Page 472 - Some Dance to Remember

442 Jack Fritscher

“You can’t go on living like this.”
“Don’t say that. I have to live like this. Doesn’t Jackie keep the Eternal
Flame burning? If I find out I’m going to die, I’ll find Kick. If tomorrow
I find I have AIDS, the first thing I’ll do is find Kick. I’ll have to. I want
to die in his arms.”
“Let him be. The man has already given you everything he had.”
“Do you remember the Pioneer?” Ryan asked.
“The movie?”
“The rocket. The day they shot the Pioneer rocket out into space. It
was the first human-made object to finally break out of the gravitational
pull of our solar system.”
“This is shtick!” I put up my hand to stop him.
“It was Earth’s SOS. I’m sure help is on the way.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Someone out there will come to save us.”
“Spare me,” I said. “This is not 2001 or 2010.”
“Then what movie are we?”
I wanted to say Gone with the Wind.
As God is my witness, Ryan was part of a cast of thousands. On the
back lot of the Castro set, they worshiped movie queens who made it, like
Vivien Leigh, no matter how bereft, to the last reel. They had been blown,
more than they’d known, with the wind.
“Yeah, that’s our movie,” Ryan said. “Blown with the Wind.”
Their emancipation politics was their set up for their Civil War. Stone-
wall was their Fort Sumter. Harvey Milk was their Jeff Davis. They seceded
from straight society to create their own. They took to the trenches against
Dan White, the worst of the fag-bashing marauders. They danced at fancy
balls wearing nothing but the window curtains. They knew nothing about
birthing no babies. The burning of the Barracks by a straight workman
was their Atlanta. The overcrowded hospital wards of San Francisco were
their big scene of countless wounded lying in the rail yard waiting for help.
AIDS was their final battle. Their only hope of victory was finding a new
sense of themselves in the holocaust that was upon them.
“I asked you a question, Magnus,” Ryan said. “I want you to live with
me.” He had the look in his eyes that must have been the look he used
to get whatever he wanted from Charley-Pop. “I’ll put your name on the
deed to the ranch.”
“Don’t insult me by trying to buy me.”
“I’m offering you something.”
“If I stay, I’ll stay because I want to.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK