Stonewall Triptych

I saw a play the other night, a new play about a family in crisis over a question of forgiveness. Can they forgive the man who murdered their daughter? This led me to consider whether a dramatist could write that kind of drama about a gay family. Say, two gay men and their children, home for the holidays, forced to deal with whether to forgive a man who had murdered a daughter of the family.

What makes this problematic is that the two gay men and their children live in a bigoted world. At almost every turn, the attention of the audience would be drawn from a sharp focus on the grief or anger or sorrow or confusion that one or the other member of the family is feeling, onto feelings called forth by the character’s life in a bigoted culture.

In the drama I saw the other night, the surviving daughter brings home a man she has met, who, it turns out, is a cop. For a time, the audience wonders whether the cop is going to discover crimes other members of the family may have committed. But he slides into an inconsequential place in this family in crisis. I couldn’t imagine the daughter of two gay men bringing home a cop without first having vetted him on the issue of two gay men. If he was OK’d by the daughter, he would become known to the audience not as a cop but as a progressive cop, altering the dynamic of the narrative the playwright had been building. There would be no danger from this cop.

I think it’s hard—it may be impossible—to write a story about a gay character without dealing with his or her context. This person can’t serve in the military, can’t get married in most states, until fairly recently was liable to being arrested for violation of the sodomy laws, is being preached against by preachers all over the country, is seven times more likely to commit suicide as a teenager, etc., etc., etc. And once you start dealing with these issues, or even introduce them, they take over the narrative, and whatever you had wanted to write, about grief and sorrow and anger and confusion resulting from a murder, gets subsumed under the bigger effects of homophobic discrimination and abuse. Writing a story about a gay character is just very, very hard to do.

Of course, if you push the gay character off to the side and make him or her ancillary to the principal characters, then you can fully describe the gay character’s life in America without having it overwhelm the narrative of the principal characters.

The point here is that, because of our culture, writers in America don’t have the same freedom to create stories around their gay characters that writers have around their straight characters. This is another consequence of the bigotry in our culture.

We don’t deal with the effects of bigotry on our characters because if we dealt with any of it, since it’s so overwhelming, we couldn’t deal with anything else. It is somewhere among these factors that we find the causes, I think, for the literature gay people have.

If we are going to write novels or plays about gay people, and put them front and center, there is only one story to tell, and that is the story of bigotry and its effects. 

This is terrible, and it’s going to stay with us until we change the culture we have. But until then, this is our story.

Check out my website, www.dwightcathcart.net, and see for yourself.

Since 1982 I have taken many hundreds of pictures of the sites in which these three novels have been placed--Cardiff, Maine, a fictional version of Bangor, Maine, Commercial Street and Race Point in Provincetown, and Christopher Street in the West Village in New York. But when it came time to find a photograph we could use for the cover of each of these novels, I realized that all of my pictures were taken in the daylight, and the significant actions that made those places memorable all took place after dark. Charles Howard was drowned in the night, the crowds at the Stonewall rioted at night, and at the end of his long life, Fair Shaw walked with his friends in the surf at night.

So I went to New York September 20, 2010, getting there in the late afternoon, leaving my bag with my son and going back over to Christopher Street about 8:30 in the evening, with a tripod and a camera. I took pictures principally in three places—the “corner,” where Christopher Street begins on Greenwich Avenue, the intersection of Christopher Street and Gay Street, and the stretch of Christopher from #55 Christopher to the Stonewall Inn and a few buildings beyond on the north side of the street, across from Sheridan Square (which is what the inhabitants called it in 1969). Many of the pictures showed the edgy confusion of New York that I like. I chose the cover of Adam in the Morning to be one of the pictures of Christopher at Gay Street.

The Bangor pictures differed in the way Bangor differs from New York. New York streets never really get dark. Bangor streets, even one as close to the center of town as the State Street bridge, are badly lit, and do get dark, and make taking pictures without a flash difficult. I started just at dusk, October 13, 2010, at six o’clock. The sky was still light. There is a small bridge, slightly lower than the State Street bridge, a little downstream. I aimed my camera upstream to get the State Street bridge. Then I took pictures in the other direction, downstream, looking out to the Penobscot River—less light, fewer people. The cover of Ceremonies is of the State Street bridge, where Charles Howard died. All of my pictures of Bangor were of the Kenduskeag Stream, where Charlie drowned, except a few, which were taken in the daytime, of the granite monument to Charlie. I have been told that people in Bangor keep the monument and its plantings in good shape, and it was a shame these pictures of it had to be taken just at the end of the growing season.

I got to Provincetown in the late afternoon, October 26, 2010, checked into a B&B, and went out on Commercial Street at dusk. I started at the intersection  of Commercial and Johnson Street and walked west or southwest through the center of town down to Carver, then I turned around and walked back toward Johnson. The sun had set in the southwest, making the sky over that part of the landscape lighter. These pictures indicate the kind of place Commercial Street is and the way it may have looked when Fair Shaw and his partner Chris and Julio and David walked down Commercial toward the west that night in 2004.

I would like to have chosen the days for my photography by the number of people on the street, but it was the beginning of autumn, and the weather was controlling. During September and October, I watched the calendar and visited these places when it didn’t seem like it would be raining. 

These are not photographs of places in my novels, but they are photographs of places I was thinking about when I was writing my novels. So, enjoy.

I was half way through Ceremonies, when I began to get the feeling that there weren’t many other gay books like this. Books that placed their characters at the heart of the gay predicament—we live in a homophobic culture—and then listened while they told us how that was. This is such an important story, how could it be that not many other writers have written about this?

The same thing is true about Race Point Light. I think that the pattern my life has taken is a very common pattern—education and coming to adulthood, with marriage and children, before Stonewall—and yet not many of our writers have taken up this subject. We say, those people were not being honest with themselves, and then we ignore their lives. All of that manifestly did happen to hundreds of thousands of gay men and women, and I would guess that few of them think they were not being honest with themselves. They knew exactly what was happening. They were coming to terms, as far as they were able, when they did what they did where they did. But these people, for the most part, are not inhabitants of our literature.

Then there is Adam in the Morning. We tell ourselves about Stonewall that there were the Dark Ages for gay people, and then the guys rebelled, and its been getting better, day by day, ever since. Yet there is another story that says there may not have even been gay people before Stonewall, much less the separation between homosexual and heterosexual that we seem to know now.

We understand our lives by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Some narratives are better than others, closer to reality for more people, more profound, more universal and at the same time more diverse. Some are more clearly myths that we tell ourselves not to explain ourselves to ourselves but to explain away difficult aspects of our lives. Sometimes our myths simplify to the point of lying. During the years when I was writing the three novels of the Stonewall Triptych, I came to think it is terribly important for the gay community to explore deeply the narratives it tells itself.

We are working hard on the last jobs getting our website—http://www.dwightcathcart.net—up and running. We ask ourselves questions. Are there enough pictures? Do you have more pictures on your HD? What did Apple do to iPhoto 11 so that it won’t do what iPhoto 10 did easily? I seem to go by the Apple store once a week, asking for help. As it turned out, I don’t think the staff was very familiar with the latest upgrade to iPhoto. I cropped more than a hundred photos. There were design issues, particularly on the first several pages, and then Edward worked on the Shopping Cart and Checkout pages. I think all that’s done, now. At one point, I went through the whole website looking for copy-editing type things. A comma here or there. Clarity. Tomorrow we’ll make some changes to the text of the excerpts of the three novels. Then, at some point, I suppose late in the afternoon, one of us will say, “Is there anything left to do?” And the other one will say, “No. I don’t think so.” And there’ll probably be a silence for a second or two, and then somebody will say, “Uh—well. Um. What now?” And the other one will say, “Put it up, and let’s see if it’ll fly.”

This is the way it’s always been when I’ve finished a book. I write all the way through to the end, so that I know what the last sentence is going to be, and then, after several days of decompression, I go back and edit the whole text. Usually, while I’m writing a book, I begin to collect subjects in my head that I know are going to need reworking after I finish, so now that I am through, I get organized about these subjects. I make a list. I pick the one I am going to look at first, and then I start to work. Sometimes this subject requires that I read a book—find a book, and then read it—and then rewrite scenes. If I am lucky, there is only one scene, but sometimes I rework every scene a character appears in over 300 pages, or 500 pages. Major effort. And then when all this is done—sometimes it takes six months—then I print out a fresh copy and read it through again. I am either unhappy with all the edits I made, or I am happy. If I am happy, I can go on and go to the beach. If I am unhappy, I have to go back to work and do those things again, or do them better, or differently, or something. And then I can go on to some other issue. I repeat this process until gradually the list of things to be looked at gets shorter and shorter, until one day, when I read through a freshly printed-out text, I realize I have read thirty pages without making a single mark on a page. Then the suspense begins to grow. How many pages can I go without making a mark?

But I never say to C, who is my partner, “I finished my book today.” Because I don’t know if today was the day I finished it. I could be reading it and realize, “I finished this last week.” Or I could realize that, “I don’t know. I am unsure about this thing. Ask me again next week. I don’t know if I finished it.” And then I’ll read it again. I may do this a number of times, until finally I can say, “There’s nothing more to do,” and, then I’ll grin at C and say, “Now, it’s finished,” and that now it’s OK for me to get C and go to the beach.

In that way, writing a book is like freedom for gay people. At some point in the future, long after we all have gay marriage and DOMA and DADT have been repealed, and many other things have been dealt with, somebody is going to say, “What next?” and somebody else is going to say, “Uh—um, I don’t think there is anything else.” There’s going to be silence for a moment, and then somebody is going to say, “Are we free now?” And the other person is going to say, tentatively, “I think so. Maybe.” And then, we can all go to the beach.