Thursday, October 28, 2010
What I like most about writing...
What I like most about writing is imagining myself deep inside a character. Take Bo Ravich in Adam in the Morning, then imagine Bo in a situation he has never been in before—it is two a.m. on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, on the night of June 27 going into June 28, 1969, and the cops have just raided the Stonewall Inn, and Sheridan Square is exploding with rage—and then see what Bo does. Some of what he does surprises me. It isn’t necessary that Bo’s personality leads him to fight in the streets against the police.
While some of the characters in Adam in the Morning had rioted elsewhere—it was the Sixties, after all—none of them had fought as gay people, because nobody anywhere had fought the cops as gay people. There had never been a gay riot before. That introduces a a certain amount of drama into Adam in the Morning. How will they behave? Will gay people actually fight the cops? What will that be like? And, of course, what does it mean, now, and for the future?
Adam in the Morning is the third novel of the Stonewall Triptych, a collection of three novels that includes Ceremonies and Race Point Light. Both of these novels also place characters in situations where they have never been before. In Ceremonies, a young gay man is thrown off a bridge by three homophobic teenage boys, and the other gay people in town, many of whom didn’t even know the dead kid, are faced with the question, What is it like to be gay in this town now? But the truth is, they hardly have the time to think about that question before they have to do something, act in some way, become activists without even knowing that that was what they had meant to be or do.
In Race Point Light, the narrator, a boy named Fair Shaw, hears his mother talk about our kind of people, and about someone who is one of us, and Shaw is in the fourth or fifth grade when he discovers that he was not one of us. All of his training and education have been to prepare him to take his place in his community, like the other men in his family, and yet he is learning that he isn’t one of us, that he likes boys, and there isn’t a place prepared for a boy who likes boys, as there is for the other boys he is related to. So, what is he going to do? And what is the search for a place going to do to him? He will become strong, but strong in a different way than the men in his family are strong, and it may be that he becomes stronger than those men.
What I write about is gay people somehow in crisis. A friend is murdered, a ten-year-old discovers he is not one of us, a gay man walking home down Christopher Street at two in the morning walks into the middle of a gay riot. It is a crisis caused, uniquely, by outside pressures. There are plenty of other serious subjects to write about, but this one is mine. It is a good subject because not much has been written about it. We haven’t often turned the searchlight of our fiction on ourselves as we really are, when we are in serious crisis. And so, we haven’t learned yet all there is to be learned about ourselves. What kind of people we are, and what we are capable of.
I am now publishing the three novels of the Stonewall Triptych—Ceremonies, Race Point Light, and Adam in the Morning—as ebooks in epub by Adriana Books on http://www.dwightcathcart.net, where you can buy them from your home and read them on your ereader. Also, you can read more about the books there and read excerpts from them. You can read more about me, too—a little more—and there’s a place for you to leave comments, if you want.
I will add to this blog once or twice a week, and you’re invited to come back by and find out what’s happening—and to make comments. I’ll be writing about the Stonewall Triptych, but I’ll also be writing about me and my life as a gay writer, about the state of publishing, and about gay subjects generally.
