The Fancy Dancer

its red velvet booths and its flickering gaslights, and drank a whiskey. Now and then I remembered, with some surprise, that I was a Roman Catholic priest. Everybody was looking everyone else up and down, and it dawned on me that I might have my first experience being “cruised” or “groped” (words I’d learned from Vidal) before the night was over.
    Some amazing-looking women drifted by us. One looked like Mae West. One looked like a classic dancehall girl. There were a couple of madams and an Annie Oakley. One plump young person with a china-doll face had squeezed herself into a real hourglass corset and looked hauntingly like the Jersey Lily.
    One really caught my eye. She was a wraithlike thing, wearing a real antique gown of apple-green watered silk, with a froth of fragile old lace at the throat and at the wrists. Her hair cascaded in brown ringlets, and spit-curls framed her forehead. She wore a little green velvet hat with a veil. Her long-lashed hazel eyes looked drowned in belladonna. She looked the most authentic and might have floated out of some old photograph in a velvet-covered family album somewhere on Helena’s West Side.
    Slowly, with a feeling of muffled shock, I realized that most of these lovely creatures were male, or had been up to some point in their lives.
    Vidal read my thoughts, and leaned over to explain'in a low voice.
    “Some of them just like to dress up. But some of them are transsexuals. Either they’ve had operations, or they were bom that way, or they just feel they got stuck with the wrong body. Some of them are gay, some of them aren’t I mean, how can a guy be gay if he’s convinced he’s a woman?”
    There were butch-looking men in the crowded bar too. Most of them were dressed up as tough Western types—gunslingers, gamblers, cowboys. As Vidal had predicted, there were a Lone Ranger and a Tonto. A few of the younger men were just wearing outlandish little costumes with more or less flesh exposure. One young guy was wearing white high-heeled kid boots laced up the knee, and a little brief with fringes of glass beads like you find on old lampshades. His mask was sewn with seed pearls, and on his head he had a big picture hat with pink ostrich plumes. He was drunk, and waltzing slowly all by himself.
    It occurred to me that I was now looking at a whole hotel full of fancy dancers. In spite of the pressures on them, or maybe because of the pressures, gay people had found the ability to explore and express a richness of inner human experience that straight people had somehow missed. The Church would impoverish herself to the degree that She refused to tap this richness.
    “This really blows my mind,” I mumbled. The whiskey was starting to get to me.
    “Don’t drink too much now,” said Vidal. “You’re not in practice for it. Let’s go in.”
    But my nervousness was getting worse. Supposing somebody I knew was there, and saw through the paint job on my face? Supposing ...
    The orchestra was wearing white tie and tails, and playing on a platform banked with palms. The crystal chandeliers glowed. Beneath them, all the butch gays, transvestites, transsexuals, lesbians and straights twirled and dipped to the strain of ‘Voices of Spring.” Some of them couldn’t waltz too well, so they just danced slow with their arms around each other. Colonel Broadwater would have done a war dance in his grave. In the adjoining room, a roast beef buffet was being served (which would make Montana cowmen happy), and people were heaping their plates.
    Vidal turned to me, grinning, and held out his arms. His peacock feathers stuck up two feet over people’s heads.
    “May I have the honor of this dance?” he said.
    “DanceF’ I said. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that we’d have to dance.
    “That’s what we’re here for,” said Vidal.
    I was a little drunk, and very serious. “I haven’t danced since I went into the seminary.”
    Vidal’s eyes narrowed. His blue eye seemed to get bluer, and his green one got greener, in another fit of impatience at my hangups. “Okay,” he said. He turned on his moccasin heel and disappeared into the crowd.
    His action hit me like a bolt of lightning. There I was, alone and abandoned in the middle of Purgatory by my Virgil.
    I stood forlornly on the sidelines and watched the happy crowd. The next time I saw Vidal, he was dancing close and slow with a glowering gunslinger type in black leather.
    I went back to the bar and had