by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, July 31, 2011

That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.

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For the last few weeks, I have been corresponding with a man I knew briefly at a school in the South in 1957 and 1959, and, as may be usual in such exchanges, we attempt to find out how we remember it in 1957 and—very gingerly—to find out how we are today. It is a delicate maneuver. I think he liked the school then, and I didn’t. 
The school was a conservative stronghold in the South and not a good place to be if you were a gay kid. I knew I was gay, and I needed to figure out what to do about it. I was naive and didn’t know this school would not be able to give me what I needed. In 1957, in the South, there were just damned few gay men out there on whom I could pattern my life or that I could learn from. In that, this school failed me. 
I left this school after two years. Afterward, I did the wrong things—I went into the Army, and instead of starting to write as I wanted, I went to graduate school. I planned to become an academic. I got married. Looking back on it, it seems like everything I did was a deflection from what I really wanted to do. It wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I began to live as I had always meant to live. Since then, I have lived without any reference to that school in the South. I live in a gay community among gay or gay-friendly folks, and I write my gay novels. 
But occasionally I am invited to exchange letters with other men who experienced that school in the South. In these exchanges, what I look for is that the other man sees how brutal those years were, and how dangerous for gay kids. And now, today, what I look for is acknowledgment that the people I am dealing with have learned what was wrong about the culture in 1957 and have changed as I have.
In the years since that school in the South, I got a doctorate and learned about literature. I taught college for eighteen years—Shakespeare every term—and later, when it came time to write my gay novels, I found I was hugely affected by my experience in the classroom. And I had my children, who are with me still, and whose children are with me still, and who enrich me and my partner still. 
Life is interesting that way. If I had been given a chance to think about it, I would have said, “I never meant to get married,” but I did get married, and now that I am doing what I always meant to do with my life, I find that I do it better, deeper, with more conviction, because first I did those things I didn’t ever mean to do. In that way, the homophobia at that school in the South—because I had to learn what it was and to fight against it—has been a gift that keeps on giving. 

For a full, fictional treatment of this kind of life, see Race Point Light.
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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Bear Week in Provincetown

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I think the whole idea behind Bear Week is that the community is exploring images of maleness. In the past, maleness has had something to do with images of male beauty—think of anything by Michelangelo or Perseus with the Head of Medusa by Cellini—and bears have altered that to something rougher, something less refined, something more mature, bald rather than shaved. Bears and their cubs. It is an interesting, and a sexy, idea. 
During Bear Week in Provincetown, bears come from all over the United States, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand to celebrate the look and style. By all accounts, the restaurant staffs find the bears great visitors in Provincetown, friendly, open, easy to wait on, sexy, thoughtful, and generous. 
While many of the men present themselves in an exaggerated image of maleness, as hairy bears, there were many other things going on in Provincetown during Bear Week. On Monday night, they hold a contest for the audience’s approval for the best drag act, and all three of the judges were in drag, although not all the contestants. On Tuesday night the show was Peter Pansy, with a guy playing Peter. Every night on Commercial Street, barkers were in such costume that a passerby couldn’t tell what gender they were—what they had started out and what they aimed for now. Courtney and I stayed in a new house in the West End, and we found that men staying in nearby houses called to us when we hung on the railing of our deck. A warm friendly open community.  
Walking into the West End on Commercial Street, late one afternoon this week, Courtney and I passed two men with small children. It was such an ordinary sight that it was not until we had gone another hundred yards that I focussed on the fact that the two men were together and the children were theirs. Provincetown spends time and energy exploring questions of gender, and when a person is there, he’s passing among a whole variety of genders without quite realizing it. This is not so much experimenting with gender issues. I think the experimenting is long over in Provincetown. What’s happening is those of us at the end of Cape Cod are employing all the varieties of gender we’ve discovered and are showing them off to each other. 
Another important thing happened this week. A panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has lifted the stay of Judge Phillips’ decision declaring DADT unconstitutional and then has apparently stayed the implementation of its own stay. It’s dizzying, I know. A very good commentator on these matters is Ari Ezra Waldman, in Towleroad. 
At this moment, the Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Courts are all twisted up over gay matters. They are making fools of themselves. Provincetown led the way years ago and continues to lead the way into the future. 
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Sunday, July 3, 2011

Betraying the great history of gay people

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There is a range of ways men can array themselves with one another, but most of the traditional forms of relationship depend more or less absolutely on the concept of ownership. The two people in the relationship own each other. They can’t have sex with anyone outside the relationship, they can’t spend time with someone outside the relationship. These forms of coupling come at a high cost, as men wander, and as both sides in the relationship levy charges of betrayal. 
Some gay male couples avoid this pattern by specifically not claiming ownership. A man is free to go and come as he wants without being questioned by his partner. No one in such a relationship is ever asked, “Why didn’t you come home last night?” Or, “Where were you last night?” Each man in the relationship is absolutely free to do exactly what he wants to do whenever he wants to do it and does not ever expect to be questioned on it.
In such a relationship, both men avoid making promises—specifically the promises in the traditional marriage service about monogamy and about staying together till death. The assumption is that these couples will stay together as long as it is good for both of them. These relationships are often opened up to include a third partner or a number of other partners who stay temporarily. 
There are, of course, other ways for men to come together. Books have been written on the subject. My point here is that many of us know men whose relationships would have to be described in a whole range of ways. What is notable about the gay community is that, in the centuries during which we have been excluded from heterosexual marriage, we have used our time well. We’ve explored what was possible, determined to find out what worked and what didn’t. Many of us have concluded that ownership of one’s partner doesn’t work, and all that emotional energy expended on expressions of betrayal and grief because the other person has acted the way many men act is merely wasted energy. We have learned that sex is not the same thing as love and that the quickest way to destroy a relationship is to act as if everything were to depend on sexual fidelity.
Now then, at this point, when we are about to start marrying legally in ever-increasing numbers, it would be a shame if any large numbers of us forgot the rich history of gay people, forgot the ways we learned to act when legal marriage was closed to us, forgot that we learned years ago that feelings of betrayal are really just wasted energy, and forgot that we know more about what men are sexually than anyone else in our culture. If we start arranging our relationships as if we were straight people, presided over by a priest, we will have betrayed ourselves and we will have betrayed the great history of gay people.
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