The Fancy Dancer

invisible cross.
    As the priest raised the chalice of consecrated wine, the dead body of the blond youth was handed down to the ground. The Golgotha of soldiers softened into the gay pairs again.
    Now they were the mourners, the grieving Apostles, the weeping women.
    The dark-haired lover was kneeling alone on the floor, sitting back on his haunches, his head thrown back with grief. They carried the body toward him. It was so heavy they could hardly lift it. They laid the body across his knees.
    The blond Christ lay across the thighs of his lover, arched backward, his hair, arms and legs trailing on tire bare board floor. The lover bent forward over him, hiding his face against the body’s side, in a mind-shocking Pieta.
    Something cracked inside of me. The* weight of all those months of guilt and overwork cracked the beams of my mind at last. The lump that had been in my throat for such a long time now tore its way out, and I started to cry.
    I covered my face with my hands, because I didn’t want my sobs bouncing around that big hall. Curiously enough, some other people around me were crying loudly—they didn’t care who heard them. Vidal pulled my head against his leather collar and held me hard. Someone else squeezed my hand. Maybe this was Doric.
    The sound of the clapper shattered my head again.
    “Alleluia!” shouted the dancers. It was the first word they’d said since the Mass began.
    The congregation reacted like they were at a gospel meeting.
    “Alleluia,” a few of them sang out. Then more of them. “Alleluia!”
    I raised my head and looked blurrily through the tears.
    The body was coming to life. With a slow joyous wrench, it rolled off the lover’s knees onto the floor. It sat up, stretched, lay down to roll again as if in a meadow of mountain flowers. The priest was back at the missal, reading the closing passages. The dancers were stooping and shuffling in a joyous circle. As they slowly straightened up, shuffling faster and faster, the blond came to his feet with them. He was transfigured. He made you see the blinding light from within that nobody is supposed to see.
    As the priest finished the Mass, all the dancers closed into a tight little group. Now there were no couples, only singles. They were reaching, waving, high-stepping joyously, like a beating of angelic wings around the Godhead. Even the blond was no longer prominent, as if he was now part of each of the others.
    The dance mass finished in this explosion of hght and joy.
    » » »
    The four of us sat in a restaurant, and I picked at my food. I was still in shock.
    The place was a combination—bar and disco downstairs, restaurant upstairs, called Touch and Go. It was one of the several places of its kind in Denver, where young gay couples of both sexes could make a complete evening of it: eat, get drunk and dance. Doric said there were also the usual bars that tended to have customers of one sex only, including a couple of classic leather bars.
    Vidal sat beside me, busy cleaning up his cheap steak. Across from us sat Doric and his lover. It was disconcerting to see the blond Christ now wearing tom Levi’s, a cowboy shirt and huaraches, and to find out that his name was Andy Jorgenson. From downstairs, we could hear the beat and wail of hustle music from the disco.
    . . It still blows our minds to see the effect the thing has on people,” Andy was saying softly.
    “Where did you get the idea?” I asked him.
    “Oh, it just evolved naturally,” said Andy. He spoke and thought as gently as he looked. “There was this little group of us at Aspen, and most of us were into dance and music and religion. We heard about the Dignity group here, and we came over, and thin gs sort of interacted....”
    “Word is getting around,” said Doric, grinning. “People in California want to see it. So, come fall, the bunch is going on the road. Maybe even back East.” He punched Andy gently on the arm. “New York. Broadway. Jesus Christ Superstud.”
    Andy blushed beet-red. Vidal burst out laughing.
    I abandoned my steak—the cheeseburger from the airport seemed to be still in my stomach—and sat looking nervously around. Here I was in a gay place again, with a lot of other gays. Admittedly no one was paying much attention to me. The tourist stage of my identity crisis was over.
    Doric called the waiter over so we could order dessert. Everybody ordered the homemade apple pie except me—all I wanted was black coffee.
    The four of us