Page 38 - Some Dance to Remember

8 Jack Fritscher

than serpents’ teeth from calling Ryan O’Hara “Miss Scarlett” to his face.
He was not self-deprecating. He was self-accepting, or so he thought, his
baldness having forced him to be realistic and stoic about what he could
not change.
I think if a gay man can accept his own receding hair as a natu-
rally evolving male Look, he achieves a kind of triumph of acceptance
unknown to those who try to imitate twenty-one forever. Long hair was
the fashion when Ryan first moved to San Francisco. He loved the Castro
Rocks Baths and the muscular hippies with long blond braids who found
an opposite attraction in his short black crewcut. He was one of the first
balding and bearded gay men on Castro in the days when Castro was
young, long before the crewcut and beard turned into the signature of the
Castro clone. He felt sorry for men like the massive bodybuilder, Casey
Viator, who wore toupees because they couldn’t accept certain male truths
about themselves. His sex talk in bed led to freelancing erotic writing.
“Baldness,” he wrote in a gay magazine where models are always
twenty-one and hung, and no hero is bald unless he is shaved, “is a natu-
ral secondary male sex characteristic. A totally male Look. Attractive to
men. It keeps grown-up men from looking androgynous. It forces self-
actualization. Never fight nature in yourself. What’s hotter than a young
balding blond college jock? Look in the mirror and never look back. Tell
anyone who asks that you got bald making U-turns under the sheets.”
When he inaugurated his own magazine, Maneuvers, he took an edi-
torial policy of glorifying men over thirty. The movie, In Praise of Older
Women, had sparked the idea. He wrote the word daddy and it entered the
gay lexicon. Maneuvers became a hit.
Suppers at Ryan’s Victorian, over the hill from Castro in Noe Valley,
revolved around talk of sex and gyms and drugs and real estate and foreign
films. Ryan’s Irish tenor voice, trained to sing high mass in the seminary,
was like Paul Simon’s. Not that he was a singer. But he could match
Simon note for note on “Bridge over Troubled Water” without any strain.
From four years of university teaching during Vietnam, he had learned
to project a certain presence with his voice. He was a talker. From the
soup to the nuts, Ryan was up. Intense. On. Active. Purposely seductive
after the fashion of men who realize if anything good is going to happen
to them, they’ll have to play their hand with whatever strong suit they
have been dealt. Ryan’s wild card was a Joker full of sarcastic, punning,
maddening, needling, blasphemous wit honed first among his adolescent
classmates in a Catholic seminary, then perfected over brunch in res-
taurants on Castro, and finally merchandised in the pages of Maneuvers

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