Some Dance to Remember; a memoir-novel of San Francisco 1970-1982

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 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 Sorensen, 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 bi-coastal lover, Robert Mapplethorpe.