Page 45 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 15

used to be, when things were what they used to be, that scholars would
wait a decent fifty years at least before daring to dissect people and their
behavior. But you? No! You pounce right on us. You formulate us like
butterflies on the heads of pins. You dissect us. You poach us. You’re a
culture vulture. Do you know the difference between a vulture and a pop
culture scholar? Of course, you don’t. A vulture waits till you’re dead to
pick on you.”
“Fuck you,” I said, “and your high horse.”
Ryan grinned.
This was my first meeting with him and he was spieling me. “Asshole,”
I said. I had called to do an interview with the editor of Maneuvers. It was
a leather and S&M magazine, but I hadn’t expected to be abused. “Don’t
waste my time attacking me. You don’t know who I am.” I could tell he
was testing me. “I’m here to find out who you are.”
Ryan unbuttoned his fly and flipped out his penis. “That’s who I am,”
he said. A sizeable chunk of meat, as Ryan would have written in his fic-
tion, lay on the chair between his leather thighs.
“That’s of small interest to me,” I said. “I know how to play ‘Dueling
Banjos.’” I bluffed him by patting my own Levi’s crotch.
“I’m gay,” Ryan said.
“I’m straight,” I said.
He broke up. We hit it off. I think I was the first person ever, and prob-
ably the last, to tell the flamboyant Mr. Ryan Steven O’Hara to shut up.
I make no apology for my vocation. I make my living as a dispassionate
observer. I believe one must study culture quickly before it melts. Memory
and memoirs only make the past glow. I love the firsthand immediacy of
another of my interviews, Sam Steward, the Father of Gay Erotic Writing.
He was a joy telling his merry tales of Gertrude and Alice and Thornton
and the rest of the Charmed Circle. Who but the living, breathing Sam,
the last survivor, could tell the intimacies of Bilignin, how he, one night,
stumbling into the bathroom, caught sight of Gertrude, one hand trying
to cover her mastectomy that only Alice had ever seen. No one had even
known that Gertrude had cancer. But Sam knew. That’s the kind of first-
hand reportage that is the essence of pop culture: get it while the source
is alive and kicking; poke at it while it’s fading; perform an autopsy while
it’s still warm; keep to the immediate evanescent facts and feelings that
will evaporate before they can be recorded; leave the eulogies to historians
studying the world through the rearview mirror. I prefer watching the
world through the windshield: not where we’ve been, but where we are
and where we’re going. An odd approach for an ivory-tower professor, but

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