by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Friday, October 28, 2011

A moment of love

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When I saw Law of Desire, in 1987, I was a couple of years into writing Ceremonies. I think one of the reasons the movie was so exciting to me--so thrilling—was that Almodovar was showing me something that I hadn’t seen before. I know now that Proust had written about it in In Search of Lost Time, and Christopher Isherwood had written about it in A Single Man, and André Gide in just about everything he wrote. But at the time I hadn’t read all those books—hadn’t read them with understanding—and what I had in front of me was Almodovar’s movie, Law of Desire, with its incredible concluding image.
In 1987 I was writing my book about what happened to all of us in Bangor Maine, during the summer of 1984 after Charles Howard was murdered. But aside from the immediate task of turning our 1984 experiences into a book, I didn’t have an idea of what I was about. I had always had a sense that the book I was writing was not like any other gay books. But different in what way? How? Why?
When Pablo cradled Antonio’s naked body at the end of Law of Desire, the image they make—pieta in front of the altar, the one still alive sobbing with grief—echoes back as far as the Bible and the Gospels, and, of course, courses through six hundred years of Western art. Pablo and Antonio do not make reference to a particular religious image or even to anything religious. What they do, when Pablo cradles Antionio’s body, is to express forgiveness, understanding, regret, gratitude and grief, in the context of the powerful symbolism of a moment of love, in which the younger person has sacrificed himself for the good of the older. 
Law of Desire, with its luminous concluding image, urged me to expand my horizons, seek more, attempt larger things, make bigger bets, and change the kind of literature that gay fiction might be, in my novel Ceremonies. 

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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Love is never a joke.

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About midway through Law of Desire, the movie by Pedro Almodovar (1987), Antonio, played by a young and beautiful Antonio Banderas, asks Pablo, a movie director who is very self-centered and seems always to be doing lines of coke, “Who is the boy in the letter, that Juan?” 
It is a moment in the movie when Antonio, who says, “I’m what I should be,” is trying to manipulate himself into Pablo’s bed. 
Antonio continues. “He seems very much in love with you.”
Pablo answers. “He isn’t.” Then he says, “That letter is a joke.”
Antonio has been stalking Pablo since the beginning of the movie. He says, “Love is never a joke.”
In a culture in which Pablo finds it impossible to treat seriously what Antonio is offering and in which the love between two men is often treated exactly as a joke, the work of this movie is to show how very serious love between two men can be. This movie moves toward tragedy, and its method is operatic.
Eventually Antonio kills Juan, the boy that Pablo has been toying with—throws him off a cliff in the moonlight—and then, after an hour with Pablo, Antonio kills himself—sacrifices himself to Pablo’s learning what love means. 
The concluding image of the story is of Pablo, kneeling on the floor in front of a May Cross, cradling the naked body of Antonio and sobbing.
And now, Pedro Almodovar’s new movie, The Skin I Live In, opened in the US October 14, 2011, but has not come to Boston, so I haven’t seen it yet. 
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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Unthinkable ideas

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Some ideas are unthinkable, then they become thinkable. This happens all the time. I suspect that for the vast majority of people in this country, same-sex marriage was unthinkable right up to the moment they had to start thinking about it. They had never seen it, they had no history of thought about it, no experience with it. This happened to me around the fact of my being gay. I couldn’t think that I had rights. Every time I thought about my being gay, I thought about the stigmas we carried—criminals, mentally ill, sinful—but Stonewall said gays have rights. This was a whole different story.
I was forced into thinking about these matters by an article on the death of Frank Kameny, the founder of Mattachine Washington, and a participant in the Stonewall Riots and, it seems, in every significant gay rights action for decades after. The article is by David Carter, who has his own claim to our gratitude, since he is the author of the book-length study of the Stonewall Riots, Stonewall. Kameny had been a cartographer with the Army Map Service and in 1957 was fired for being gay. Kameny sued and took his case to the Supreme Court. He wrote a classic statement of the case for gay rights under the constitution, but, according to Carter, “in 1961, the Supreme Court was not ready to hear this analysis, and it did not take the case.” Carter quotes Barbara Gittings, who was also there at the beginning of Mattachine, saying, "before I met Frank ... I had a very inchoate idea of how we could solve our problems. ... Frank came along and he had this very strong, very definite philosophy, and it crystallized my thinking. 'Well, yes, of course. If you take the position that Frank has taken, then you get a very clear view of what you have to do, and you don't have to fumble around anymore.' “
How does an idea become thinkable? 
One of the important questions of our time is just this one. Even before the governments could think about marriage and the military and adoption and the rest of them, majorities have formed to demand these changes. How did this happen? What did we do? 
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Thursday, October 6, 2011

Me and my buddy and the Army, fifty years later

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I got an email two days ago from a man whose name I haven’t heard in fifty years. The email said, “Are you the Dwight Cathcart that was stationed in Yakima, Washington. 1960-1961?” This man and several others and I were in the Army together and formed a little group who went into town drinking and sometimes went on passes together. One of these guys was married, and we spent a lot of time at his house in town. We were close friends. I didn’t tell any of them that I was gay.
Now, it’s fifty years later, and everything is different. Before this man even found me, he found my web page advertising my gay novels, so when I wrote him back and outlined what I had done in the last fifty years or so, I told him, “In 1983 I separated from my wife and got a divorce in 1984, and then I came out.” I told him about my partner for the last twenty-one years. 
I was interested in the way I felt about that exchange. I found that I felt apprehensive, a little, about what he was going to say. We were friends fifty years ago. We liked each other. I think we had each other’s back, as the saying is. I suppose all of those guys must have suspected something about me, and there was nothing that I knew about them that would lead me to think that any of them would attack me now for being gay. But there was something else. This man might say, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I was surprised at my anxiety. Is this guy going to understand why I didn’t tell him back then? I didn’t know. He went hiking in Arizona before he could respond to what I had told him.
But what I do know is that, at least in my generation, coming out is still a big fucking deal. 
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