Page 41 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 11

swimmer’s bodies jealous as shit. There is something about handsome,
husky, blond jocks that has filled everybody from Hitler to Madison Ave-
nue with lust. Especially if, like Kick, their genes take to bodybuilding,
and they groom themselves like impeccable Highway Patrolmen parading
their stun-gun good looks with all the Command Presence of a man car-
rying himself with absolute self-confidence.
Kick could get away with murder.
One night, when Ryan sat with Kick at the Castro Palms, Kween-
asheba took a handheld mike, sat down on the edge of the stage, and sang
soft country-blues, with a twinge of lust for Kick in her own voice: “His
pickup grin’s flashin’ across the juke joint floor. Redneck an’ handsome.
Blue-jean eyes lit from above. Chancin’ with dancin’, flirtin’ with love.”
Ryan and Kick were hardly listening. They were staring into each other’s
eyes. At least, Ryan was staring into Kick’s.
“God,” Kweenie told me after she first saw Kick, “He’s so drop-dead
gorgeous he should carry drool buckets for innocent bystanders.”
Kweenie and Ryan were psychic twins born sixteen years apart.
I must warn you. I am a professor of American popular culture at San
Francisco State. I am not inexperienced in my observations. I am not gay,
but I am a scholar—no, a student—of the gay subculture so important
to San Francisco. I like gay men and lesbian women. Gays have always
been a wonderful affront to received taste in America. That makes them
interesting. They know how to make us react. You do not have bearded
men in nuns’ habits on network television without offending someone;
and in the stylish offense of a man like Sister Boom Boom, quite often,
comes the shock of awakening society needs. Gay men and lesbian women
have been avant garde gadflies to straight American society. They exist to
teach us irony. We are better off because of them. Our interiors are better
designed. But that is academic. What is personal to me is that, once, while
jogging Venice Beach, I met a woman friend who had run into a Golden
Man. The look in her startled eyes was the same wondrous look I saw in
Ryan’s face when first he told me about Kick.
Recently, lecturer Quentin Crisp, that brilliant British pioneer of
world-class queers, warned the yearning world of homosexual lovers that
there is no tall, dark man of their dreams. But Ryan, the night that Crisp
held my campus lecture hall in queenly thrall, would not have it so. Crisp
gayly fielded questions after his lecture. Ryan challenged Crisp’s velvet-
glove rhetoric with a boxing glove. What a show! Both men respected the
other but neither budged an inch. They locked horns at the political heart
of the gaystyle matter. Ryan, plucky as Quentin was plucked, was playing

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