an ironic mistake in bad timing. At the very moment
when we need a gay mortuary, the building turns into a Savings and Loan.
Give me the days when we were all sexual outlaws. We died quietly in our
closets with our high-heel sneakers. The paper says we’re now an economic
force to be reckoned with: mortgages, IRAs, estate planning. Gone, gone
with the wind, are the days and nights of serious sucking and anonymous
fucking. What’s happened to us? We’ve become, omigod, bourgeois! A
fate worse than Death!”
Ryan always knew the physical joys and medical dangers of casual sex,

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