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 the 1970s, that "first golden decade after Stonewall." This best-selling epic of San Francisco's Castro and Folsom streets 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. "My God, what a book! It's all there, done with Fritscher's usual élan and verve. I wouldn't be surprised if he has written what will be looked on as that period's Great American Gay Novel. What lovely stuff! -Sam Steward (Phil Andros) "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." - THE ADVOCATE, David Perry "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." - BOOKS TO WATCH OUT FOR, Richard Labonté "STAGGERINGLY ORIGINAL and completely absorbing....Here is San Francisco's gay male scene in the 1970s and 1980s as never told, or documented, before." - Michael Bronski, Author of CULTURE CLASH: THE MAKING OF GAY SENSIBILITY