SAN FRANCISCO REMAINS firmly entrenched in the gay American mythos as the Never Never Land of queer culture. During the tender years after the Stonewall riots in New York, the city became the central destination for gay people fleeing rural and closeted lives, so they could fulfill their hearts’ desires.

Jack Fritscher’s novel “Some Dance to Remember: A Memoir-Novel of San Francisco 1970 –1982” — not to be confused with Andrew Holleran’s classic “Dancer from the Dance” — centers on those early days of the gay cultural revolution. Through the eyes and voices of well-rounded and strong characters, the author captures the spirit of the time: sex as liberation, identity creation and the eventual descent into AIDS.

Magnus Bishop, a straight professor of pop culture with an affinity for queer life, is the reader’s entree into this world. Through him, we learn about Ryan O’Hara, an erotic and philosophical gay writer, and Kick Sorenson, the drop-dead gorgeous blond bodybuilder whom Ryan loves with an intense passion. Their romantic relationship becomes the pole star for a novel that at times can become a little overworked in its preachy rhetoric.   

Fritscher’s work is just being re-released after first being printed in 1990. For readers who were not old enough (or even alive) to remember the early years of the modern gay experience, the book can be an invaluable and fascinating look at this period.

“Everyone was an excited, uncloseted refugee, come from somewhere under the rainbow to Oz aspiring to accomplish something openly gay and grand,” Fritscher writes.  “[Walt] Whitman’s all-gender barbaric Yawp was howled in the streets around the clock.” The author’s descriptions of pre-epidemic San Francisco conjure the shade of a gay culture that has long since died out.

ALTHOUGH AIDS FIGURES heavily at the novel’s end, this is not just an AIDS memoir. The majority of the work focuses on the years immediately before the disease hit. Ryan and Kick become trailblazers in the creation of a new gay identity labeled “homomasculinity.”

In the novel, Ryan publishes a tract called “The Masculine Manifesto,” in which the character tries to create a positive masculine gay identity and criticizes men who act the sissy role because of cultural tradition.

“Masculine homosexuality was closer to the decent attitudes of straight men ... than to the attitude of effeminate gay men who were sissies out of reaction and not choice,” Ryan writes.

This untangling of identity politics is a fascinating window into the beginnings of modern gay cultural issues. The reader can easily begin to see how the 1970s ideas about being butch and gay have been played out to their absurd post-modern ends in the current environment of straight-acting and assimilating gay politics.

THE MAJOR DOWNFALL of the novel is its lack of conflict. In a 437-page book, tension does not arise between the leading lovers until more than halfway through. That’s a long wait, and there’s too much broadly drawn foreboding up until that point. The intimations of impending doom wear the reader down to sheer desperation, and then 100 pages later the serpent makes his way into paradise.

Fritscher also has the tendency to chew everything for his readers before spoon-feeding it to them. Much of his political, cultural and even character description gets rehashed ad nauseum. This is especially frustrating in the light of one-liners that create an entire atmosphere economically and evocatively.

“A certain paranoia rode a pale horse down Castro,” Fritscher writes of the AIDS years. In one sentence, the Christian apocalypse is projected through a gay lens, and the image of an emptying, disease-ridden, and tormented community of specters rises into the imagination.

Moments of breathtaking beauty, passion, and wit fill the novel’s blank spaces, making the book an interesting and often powerful read. Do yourself a favor and skip past the sections that seem familiar — you’ll be much happier that you did.

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