Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982

by Jack Fritscher, Mark Hemry (Introduction), David Van Leer (Introduction)

Overview

SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER has been reviewed as "the gay Gone with the Wind." But such popular praise does not do literary justice to this eyewitness classic of that "first golden decade after Stonewall." This best-selling epic of San Francisco's Castro seethes with sex, drugs, panic, and passionate characters: a gay writer, a drop-dead gorgeous bodybuilder, a cabaret singer, a Vietnam vet, a Hollywood bitch, and a rough-trade porn mogul. Narrator Magnus Bishop channels Ryan O'Hara, a writer pioneering a tell-all voice in the emerging subculture of gay magazines. When Ryan meets Quentin Crisp’s “perfect man” in Kick Sorenson, lust and politics collide. Steroids rule Castro Street. Gender fascism divides queens versus clones into gay civil war over correct queer identity. White assassinates Milk. Gay rioters burn City Hall. Ryan, romancing the morphing trickster Kick, cruises through nightclubs, ecstatic sex, and leather rituals in legendary bathhouses. Sprung from Isherwood’s Cabaret, 1970s San Francisco mirrored 1930s Berlin: decadent, dazzling, diverse, doomed. It's all here. A city. A murder. A plague. A lost civilization. A love story. SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER is dedicated to Jack Fritscher's 1970s bicoastal lover, Robert Mapplethorpe.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013857575
Publisher:	Palm Drive Publishing
Publication date:	12/20/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	498
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jack Fritscher emerging from the gay past exists, both now and in the future, as a pioneer participant in gay culture and as a critic chronicling analytical witness to that history. He is the double-jointed author of literary fiction as well as of erotic fiction, including 4 novels, 5 fiction anthologies, 3 nonfiction books, and 2 produced plays. He is also the director and videographer of 170 feature videos. A Gemini, born June 20, 1939, he has balanced twin careers in literature and erotica--often recombinantly.

MID-CENTURY GAY WRITERS
A gay pioneer from the 1960s, he wrote the 1968 novel, "I Am Curious (Leather)," began before Stonewall his research on "Popular Witchcraft," befriended the legendary and elderly gay author Sam Steward (Phil Andros) in 1969, and became the founding San Francisco editor shaping the legendary "Drummer" magazine (1975) which published his features, fiction, and photographs for 25 years in more than 62 issues. Those writings and photographs, annotated with historical commentary by the author, are available free online at this site.

In 1953 at age 14, he came out into the closeted gay world by writing a "gladiator novel" while attending the Vatican's ultra-exclusive Catholic seminary, the Pontifical College Josephinum, where the bullies were not the jocks but the opera-and-liturgy queens. His short fiction was first published in 1958 in the Catholic press.

Also adolescents at this time, his American gay peers were John Rechy; William Carney; Rita Mae Brown; and Dorothy Allison; as well as Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White who founded their Violet Quill in late 1980.

These mid-century careers made possible the next generation: the fin de siecle writers who appeared after HIV in 1982. They rose during the late-80s invention of history's first viable small lesbigay book publishers whose anthologies took the place of the once-flourishing gay magazines which by the millennium had collapsed because of internet competition.
DIVERSITY, PERVERSITY. THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
As a diverse wild card among his 20th-century contemporaries, Fritscher is the only Catholic writer, and the only actual holder of an earned PhD in literature. In addition, he is the only writer who also composes and creates as a photographer and videographer. In 1966, he wrote the world's first PhD dissertation on Tennessee Williams titled "Love and Death in Tennessee Williams: His Philosophy and Theology."

Editorial Reviews

"STAGGERINGLY ORIGINAL and completely absorbing....Here is San Francisco’s gay male scene in the 1970s and ’80s as never told, or documented, before."

Michael Bronski

"Cinematic intensity....A brilliant record of gay life before AIDS....An astonishing spectrum of queer lives....This sprawling saga...has not lost a whit of its muscular passion, punchy immediacy, or transformative literary impact."

Richard Labonté

"Jack Fritscher didn't invent the Castro. He just made it mythical. HEADY, EROTIC, COMIC....A comprehensive fictional chronicle of the best of times....If one can learn American history via the novels of Gore Vidal, one can learn gay American history through SOME DANCE."

David Perry