by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Getting to safety (2)

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I don’t remember being bullied for being gay when I was a kid, but I do remember being given a hard time because I was a sissy. This happened when I was less than ten. I was pretty and wasn’t any good with a ball on the playground, and other boys didn’t want me on their side.

The cruelty never got very bad. What was the worst was my realization that the other guys on the playground pitied me for not being more like a boy, which meant for not being able to play games with balls. In grammar school, I don’t think any of us knew what being a “sissy” was, if it had to do with more than the failure to play games with balls.

I was aroused by men before I was ten—my dick got hard—but I didn’t know what caused it, and I didn’t know what to call it. I don’t think there was a sexual component to my treatment on the playground. Before about ten, it was all about gender.

Later, I figured out that getting hard was always caused by the same thing—some man or boy—and even later I found out what to call it.

In high school, what had been called “sissy” in grammar school was called “queer,” or “faggot.” There was a sexual component, and people knew what it was.

Whether the word was “sissy” or “queer,” or “faggot,” I understood during those early years that I was failing at some basic requirement of being what I was supposed to be. I didn’t know exactly what the requirement was—I knew it was bigger than merely playing ball—but I did know I was failing at it.

Attempts to help teenagers, who are being bullied or treated cruelly, with programs like It gets better, are not addressing the whole problem. Children are being treated cruelly over gender/sexuality issues a long time before they get to high school.

See Race Point Light, at Stonewall Triptych.
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Monday, April 18, 2011

Getting to safety

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Today, the paper and the blogs carry the news of the Oregon Study out of Columbia University, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Fenway Institute in Boston, and published in the journal Pediatrics. The study, by Professor Mark Hatzenbuehler, Psychologist at Columbia University, shows that suicide rates among teenagers are dependent upon which county a teenager lives in—the prevalence of same-sex couples, registered Democrats, liberal views in the community, schools with gay-straight alliances, schools with policies against bullying students, schools with anti-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation. The ranking of various counties by these measures is called a social index score. Teenagers who live in counties with the lowest social index scores were 20% more likely to have attempted suicide than gay teenagers in counties with the highest social index scores.

Several years ago, I attended a panel discussion in Cambridge on Gay Youth. One of the panel participants, a young man who was editor of a “youth oriented” magazine, said that the trouble is that if any of us were over thirty, we knew nothing about the lives of gay youth today. He said that the determining factor in the lives of all gay youth up to now was the sense that I am alone. There is no one else like me. At least one of the things that coming out meant was coming out into the gay community and the breaking down of that sense of being alone. Today’s youth, according to this editor, have the internet. They are never really alone and never even think they are alone.

The teenager in the family with easy access to the internet still may spend his most vulnerable pre-teen years—that is, ten and eleven or twelve—on the internet unaware of what the internet can be used for, still looking for cute cat videos on You Tube. For the internet to be useful in the coming out process for the much younger children, many things have to have come together—the changes in the child’s feelings, his having learned what words to apply to his feelings, his discovery that the web is a place for him to look for answers, his learning how to use the web—and different children put all this together in different ways and at different times. I would guess that, if a child has hostile parents, knowing that it is possible to find something different on the web is not going to be very helpful. And if the home is not a welcoming place, then a child faces harsh years before he can get to the safety of that gay-straight alliance in high school.

Check out the Stonewall Triptych, three gay novels by Dwight Cathcart.
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Sunday, April 10, 2011

The future arrives before we are ready for it

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Fair Shaw, who is narrator of Race Point Light, finds that each new phase of his life is not what he expected. Shaw has an education, and he has some experience—he was in the Army and on the fringes of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement—but each time when he finds himself thrown into a new situation, he feels unprepared. The Army, graduate school, marriage, Stonewall, the city at the middle of AIDS. His world seems to change radically every eighteen months. It would be possible to break up Race Point Light into at least two novels, and perhaps more, divided after Fair receives a divorce at the end of Part 4, to make an entirely separate novel about a man’s life in the city in the middle of AIDS.

But that is to make of these two novels, narratives about distinct subjects—a gay man who gets married, and a gay man living in the city in the middle of AIDS—and those subjects have been written about. What needed to be written about, because no one had done it, is a man who experiences all these things during one lifetime, which is what actually happens to hundreds of thousands of gay men and women in our culture. What would make a gay person get married? What is it like being married? What would make a gay person leave a marriage? What wounds, what scars does he or she have afterward? How would he or she live after divorce? What would he or she find in the place he or she went after divorce? What are the years of AIDS like in the city? The compelling quality of such a narrative lies in the fact that all these things happen to the same person. And the question such a novel would answer would be, What would that be like? It would not be a novel about a gay man in a marriage so much as it would be a novel about a gay man who leaves his marriage and moves to the city in the middle of AIDS, and then makes a life for himself in the city with all the memories, objects, relationships, scars, decisions accumulated from earlier decades and earlier lives. It would be in that accumulation that the power of such a novel resides.

The point is You don’t start over again, ever. Everyone just has to keep going in their lives, from one day to the next, one decade to the next, down to the end, and I didn’t want to structure Race Point Light in such a way as to imply that anything is ever a fresh start. Before Fair Shaw has gotten over the trauma of his divorce, he is face-to-face with a man who is breathless with pain because he has found out that he has Karposi’s sarcoma. One loss is experienced simultaneously with the other loss. After Fair Shaw has made a commitment to a marriage in a pre-Stonewall time, gay men riot in the streets of Greenwich Village, and gay people are now out and proud. The gay person finds himself living in two distinct worlds simultaneously, the past and the present and maybe even the future. The future arrives before we are ready for it, and we bear the scars of living in our time. This is uniquely stressful on gay people who came to adulthood in the ten years before Stonewall. They made commitments and promises, and then Stonewall called, “Come out into the street with us!”
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Saturday, April 2, 2011

Singing our songs

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Last Sunday night I attended a concert by the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus whose title was Our True Colors. The concert was influenced by the It Gets Better movement, and during the concert four different men told stories of their youth and coming to adulthood and of the difficulties they faced with unloving families and bigoted, bullying schoolmates. One man told of being pushed to the point of putting a gun in his mouth. The last half of the concert was given over to the extended piece, "Prayers for Bobby," based on the book by Leroy Aarons, music composed by J. A. Kawarsky. Bobby didn’t make it.

The question was raised by a man I was sitting next to, Why does the gay community spend so much energy on narratives of pain and sorrow? This man wanted more positive narratives. Since so many people have survived their horrors, and are now living successful, even triumphant lives, that is a legitimate question.

In fact, there was a good bit of positive narrative in the concert Sunday night. “Beautiful,” by Linda Perry, and “Firework,” by Katy Perry (and others), and the whole thrust of “Prayers for Bobby,” and, finally, the energetic and very beautiful encore, “Celebrate.”

As the concert developed from song to song, I began to realize that the chorus and its director, Reuben Reynolds, had pulled off a very difficult feat. Their concert was closer to the heart of the experience of the gay community than almost any other works of art that we have access to. For the concert had its full measure of pain and sorrow, but it also had its full measure of celebration. Nothing was stinted. It was all there, and, as I told my partner, C, it was like a richly woven tapestry with all the threads, light and dark. Or like a choral piece, in which every singer had something to add. Nobody's story was left out. We seem to find that difficult to do in the gay community.
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