At Danceteria and Other Stories by Philip Dean Walker

Author:Philip Dean Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: short stories, music, new york city, celebrities, fashion, washington dc, films, aids epidemic, 1980s america
Publisher: Handtype Press

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At the time, I fancied myself an amateur fiction writer. I’d had one short story published in the March 1980 issue of Christopher Street and was working on a couple others. Kurt Porter was the kind of guy I most liked to write about back then: Midwestern hunks who’d been cast out of their hometowns by religious zealots. They would arrive in the city with canvas knapsacks slung over their big shoulders and an unquenchable thirst for cock and ass which would then lead them to the nearest bus station bathroom for quick relief before being spit out into the streets of New York to search for more. It was a variation on a familiar plot and theme, one I’d seen repeated in the pages of several gay novels of the period. But for me, when I wrote that kind of character, it was like I was able to inject myself into a gay male fantasia that was almost completely removed from my own experience. I could play out the lives of the beautiful untouchables, that legion of men that seemed to multiply every year throughout those glorious ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Kurt was simply in a different league than The Three. Kurt was hot on an almost international level. Men, women, children, dogs—they all stopped what they were doing in order to look at him. There was even an urban legend that a bus driver had failed to watch where he was going and drove right into a fountain near Sheridan Square in 1979 all because he had turned to stare at Kurt who’d been walking down the street on his way to the gym. So, yes, when Kurt got Hot Guy Flu, there was no question what was really happening. Without a doubt, it was only the hot men of New York City who were being infected. Exceptionally hot men—no one else.

Kurt’s initial symptoms: at first, he became thinner. Nothing that was too noticeable on someone with his hulking body. In fact, in the beginning, the weight loss leaned him out in a way that only made him appear more attractive. But then his cheeks began to sink in too much. His bright blue eyes—those eyes that you would’ve done anything to find pointed in your direction not even a month ago—sank deeper and deeper into his face until they looked like someone had pushed them in with their thumbs. They were still that same bright denim blue, but now they were also blood-stained and kind of distant. Fearful and vacant.

The last person who saw Kurt, right before Christmas that same year he died, described him in purely Gothic terms. He was practically a ghost, they said. Sitting alone on the subway, staring straight ahead at his own terrible reflection in the window of the train-car. He was barely recognizable. A hushed whisper of the beautiful man he’d once been.

But what was it that made the better looking people more susceptible to the virus?

“It’s the pheromones. The virus is

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