by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Never give in, we own the street

Edit Post
Today, here in Boston, I was at a rally at the State House supporting the demonstrators in Madison and supporting our unions and theirs. It was not very big, somebody said a thousand people, and it was orderly. Everybody seemed to agree on the basics—unions and collective bargaining are essential to the kind of culture we have in this country—and the crowd was cheerful and energetic, applauding the speakers at every popular line. The police were respectful and kept a low profile. We had a sense of the other demonstrations—we were told that these demonstrations were being held across the country in all the state capitols—and I don't think people felt very embattled, but even so, it was inspiring to be there with others who felt as I did and to feel that we represented a larger movement than had actually shown up on Beacon Street.

Another rally I went to in front of the State House was several years ago, in favor of gay marriage. It was after the Supreme Judicial Court had construed a new definition of marriage—"two persons" rather than "a man and a woman." The legislature was considering whether to allow a vote by the people on amending the constitution to prevent same-sex marriage. The legislature was inside the building, and we were outside chanting and singing and carrying signs. It was very cold then, too, just like today, and the demonstrators felt very embattled. There were many opponents of gay marriage on the street with us, and many strident arguments from people who wanted to quote scripture to us. We had no idea which way the legislature would go. It was going to be one or two votes in either direction that would decide the matter. In the end, the amendment was turned down, and gay marriage as decided by the SJC was saved, and we were saved.

I have spent most of my time since January 2008 studying and writing about the Stonewall Riots, which was another way that American citizens have come together to petition the government for redress of their grievances. The police raided the bar, the customers were thrown out on the street where they ended up rioting, and the police trashed the bar. The police, in three nights of rioting, were never able to control the streets. Some people have asked, "Why didn't the police use their firearms?" I suspect that the answer lies in what is happening in the Middle East. Once the police or the armed forces start firing on unarmed citizens, they have lost the battle. And what the citizens have to do—whether they live in Madison or in Tripoli or Cairo or in Boston or New York—is to be persistent, to keep coming back, to never allow themselves to be permanently run off the street. Citizens, actually, no matter where they are, own the street, despite the cops and the soldiers. In the end, the gay men and women on the streets of the West Village after the raid on the Stonewall Inn never gave in, and they proved a more powerful force than the cops and the politicians. We have our lives as proof.
0 comments
Sunday, February 20, 2011

Narratives, change, violence

Edit Post
Bo Ravich opens Adam in the Morning lying on the steps of the theatre where he works, on Sixth Avenue, and in the next two or three hours he becomes a different person. Narratives—stories—seem to require that characters change in some way, either suddenly, like Bo, or even more suddenly, like Fair Shaw in Race Point Light, who opens the Sunday paper on June 30, 1969—he’s reading about the same riots that are affecting Bo—and discovers that his life is transformed. But more usually, change comes gradually, over decades, somewhere between one’s twenties and one’s forties, or between one’s forties and one’s sixties. The biggest change people seem to experience is acceptance—of themselves, of other people, of their place in the scheme of things.

This may sound bland enough, but what is interesting about this process is that what people often come to accept is the need to fight. It is relatively easier to go on the way one has been going since one was born on the first page of the book, to allow inertia to carry one from day to day, avoiding the issues that are going to disrupt one’s life. As Derek says, in Ceremonies, “I wanted a good part with one good scene—Macduff, say, weeping for his children—and a pretty boy in my bed,” but whatever it was he wanted, he’s caught in the middle of a fight he didn’t start but can’t walk away from, even though he tries. He’s gay, and he can’t walk away from that, and when the bigots come out to fight, Derek finds there is no where safe to go. His change is his acceptance—of the need, in this case, to shed blood. This is a tough one.

Some people come to this acceptance early. Jack screams, "Fight, you son of a bitch! Come back and fight!" as some drive-by bigots get away. Some wait until the last possible moment, running from place to place until events and bigots catch up with them, and, their backs against the wall, they have to fight, have to transform themselves into something heroic. It may be that there are many heroic people who might not have chosen to be heroes if they had had a choice.
0 comments
Friday, February 11, 2011

A literature that reflects us

Edit Post

A friend wrote this morning to say that he is frustrated by the state of gay publishing. Most gay books that come out are humorous essays about gay life and gay romance novels. I’d like to read something heftier, in which the kinds of things that affect me also affect the characters—that is, politics, race, class, a sense of the characters’ epoch. I’d like the novels I read to answer the question, How is it for you there? And I’d like that question to be treated seriously. 

But we don’t much get that kind of novel. The publishing industry is composed of agents, finders for agents, publishers, distributors, booksellers, journals that review books, reviewers, writers, and, finally, the book buyer. I am sure there are others. Most of them don't seem to know how to deal with a big gay serious book. They are clueless. And, of course, the book buyer going to the bookstore at the end of the foodchain to buy some serious novel is unlikely to go to a gay bookstore, because he has learned that gay bookstores don’t carry serious fiction. Gradually, over recent decades, our whole literature has gotten dumbed down. As readers, we don’t know any more what to demand of serious gay fiction than the rest of the publishing industry.

We are serious people. We confronted AIDS. We survived Reagan and Bush (I) and Bush (2), we have learned to work the political system, we have gotten gay marriage in some places, and we have fought against DADT and are fighting against DOMA. We are transforming what marriage means in this country and what this country considers a family. As gay people, we have fought in the great battles of our time. We have been heroic and successful. We have been fighters. We have preserved those aspects of ourselves which were unique. But our literature does not reflect these things.  
0 comments
Saturday, February 5, 2011

A beautiful film

Edit Post
In Night Catches Us, a film by Tanya Hamilton, Marcus, played by Anthony Mackie, comes back to Philadelphia after being away for ten years. His father has just died, and he has come back into a family struggling with the past. Marcus left, and his brother, who had to deal with his father, is resentful and wants no part of him. Young Jimmy, Patricia’s cousin, is resentful of the cops and thinks Marcus informed on Patricia’s husband, who was killed by the cops in an execution-style shooting in Patricia’s living room. Patricia, who is played by Kerry Washington, welcomes Marcus home, and Patricia’s daughter, Iris, wants to know what happened to her father.

There is enough stuff here to make a powerful movie. But what raises the stakes is that the film takes place in 1975, and Marcus and Patricia and several others of their friends in Philadelphia were members of the Black Panther Party, and what’s happening is that they are all trying to come to terms with their pasts, represented by the question of what happened to Patricia’s husband. Did somebody tell on him? Who? Why? Patricia says at one point, “That’s not what we were,” referring to the execution of a cop. But if not that, then what? And even more important for Marcus and Patricia now, How are we going to live now?

It is a deeply moving film which closely connects the racism of political Philadelphia, represented by the cops and their allies, both white and black, and the actions of the Black Panthers then, and the kids who would like to do what the Black Panthers did, now, with the poverty of their neighborhood and with the questions faced by Patricia and Marcus, What we are? And, How do we live now? 
 
It is a slow-moving, elegiac film, conveyed by slow quiet conversations, punctured by gunfire. At critical moments, the camera simply backs off and watches the water in an urban stream flow or the tangled vines of an urban jungle, blowing in a breeze. Long moments are spent as we watch the principals ponder their lives, staring off into the distance.

Tanya Hamilton has it exactly right. Life is interconnected, you can’t be on the streets of Philadelphia without knowing about poverty, the cops and the Panthers, and the fact that Patricia’s husband was executed, and that Marcus loved Patricia. To understand anything, you have to understand it all, and you can’t pick and choose, and you don’t really have the right or even the ability to make it pretty. Any of it. And yet, and yet, this is a beautiful film.
0 comments

Designed by Edward Wharton.