Page 455 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 425

Before things turned sour and Ryan turned bitter, he wrote, “Scott
Fitzgerald was right. When the best people get together, things go
glimmering.”
Like the rest of them, he thought the sanctuary of San Francisco was
their mecca of Sodom-Oz. They thought, before the drugs and before the
breakdowns and before the epidemic Deaths, that they would live forever.
I once wrote in The Journal of Popular Culture that “homosexuals have
always been their own best invention.” And also perhaps their worst.
Before Stonewall ignited the seventies when they spun their existence
out of media whole cloth, because no one like them had ever before been
seen in the streets of America, their history of closets and shame had for
years been their prison. I think their newfound freedom, and especially
the gay pride that so petulantly for so many became an outrageous vanity,
turned into a much more deadly sentence, not of AIDS, but of the heart.
I’m not sitting in judgment. I try to examine what happened and
make the best sense possible. Popular culture and cinema, after all, are
my specialty. I can tell you more than you probably want to know about
Citizen Kane. I study movies—forgive me, analytically.
Ryan’s memorabilia are my “Rosebud.”
“You have too much Attitude,” Ryan once told me.
“I’m a critic. I can let nothing obstruct my objectivity.”
“That’s why you can’t get a date,” Ryan said. “That’s why no one makes
love to a critic. Love is not objective.” He tried to redeem me. “Maybe
you’re a critic and more than a critic,” he said. “You may be an apprecia-
tor, a true appreciator of other people’s visions. Most critics are detractors
of other people’s work. Parasites: that’s what critics are. If artists stopped
producing, critics would starve. Critics don’t act; they react. Most of the
criticism I read is no more than Attitude. I’m an expert on Attitude. Kick
made me an expert on Attitude. Kick had real Attitude. He taught me
everything I know about Attitude.”
“Kick was a world-class teacher of Attitude,” I said.
We had words, Ryan and I.
Sometimes, I must reveal, I was too close to Ryan Steven O’Hara.
Sometimes I thought we were the same person playing Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona. He had that boyishly charming way of pulling people into his
center. Teddy had fallen for it. Kick pursued him for it. I felt his undertow,
particularly in those last days, pulling me dangerously close to him. My
empathy toward him, then and now, worries me.
Objectivity, I believe, even more than passionate love and hate, is the
most fragile gift in the human order of things. Passion has to do with the

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