Page 83 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 53

When Ryan’s friend, Hank Diethelm, the owner of the Brig, the most
popular leather bar South of Market on Folsom, was tied spread eagle in
his own basement, strangled, bludgeoned, and set afire by a casual trick,
I accompanied Ryan to the memorial service at the Neptune Society’s
classic Columbarium on Loraine Court behind the Coronet Theater on
Geary Street. The once-glorious edifice, having survived the 1906 earth-
quake, had fallen with the ravages of time and neglect and grave robbers
to a cold Wordsworthian ruin during the 1930s until restoration began
in the late 1970s.
Men, accustomed to meeting at bars and baths, gathered at the mas-
sive bronze door in small groups unsure exactly what to do. Death was new
to them. This was the first grand gay funeral. “At least he doesn’t have to
grow old,” they whispered. The majority of the mourners wore full leather
gear. They were Folsom Street men, good-looking and gruff, a decade or
two older than the boys on Castro. Leather for them was an attractive
saving grace. Leather transformed aging bodies. Leather was tighter and
smoother than skin. Leather cinched and corseted and disguised bodies
which rarely, if ever, darkened the iron-pumping, designer-muscle gyms
on Castro. Leather was a fetish that extended a mature man’s sex appeal
for another dozen years.
“Can you believe it?” Ryan whispered to me during the service. “We’re
witnessing a whole new gay phenomenon.” He pointed to a row of bearded
men in full black leather wiping the dark circles under their eyes with red
bandanas. Their grief was real. Ryan was not so cynical as to be blind
to that. Death was bad enough, but premature Death at the hands of a
murderer was almost more than he could bear.
Liberated life in San Francisco had become in too many sorry ways a
serial Death sentence indeed. Murderers found gay men easy prey. Their
bodies all too frequently turned up stuffed into barrels in Golden Gate
Park and in dumpsters South of Market. Drugs took their toll in overdoses.
The occasional suicide was inevitable. However it was Death rode into the
City, nothing stopped the party. Death in the early days was considered no
more than bad taste. It took Dan White’s assassination of Harvey Milk to
make gay Death seem real, but even Harvey’s Death, when everyone was
young and healthy, seemed no more than a fluke of politics.
Ryan wrote, in an unpublished manuscript dated Monday, November
27, 1978, the day of the assassination:

Castro could hardly regard Dan White objectively. They knew
no more about him than the way he was the November morning

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