Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Jack Fritscher (Author), David Allen Vargo (Narrator), Mark T. Hemry (Publisher)

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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.

Winner! Foreword Magazine Gay/lesbian Fiction Book of the Year Award

Listening Length

21 hours and 21 minutes
Author

Jack Fritscher
Narrator

David Allen Vargo
Audible release date

Aug. 12 2020
Language

English
Publisher

Mark T. Hemry
ASIN

B08FPKG53M
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	21 hours and 21 minutes
Author	Jack Fritscher
Narrator	David Allen Vargo
Audible.ca Release Date	August 12 2020
Publisher	Mark T. Hemry
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B08FPKG53M
Best Sellers Rank	#207,328 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1,587 in LGBTQ2S+ Literature & Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #3,324 in Biographical Historical Fiction #13,343 in Historical Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

30 global ratings

5 star		62%
4 star		13%
3 star		20%
2 star		5%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Top reviews from Canada

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David R Hurles

Fritscher's masterpiece, savour this time now gone

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 19, 2000

Perhaps you had to be there...the 70's, San Francisco, the blossoming and peak of the gay sexual culture. It was a rare time; everything, it seemed, was perfect. So perfect, in fact, that those of us there could not have possibly imagined it might ever be otherwise! The list of honors and citations which precede this more modest effort, don't really reveal or do justice to what Fritscher has written. He has, quite simply, told the truth, sometimes whispering secrets that were to remain secret, sometimes using words to betray unspeakable thoughts. The truth of that time is played out on a vast stage within his head, on occasion momentarily inaccessible. But, within a few paragraphs or pages, some small detail, as if casually discarded, will suddenly bring life, and meaning, and intimacy to what he is saying. Fritscher worked the better part of a decade on Some Dance to Remember, living the life as he wrote the words. The story is tightly and carefully knit together, and it's a story that's hard to put down. In spite of the high page count, Fritscher clearly has a reverence for language, and his style is economical, accessible, and crystal clear. His sentences invite re-reading for the sheer pleasure of their composition. Maybe this book is a tribute to those embraced by the San Francisco fog in that forever vanished, blessed, golden moment. I can only recall that wondrous time with a hollow sadness, everyday missing it even more. But even if you weren't there, the book is a monument to its time. The words come to life, and to read it is to be there. Although Fritscher (perhaps with a wink and a nod) steadfastly insists that his book is fiction, it is also a hagiology of people, place and time. A character such as Solly Bluestein (with his overflowing penthouse of husters) simply has to have really existed, if only because he is far too human to have not existed. So, if you've come this far with me, trust me...the book's a gem!

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Amazon Customer

A profound study of the humand condition American style.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 6, 1999

The metaphysics in this novel derives from Kant by way of Henry James and leads to Heisenberg. The narrator tells us what he knows or thinks he knows about a torrid love affair between two men:observation supported by video and printed documents. He tries to be objective, but resorts to the omniscient narrator technique to present the interior thoughts of his protagonist, Ryan O'Hara. In the brief opening scene he is preparing to shoot his muscleman lover at a physique contest. Unless the reader notices that this scene takes place "in a drive-in movie" behind Ryan's "high forehead" he will be confused when he reads later that Ryan shot his lover, then that he did not shoot him. The relation betweeen the narrator and his donnee emerges only at the end of this gripping, technically dazzling narrative. "What is, is. Until it isn't." But what is it? The theme, as in Henry James, is maya. We can know in part only. The Apostle Paul said so. So did Heisenberg. SOME DANCE TO REMEMBER should be required reading for all serious students of the American novel.

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Christine Dec

Seventies' Women in Gay Lib Novel

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 18, 2001

As a graphic designing woman, I heard about this novel, borrowed a copy and was surprised to find several women characters who are more than stereotypes or hags, but around whom the plot actually, in many ways, revolves. I particularly liked Kweenasheba and the satirical art-world woman, January Guggenheim. Also, Sandy Gully, the wife of the Viet Vet, was of interest in her domestic desperation. "Boogie Nights" did the seventies one way. This novel remixes the seventies even in its title, which references the Eagles' "Hotel California" which I remember as a soundtrack for the seventies. I knew nothing of the gay video culture's vultures til I read the gay "Boogie Nights" parts of this novel which seems so real, I wonder if it's really fiction. Even Diane Feinstein enters the story. In all, I was fascinated. I think I was misled by my friends who said this is a gay novel. I think it's a novel, period, and a good novel at that.

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Top reviews from other countries

J. Winmill

Rather a dance to forget

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 15, 2013

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I found the style a bit forced and it became a bit of a labour of love to get through to the end. As the novel progressed it became more difficult to sympathise with the characters and this became the problem. Looking from the outside it was an interesting view of San Francisco late 70's early 80's but as the characters had rejected the main gay lifestyle it became a bit frustrating, so it became a book that I wasn't expecting it to be. It's OK if you want a more historical perspective but I feel the characters and storyline are too personal to the writer to have a wider appeal.

Paula P

Interesting viewpoint from people living through 1970s San Fransisco before ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 26, 2018

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Interesting viewpoint from people living through 1970s San Fransisco before the onslaught of AIDS..just quite repetitive & far too much detail about bodybuilding poses!..a mix of 'madness of a seduced woman, a x rated 'tales of the City' & 'looking'..it will put you off meeting your 'soulmate' for life!!!

David A Vargo

WISDOM, WIT, & HUMOR

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 28, 2020

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When I first read Some Dance To Remember in the early 1990s, I never imagined that 30 years later I would have the great honor of narrating it for audio book format. Although I have never met the author, Jack Fritscher, in person, he has been a significantly influential person in my life. As a teenager, I came out in the mid 1970s and headed directly for the Leather/BDSM scene in New York. At newsstands, on the streets of New York City, I discovered Drummer Magazine, edited by Jack Fritscher. It was a phenomenon for Leather men and it changed everything in my world. Drummer became my bible, my guide to life and living, helping me carve out the man I wanted myself to be. I eventually won several Mr. Drummer titles, going as far as International Mr. Drummer First-Runner-Up in 1992-93 when my friend, Emerson Briney, won. Those Drummer titles meant the world to me. I worked hard for them because I loved Drummer magazine and all that it taught and represented. Learning that Jack was a writer, I began reading his prolific work and eventually discovered Some Dance To Remember. It's a terrific book which delves deep into the gay psyche and experience - especially the way we were, and I would imagine the way many of us are still. I think gay people will especially enjoy this book since it is a fascinating snapshot of where we came from and what we were like in the early days of the gay golden age, post Stonewall. There's much to learn from the experiences of the characters in Some Dance To Remember. Wisdom, wit, and humor all combine here to form a rich tapestry of memories of the people we used to be.

One person found this helpful

Tim Brough

Memoir, Manifesto, Mythology....and Classic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 9, 2006

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"The hardest thing to be in America today is a man."

I recall seeing the movie "The Boys In The Band" in college and being so put out by the loathsome men depicted in it that I was easily confined to the closet for another five years. Back in my high-school seventies, when the bulk of the activity in this book took place, I was just a kid with a confused identity. Even in college, I read about Moscone/Milk with a mix of confusion and anger, wondering why good men could get gunned down for little more than being who they were, while all the time I was denying to myself who I really was. It took me another decade or so to come to grips with it all, and to discover what one of the basic premises of "Some Dance To Remember" sets forth. It makes me wish I'd come across this book in the seventies and not viewed "The Boys In The Band."

From "Some Dance To Remember;" "Every gay man is a homosexual, but not every homosexual is gay."

Jack Fritscher has created a world in "Some Dance To Remember" that goes from romanticized to mythologized to the aftermath of when paradise crumbled under the corrosional erosion of AIDS, drugs and too many Peter Pans. Ryan O'Hara is the hero of the story. He publishes MANUEVERS magazine in pursuit of the romanticized masculine man, engaging in rough and tumble leathersex and disdaining the hordes of men who come to San Francisco only to give up any male traits and begin acting like Junior Judy Garlands. He publishes a book titled "The Masculinist Manifesto" and sets the feminests and the SF Queenly majority into a convulsions. (Any similarity to MANUEVERS and Mr. Fritscher's residency at the legendary DRUMMER magazine are purely coincidental.) A cast a characters surrounds Ryan and form his support net; his sister who is a high profile cabaret star, his best friend and porn-king Solly Blue and his hustler's paradise, pop culture critic Magnus Bishop, and finally his ideal man, the southern-bred Kick Sorenson.

Throughout the novel, real life men and women drop by, such luminaries as Moscone and Milk, Dianne Feinstein, Tony Travorossi and Armistead Maupin all get name checked during the decade that "Some Dance To Remember" winds through. But where this book really shines is in its portrayal of the whole San Francisco gay liberation scene of the seventies. The first two acts of the book made me long for a time machine, for the chance to enter a golden age of freedom and possibility, before AIDS, before Iran-Contra, before Bush and Dobson and Falwell and Phelps. The descriptions of both the fictional and the true legendary places sinks in deeply, and even the side characters are all exquisitely detailed. "Some Dance To Remember" is almost a mirror reflection of Maupin's "Tales Of The City" (before the endless sequel books splattered into absurdity), with the characters more exclusively masculine and a lot tougher. Both books capture the very essence of the heady times of San Francisco's madcap dance through the get up and boogie years.

Alas, and much like the cautionary ending song/tale the album from which "Some Dance To Remember" takes its name, O'Hara discovers "to call someplace paradise is to kiss it good-bye." His friend Solly Blue has told him repeatedly how all hustlers are the same, just with different packaging, and as Ryan discovers the world he tried to design is undoing, the story reaches its conclusion in the fog of AIDS, steroids, and the real world that invaded The Castro as the Age Of Reagan ascended.

Probably more identifiable for me than those endless tales of coming out and the subversion of masculinity that most gay books churn away; "Some Dance To Remember" relishes its maleness and shys not from looking into the darker areas of the male psyche. Rich in depth and lovingly detailed, spellbinding in its vocabulary (Jack Fritscher is a master of catchy phrases), "Some Dance To Remember" deserves a place on the pantheon of great American gay novels.

21 people found this helpful

Jim Pippin

Very long winded

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2021

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The constant referrals to movies, most of which I haven't seen, got a little trying. Some of the conversations became rather repetitive. I skipped over parts just to get on with the story.
I moved form SF just before the period he wrote about so it was interesting from that point of view. Never realised the depths of depravity to which it had sunk.

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Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970-1982 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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