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Some Dance To Remember: A Memoir-novel Of San Francisco, 1970-1982
See what it was really like at the golden age of gay liberation back to the 70s in San Francisco!
The Harrington Park Press is proud to bring this classic of gay literature to a new generation of readers! Some Dance To Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, out of print for over a decade, has been referred to as the gay Gone with the Wind. But such words do not do justice to this story. Some Dance To Remember uses the quintessential gay love story between a writer and a bodybuilder to capture the tone, setting, style, events, and essence of the Gay Liberation Generation of the 1970s. It is a lyrical romance, a comedy, a tragedy all this and more wrapped up in the historical context of the life and times of San Franciscans during the decade that changed the world. You'll never forget this story of life, love, and loss, and the extraordinary San Francisco storyteller who lived it.
This historical epic seethes with sex, love, and passionate characters with unique motivations. Lives are built, lives are destroyed. This sweeping memoir-novel tells the story of the golden mythic time after Stonewall. It was the time of the rise of the Castro and of Folsom Street. It was the time of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Robert Opel and his Fey Way Gallery. It was the time of the White Night riot. It was the time of the burning of the Barracks South of Market. It was the time when the mysterious gay cancer first sent the city of San Francisco into hysteria.
This moving story brims with ideas and meticulous details. Entertaining, sharp-witted, and totally enthralling, this story chronicles an extraordinary time in an extraordinary place that shall never be forgotten.
San Francisco's where you go to lose a lover.
Ryan O'Hara takes the lead in this wild story of love, sex, fear, and abandon. He is a writer, coming to San Francisco during this golden age to seek a voice not only for himself but also for the burgeoning gay liberation movement galvanizing the country. Enter Kick Sorensen, Ryan's perfect man, the drop-dead blond bodybuilder who may or may not be all he seems. From bodybuilding to muscle sex to the bathhouses to gay porn to the hustlers, the story unfolds. Their romance leads them to careen movie-like in and out of the lives of very unique and very human people gay and straight and thus show this golden decade for the important time it was and has remained.
The Harrington Park Press is proud to bring this classic of gay literature to a new generation of readers! Some Dance To Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982, out of print for over a decade, has been referred to as the gay Gone with the Wind. But such words do not do justice to this story. Some Dance To Remember uses the quintessential gay love story between a writer and a bodybuilder to capture the tone, setting, style, events, and essence of the Gay Liberation Generation of the 1970s. It is a lyrical romance, a comedy, a tragedy all this and more wrapped up in the historical context of the life and times of San Franciscans during the decade that changed the world. You'll never forget this story of life, love, and loss, and the extraordinary San Francisco storyteller who lived it.
This historical epic seethes with sex, love, and passionate characters with unique motivations. Lives are built, lives are destroyed. This sweeping memoir-novel tells the story of the golden mythic time after Stonewall. It was the time of the rise of the Castro and of Folsom Street. It was the time of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Robert Opel and his Fey Way Gallery. It was the time of the White Night riot. It was the time of the burning of the Barracks South of Market. It was the time when the mysterious gay cancer first sent the city of San Francisco into hysteria.
This moving story brims with ideas and meticulous details. Entertaining, sharp-witted, and totally enthralling, this story chronicles an extraordinary time in an extraordinary place that shall never be forgotten.
San Francisco's where you go to lose a lover.
Ryan O'Hara takes the lead in this wild story of love, sex, fear, and abandon. He is a writer, coming to San Francisco during this golden age to seek a voice not only for himself but also for the burgeoning gay liberation movement galvanizing the country. Enter Kick Sorensen, Ryan's perfect man, the drop-dead blond bodybuilder who may or may not be all he seems. From bodybuilding to muscle sex to the bathhouses to gay porn to the hustlers, the story unfolds. Their romance leads them to careen movie-like in and out of the lives of very unique and very human people gay and straight and thus show this golden decade for the important time it was and has remained.
437 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 20, 2018
Fritscher's epic tale brings Ryan, the editor of a gay men's BDSM magazine, and Kick, a southern bodybuilder, together in a romance for the ages. Set in pre-AIDS San Francisco (and in the second half, during its onset) where gay sexuality is reaching a precipitous peak, the two men's passion endures the envy of many, and the scrutiny of outsiders. Ryan's frenemy Solly Blue makes rough trade videos in his Tenderloin apartment, providing a foil to Ryan's idealistic concepts of erotica and 'homomasculinity.' The two debate the merits of the sexual revolution as Kick becomes more of an obsession for Ryan.
Real events and celebrities of the time mix in with the fictional heroes as a treacherous villain plots his revenge. The prose is not for everyone; lush, arch, cynical and satiric, then sexy and snappy elsewhere. The various clone and femme subgroups of the Castro scene all get a sardonic poke, in extensive dialogue, and Ryan's frequently quoted journals and manifestos.
Told by an involved straight professor, our narrator Charles Bishop offers an up-close perspective on his subjects. In rereading this 20 years later, I enjoyed the many forgotten side characters; Ryan's buxom chanteuse sister, his dysfunctional brother's family, and the various queens and creatures of the era as they face the oncoming plague. Some survive, others don't.
Real events and celebrities of the time mix in with the fictional heroes as a treacherous villain plots his revenge. The prose is not for everyone; lush, arch, cynical and satiric, then sexy and snappy elsewhere. The various clone and femme subgroups of the Castro scene all get a sardonic poke, in extensive dialogue, and Ryan's frequently quoted journals and manifestos.
Told by an involved straight professor, our narrator Charles Bishop offers an up-close perspective on his subjects. In rereading this 20 years later, I enjoyed the many forgotten side characters; Ryan's buxom chanteuse sister, his dysfunctional brother's family, and the various queens and creatures of the era as they face the oncoming plague. Some survive, others don't.
November 25, 2024
NEXT BEST THING TO BEING THERE
For anyone interested in taking a look behind the historical curtain of what gay life was like within the gay geographical triangle – San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City – during the late sixties, the seventies, the eighties, before and during AIDS, then SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER (a partial lyrics taken from The Eagles anthem, “Hotel California”) , is the novel for you, written by an author and scholar who lived through those places and times and survived while a lot of his contemporaries didn’t.
If you can get through the author’s frequent philosophical detours, regarding love vs. in-love, masculine vs. feminine, the sissification of the homosexual male, the cons of the feminist movement, a whole lot of muscle-man adoration, et al, then this book presents a fascinating time capsule of a time and place when the sexual gay revolution, hand in hand with the sexual revolution, began and proceeded in full swing.
Movie buffs will, I’m sure enjoy all of the many takes and references to movies as the characters constantly play, “What movie are we in now.”
While I confess to enjoying the author’s MAPPLETHORP: ASSAULT WITH A DANGEROUS CAMERA more, there’s a helluva lot to be said for this gay “Gone With The Wind” novel, too.
For anyone interested in taking a look behind the historical curtain of what gay life was like within the gay geographical triangle – San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City – during the late sixties, the seventies, the eighties, before and during AIDS, then SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER (a partial lyrics taken from The Eagles anthem, “Hotel California”) , is the novel for you, written by an author and scholar who lived through those places and times and survived while a lot of his contemporaries didn’t.
If you can get through the author’s frequent philosophical detours, regarding love vs. in-love, masculine vs. feminine, the sissification of the homosexual male, the cons of the feminist movement, a whole lot of muscle-man adoration, et al, then this book presents a fascinating time capsule of a time and place when the sexual gay revolution, hand in hand with the sexual revolution, began and proceeded in full swing.
Movie buffs will, I’m sure enjoy all of the many takes and references to movies as the characters constantly play, “What movie are we in now.”
While I confess to enjoying the author’s MAPPLETHORP: ASSAULT WITH A DANGEROUS CAMERA more, there’s a helluva lot to be said for this gay “Gone With The Wind” novel, too.
January 23, 2023
A couple of thoughts from sixty pages in:
1. This novel suffers from an illness afflicting a lot of fiction from the latter half of the twentieth century: the first-person omniscient narrator. I have yet to see this pulled off successfully except in those cases where the narrator is also an unreliable one. So far there's no sign that's the case here. The narrator here is supposedly a professor of pop culture who has chosen as his object of research the editor of a gay kink magazine. He will subsequently spend more than three years with that editor without getting around to publishing anything. Ahh, the days of easy tenure! (For the record, he introduces himself as a "professor of American Popular Culture at San Francisco State" on page 14; on page 543 and more than three years later, he's in the summer of his sabbatical year -- and writing his doctoral thesis!) Supposedly the narrator is straight too, although the straight-male-trying-to-understand-the-gay-male/milieu issue isn't developed or problematized at all -- precisely because the narrator is omniscient, dontcha know, or, worse, superfluous to the perspective of Ryan, the editor in question. Tellingly, and from a technical point of view fatally, our narrator even engages in the same orthographical pecularities that Ryan does in the all too frequently quoted fistfuls of deluded romantic fetishism (diary entries, essay snippets, etc.) the narrator quotes: "in-love" (with the hyphen); "gayman"; "El Lay" (i.e., Los Angeles); "Look" (when used substantively); "Death"; "Attitude"; and "Energy" -- the last four always capitalized, and the last featuring in a lot of proto-New Age twaddle. Fritscher could've saved himself the trouble by using a good old-fashioned third-person narrator (or maybe even none at all); this would've at very least made the scene where Kick descends by helicopter onto Ryan's Russian River property somewhat less absurdly contrived. (At this point Kick and Ryan had met only once (on business, sort of); Ryan figured he'd never see Kick again; and as far as we know Kick had never heard that Ryan had a Russian River property.) But that would've been boring, I guess. The pages about Ryan's high school years in a Catholic seminary are affecting (and, wouldn't you know, autobiographical), but I suspect they would've been even more affecting if they'd been recollected directly by Ryan himself.
Oh, and we're not even sure that the narrator's name is. On page 21 it's "Charles Bishop"; on page 45 it's "Magnus Bishop." Maybe the "Charles" is supposed to remind us of "Charley-Pop," Ryan's dad, ex-jock, and first erotic interest?
2. In any case, the narrator seems to be, so far at least, a marginally better writer than the kink mag editor. I mean, seriously, do we have to be told multiple times, within the course of a single page, that Kick's eyes are blue, his hair blond, and his abs washboard? Scratch a pornographer, find a gay Harlequin Romance author, I guess.
Otherwise: there's a huge gap in the Ryan-Kick relationship between plain old lust and fantastic mythologizing. Or maybe it's just kink-mag fetishizing. Eroticize lust, and the result is a relationship? It's like when a hack films an R-rated sex scene: a smear of Vaseline over the lens doth not art make. I will be curious to find out whether Fritscher and/or his characters come to realize that. Until then I'll read this for the somewhat different San Francisco than the one Armistead Maupin offers.
--
Just finished the first "reel" (the book is divided into six "reels" -- think pre-porn bodybuilding 8 mm reels). Pretty easy to skim through as most of it is an exhaustively detailed description of a bodybuilding competition in which our Kick wins, well wouldn't you know, all the trophies. Two passages struck me as hilarious, and probably unintentionally so:
(1) Ryan's friend/antagonist, a pornographer named Solly Blue, asks him: "So, beyond his looks, what do you [two] have in common" -- to which Ryan responds "I never kiss and tell," which is, I suppose, a cute way of saying "I don't know and I don't care."
(2) Upon the drug-related death of a former Mr. America:
"Steroids kill," Kick said. "It's a shame. Bodybuilding is supposed to be a health sport."
"It's as far," Ryan said, "as a man can get from Death."
"We'll stick with coke and MDA," Kick said.
"And poppers," Ryan said.
"Definitely poppers."
--
Now at the end of the third "reel." The narrator continues to annoy, adopting wholeheartedly the attitude of Ryan's "Masculinist Manifesto" and thus the professor of pop culture dispenses with any pretension of academic objectivity.
More problematic is the Manifesto itself. We are mercifully spared having to read it, but the numerous paraphrases the narrator offers us is enough to make any reader cringe: it's "satire" except when/that it isn't; it's a "joke" except when/that it isn't. What it seems to be is a vitriolic attack on both mainstream gay culture as well as on feminism and, well, women in general. Instead it celebrates "homomasculinism," which is more or less coterminous with bodybuilders and those who worship them. (The term "homomuscular" also appears frequently.) The manly homomasculinist, so it goes, has more in common with the heteromasculinist than with gays or, god forbid, women. (Nerdy, wimpy, or effeminate straights don't even merit mention, although Ryan allows the supposedly straight narrator to tag along.) Perhaps this is how Ryan justifies his frequent acts of incest with his straight married father-of-three Marine brother -- yes, brother -- and his refusal to do similar favors for his sister. (Ryan's parents are depicted as pretty okay people, with nothing more quirky about them than their deep Catholicism; how did the kids end up being so messed up? Ah, but that's not the novel Fritscher seems to have set out to write.)
Now as to the Ryan-Kick relationship: two years on, and it still hasn't passed the puppy love stage. Real love is supposed to develop -- grow and deepen, or pick out your own descriptive words -- and it's perhaps for that reason that most love relationships in fiction deteriorate, or at least fade into routine, rather than grow: deterioration and routine are so much easier to depict (and, admittedly, so much more characteristic of real life). But the only developments are in the Ryan-Kick relationship are increasingly kinky sex acts and Ryan's surrender to Kick's goal of making him over into a bodybuilder too. Oh, and did I mention that Kick is now on steroids? But here's where it gets interesting, and maybe Fritscher is wiser to the whole bodybuilding scene in general, and the Ryan-Kick relationship in particular, than his characters realize: Ryan is slowly realizing that he doesn't as much love Kick as he is in love (i.e., infatuated or, as Fritscher spells it, "in-love") with him. Well, with one exception among the characters: Fritscher gives the Solly Blue character plenty of opportunity to pour cold water over Ryan's romantic illusions/delusions. Solly has no illusions/delusions of any kind. Solly is the one reason I haven't given up on this book yet. I wish that, if there had to be a first-person narrator, it had been Solly. Solly has told Ryan point blank that Kick is a hustler. Will he be proven correct?
--
End of the fourth "reel." There isn't much to be said without boarding the express train to Spoilerville (well, okay, I'll note that Kick is noticeably (except to Ryan) beginning to remove himself from Ryan's life, but Ryan is of course clueless), so I'll just note that the narrator has pretty much lurched from aping Ryan's romantic delusions to aping his as yet inchoate doubts. This underscores rather than challenges his superfluity, especially given his presumed omniscient status. One phrase for the ages: Solly diagnoses Ryan as suffering from Acquired Identity Deficiency Syndrome!
By now it should be mercilessly apparent to all but the most clueless reader that Ryan's "love" for Kick is essentially onanistic: dream boy who happens to exist in the flesh rather than just on paper. Perhaps Fritscher realizes this too? Awfully cunning of him -- assuming the following is intentional on his part -- that increasingly the sex life between the two seems to consist of Ryan wanking to Kick while the latter casts bodybuilder poses. (It's telling that in the first three-way with a homewrecking second bodybuilder, Ryan is on the ground while the other two are towering over him . . . you can imagine the sticky details for yourself.) And sometimes Kick is even with him in the flesh! -- but increasingly Ryan has to make do with tapes while Kick is off roiding and sexing up with Mr. Homewrecker at Ryan's Sonoma County estate. Can we say "doormat," boys and girls?
--
The end. No, I'm not going to do spoilers, but instead post mortems.
1. No, Ryan doesn't come out at the end of the novel any wiser in matters of the heart. The denouement of the novel is painful -- as in embarrassingly bad B-movie painful, and with an avalanche of movie allusions besides -- and serves only to expose our homomasculinist Ryan as just another movie queen given to movie-imitative histrionics. But then, every homosexually inclined male on the planet knows: Scratch a Macho Man, find a Screaming Queen. Well, every homosexually inclined male on the planet except this Ryan character. Nor does Ryan give up on the homomasculinist nonsense. This might also help explain Ryan's final choice of life partner. (Hint: If you can't have a homomasculinist, you can at least settle for a . . . )
2. Fritscher loves lifeless, redundant adjectives. Surely the book could've been reduced by 5 percent simply by deleting recurrences of the words "blond" and "washboard." Okay, I exaggerate somewhat, but --
3. come to think of it, the novel could've easily been reduced by a third by cutting most of the supposed quotations from Ryan's writings. The more they're quoted, the sillier Ryan looks. Sorry, folks, but you can't spin onanistic fantasy into philosophy; at most all you get is (if you were once the bestest little seminary student) ersatz Catholicism or bargain-basement ersatz Genet.
4. Another unintentional moment of hilarity when the narrator says with regard to Ryan: "Sometimes I thought we were the same person." By the way, lest you think I'm exaggerating matters by claiming that Fritscher is (mis)employing the first-person omniscient, let me just point out that there's at least one episode his narrator relates, complete with dialogue, which the narrator could not have heard from any living person. Gotta love the way that "Charles Bishop" (yes, he's back to being Charles instead of Magnus) just happens to drop, on the very last page, the bit of info that he, like Ryan and his family, is from Kansas City. Still, I'm not seeing him as a stand-in for Charley-Pop.
5. Given that our narrator is a "professor of American Popular Culture," one would have hoped he could spell Jon-Erik Hexum's name correctly at least once. (How did that real-life 1970s hunk end up in in this flaming dumpster of a novel? The narrative had him slated to play Kick in a made-for-TV movie!) Given that Fritscher himself earned a literature doctorate, one would have hoped he could spell J.M. Barrie's name correctly, especially after all the *Peter Pan* references. (I won't bother with the frequent quotidian word misspellings.) Given that Fritscher, like his character Ryan, had spent time in a Catholic seminary, one wonders why Ryan, on his knees but this time not in front of Kick, would be praying recollected bits out of the (Anglican) Book of Common Prayer.
2 1/2 stars, curved downward.
1. This novel suffers from an illness afflicting a lot of fiction from the latter half of the twentieth century: the first-person omniscient narrator. I have yet to see this pulled off successfully except in those cases where the narrator is also an unreliable one. So far there's no sign that's the case here. The narrator here is supposedly a professor of pop culture who has chosen as his object of research the editor of a gay kink magazine. He will subsequently spend more than three years with that editor without getting around to publishing anything. Ahh, the days of easy tenure! (For the record, he introduces himself as a "professor of American Popular Culture at San Francisco State" on page 14; on page 543 and more than three years later, he's in the summer of his sabbatical year -- and writing his doctoral thesis!) Supposedly the narrator is straight too, although the straight-male-trying-to-understand-the-gay-male/milieu issue isn't developed or problematized at all -- precisely because the narrator is omniscient, dontcha know, or, worse, superfluous to the perspective of Ryan, the editor in question. Tellingly, and from a technical point of view fatally, our narrator even engages in the same orthographical pecularities that Ryan does in the all too frequently quoted fistfuls of deluded romantic fetishism (diary entries, essay snippets, etc.) the narrator quotes: "in-love" (with the hyphen); "gayman"; "El Lay" (i.e., Los Angeles); "Look" (when used substantively); "Death"; "Attitude"; and "Energy" -- the last four always capitalized, and the last featuring in a lot of proto-New Age twaddle. Fritscher could've saved himself the trouble by using a good old-fashioned third-person narrator (or maybe even none at all); this would've at very least made the scene where Kick descends by helicopter onto Ryan's Russian River property somewhat less absurdly contrived. (At this point Kick and Ryan had met only once (on business, sort of); Ryan figured he'd never see Kick again; and as far as we know Kick had never heard that Ryan had a Russian River property.) But that would've been boring, I guess. The pages about Ryan's high school years in a Catholic seminary are affecting (and, wouldn't you know, autobiographical), but I suspect they would've been even more affecting if they'd been recollected directly by Ryan himself.
Oh, and we're not even sure that the narrator's name is. On page 21 it's "Charles Bishop"; on page 45 it's "Magnus Bishop." Maybe the "Charles" is supposed to remind us of "Charley-Pop," Ryan's dad, ex-jock, and first erotic interest?
2. In any case, the narrator seems to be, so far at least, a marginally better writer than the kink mag editor. I mean, seriously, do we have to be told multiple times, within the course of a single page, that Kick's eyes are blue, his hair blond, and his abs washboard? Scratch a pornographer, find a gay Harlequin Romance author, I guess.
Otherwise: there's a huge gap in the Ryan-Kick relationship between plain old lust and fantastic mythologizing. Or maybe it's just kink-mag fetishizing. Eroticize lust, and the result is a relationship? It's like when a hack films an R-rated sex scene: a smear of Vaseline over the lens doth not art make. I will be curious to find out whether Fritscher and/or his characters come to realize that. Until then I'll read this for the somewhat different San Francisco than the one Armistead Maupin offers.
--
Just finished the first "reel" (the book is divided into six "reels" -- think pre-porn bodybuilding 8 mm reels). Pretty easy to skim through as most of it is an exhaustively detailed description of a bodybuilding competition in which our Kick wins, well wouldn't you know, all the trophies. Two passages struck me as hilarious, and probably unintentionally so:
(1) Ryan's friend/antagonist, a pornographer named Solly Blue, asks him: "So, beyond his looks, what do you [two] have in common" -- to which Ryan responds "I never kiss and tell," which is, I suppose, a cute way of saying "I don't know and I don't care."
(2) Upon the drug-related death of a former Mr. America:
"Steroids kill," Kick said. "It's a shame. Bodybuilding is supposed to be a health sport."
"It's as far," Ryan said, "as a man can get from Death."
"We'll stick with coke and MDA," Kick said.
"And poppers," Ryan said.
"Definitely poppers."
--
Now at the end of the third "reel." The narrator continues to annoy, adopting wholeheartedly the attitude of Ryan's "Masculinist Manifesto" and thus the professor of pop culture dispenses with any pretension of academic objectivity.
More problematic is the Manifesto itself. We are mercifully spared having to read it, but the numerous paraphrases the narrator offers us is enough to make any reader cringe: it's "satire" except when/that it isn't; it's a "joke" except when/that it isn't. What it seems to be is a vitriolic attack on both mainstream gay culture as well as on feminism and, well, women in general. Instead it celebrates "homomasculinism," which is more or less coterminous with bodybuilders and those who worship them. (The term "homomuscular" also appears frequently.) The manly homomasculinist, so it goes, has more in common with the heteromasculinist than with gays or, god forbid, women. (Nerdy, wimpy, or effeminate straights don't even merit mention, although Ryan allows the supposedly straight narrator to tag along.) Perhaps this is how Ryan justifies his frequent acts of incest with his straight married father-of-three Marine brother -- yes, brother -- and his refusal to do similar favors for his sister. (Ryan's parents are depicted as pretty okay people, with nothing more quirky about them than their deep Catholicism; how did the kids end up being so messed up? Ah, but that's not the novel Fritscher seems to have set out to write.)
Now as to the Ryan-Kick relationship: two years on, and it still hasn't passed the puppy love stage. Real love is supposed to develop -- grow and deepen, or pick out your own descriptive words -- and it's perhaps for that reason that most love relationships in fiction deteriorate, or at least fade into routine, rather than grow: deterioration and routine are so much easier to depict (and, admittedly, so much more characteristic of real life). But the only developments are in the Ryan-Kick relationship are increasingly kinky sex acts and Ryan's surrender to Kick's goal of making him over into a bodybuilder too. Oh, and did I mention that Kick is now on steroids? But here's where it gets interesting, and maybe Fritscher is wiser to the whole bodybuilding scene in general, and the Ryan-Kick relationship in particular, than his characters realize: Ryan is slowly realizing that he doesn't as much love Kick as he is in love (i.e., infatuated or, as Fritscher spells it, "in-love") with him. Well, with one exception among the characters: Fritscher gives the Solly Blue character plenty of opportunity to pour cold water over Ryan's romantic illusions/delusions. Solly has no illusions/delusions of any kind. Solly is the one reason I haven't given up on this book yet. I wish that, if there had to be a first-person narrator, it had been Solly. Solly has told Ryan point blank that Kick is a hustler. Will he be proven correct?
--
End of the fourth "reel." There isn't much to be said without boarding the express train to Spoilerville (well, okay, I'll note that Kick is noticeably (except to Ryan) beginning to remove himself from Ryan's life, but Ryan is of course clueless), so I'll just note that the narrator has pretty much lurched from aping Ryan's romantic delusions to aping his as yet inchoate doubts. This underscores rather than challenges his superfluity, especially given his presumed omniscient status. One phrase for the ages: Solly diagnoses Ryan as suffering from Acquired Identity Deficiency Syndrome!
By now it should be mercilessly apparent to all but the most clueless reader that Ryan's "love" for Kick is essentially onanistic: dream boy who happens to exist in the flesh rather than just on paper. Perhaps Fritscher realizes this too? Awfully cunning of him -- assuming the following is intentional on his part -- that increasingly the sex life between the two seems to consist of Ryan wanking to Kick while the latter casts bodybuilder poses. (It's telling that in the first three-way with a homewrecking second bodybuilder, Ryan is on the ground while the other two are towering over him . . . you can imagine the sticky details for yourself.) And sometimes Kick is even with him in the flesh! -- but increasingly Ryan has to make do with tapes while Kick is off roiding and sexing up with Mr. Homewrecker at Ryan's Sonoma County estate. Can we say "doormat," boys and girls?
--
The end. No, I'm not going to do spoilers, but instead post mortems.
1. No, Ryan doesn't come out at the end of the novel any wiser in matters of the heart. The denouement of the novel is painful -- as in embarrassingly bad B-movie painful, and with an avalanche of movie allusions besides -- and serves only to expose our homomasculinist Ryan as just another movie queen given to movie-imitative histrionics. But then, every homosexually inclined male on the planet knows: Scratch a Macho Man, find a Screaming Queen. Well, every homosexually inclined male on the planet except this Ryan character. Nor does Ryan give up on the homomasculinist nonsense. This might also help explain Ryan's final choice of life partner. (Hint: If you can't have a homomasculinist, you can at least settle for a . . . )
2. Fritscher loves lifeless, redundant adjectives. Surely the book could've been reduced by 5 percent simply by deleting recurrences of the words "blond" and "washboard." Okay, I exaggerate somewhat, but --
3. come to think of it, the novel could've easily been reduced by a third by cutting most of the supposed quotations from Ryan's writings. The more they're quoted, the sillier Ryan looks. Sorry, folks, but you can't spin onanistic fantasy into philosophy; at most all you get is (if you were once the bestest little seminary student) ersatz Catholicism or bargain-basement ersatz Genet.
4. Another unintentional moment of hilarity when the narrator says with regard to Ryan: "Sometimes I thought we were the same person." By the way, lest you think I'm exaggerating matters by claiming that Fritscher is (mis)employing the first-person omniscient, let me just point out that there's at least one episode his narrator relates, complete with dialogue, which the narrator could not have heard from any living person. Gotta love the way that "Charles Bishop" (yes, he's back to being Charles instead of Magnus) just happens to drop, on the very last page, the bit of info that he, like Ryan and his family, is from Kansas City. Still, I'm not seeing him as a stand-in for Charley-Pop.
5. Given that our narrator is a "professor of American Popular Culture," one would have hoped he could spell Jon-Erik Hexum's name correctly at least once. (How did that real-life 1970s hunk end up in in this flaming dumpster of a novel? The narrative had him slated to play Kick in a made-for-TV movie!) Given that Fritscher himself earned a literature doctorate, one would have hoped he could spell J.M. Barrie's name correctly, especially after all the *Peter Pan* references. (I won't bother with the frequent quotidian word misspellings.) Given that Fritscher, like his character Ryan, had spent time in a Catholic seminary, one wonders why Ryan, on his knees but this time not in front of Kick, would be praying recollected bits out of the (Anglican) Book of Common Prayer.
2 1/2 stars, curved downward.
March 19, 2022
Extremely uneven and disjointed. There are some great passages but it seems like these are probably preexisting essays that have then been merged into the novel. The novel as a whole is inconsistent, disappointing in places, and does not hold together well. The historical windows into 70s gay San Francisco are certainly worth the read though.
June 8, 2021
I found this book to be an astonishing chronicle of the Gay SF Castro community in the 1970s and early 1980s. The author clearly took some details from his own life in telling this story about an ill fated love affair between a writer and a bodybuilder with an epic backdrop of numerous friends and family. I was a bit puzzled by the ending but it didn’t attract from my enjoyment of the book. Bravo!!!!
December 31, 2020
I picked this book up after reading Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera, where Fritscher mentions this book a few times. I didn't really have many expectations going into it, but I definitely expected more Mapplethorpe. He was only mentioned a few times. There was definitely some problematic content (incest, misogyny, etc.) but I still thought Some Dance to Remember was a very enjoyable read. I haven't read a book this long in a very long time, and I think this booked used it's 500+ pages really well. There are so many different storylines going on throughout the book. I really loved the characters and thought they were well developed. Fritscher does a great job with setting, both in San Francisco and at Bar Nada. It really made me wish I could experience San Francisco pre-AIDS, the book felt almost like an ode to a time and place that's lost to history. Without giving anything away, the ending was surprising and I thought it was well done. I also liked the style of narration, through the character of Magnus Bishop. I have a sense that this was somewhat autobiographical, with the author splitting different aspects of himself into Ryan and Magnus. I also thought Fritscher did a great job of blending real place and people (like Robert Opel) with the (at least somewhat) fictionally story of Ryan, Kick, and the other characters that surround them. Pretty solid, enjoyable book. Maybe 8.5/10.
June 13, 2016
"them was some times" said by a survivor (me)
Want to read
June 22, 2016I HAVE TO READ THIS!
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