by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Thoughts on getting home

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C and I have just come back from the eastern Connecticut shore where we joined extended family for Thanksgiving weekend. We had good food, good conversation, a good sense of belonging—all the things that are expected of such a weekend—and then we returned to Boston last night, and C returned to his job at a local gay bar. 
The interesting thing was how assimilated we were—relatively—during the weekend, at a house owned by a straight couple, surrounded by more than twenty people, also straight, and only one person winced when he overheard me recounting a portion of my sexual history to a straight female relative. In short, I felt pretty much at home with this group of relatives, and I didn’t feel constrained in any way by being one of only two gay people out of twenty straight people.
And yet, it was a huge relief when we got home, back to our books and DVDs, to our own things, our cat, our politics, and our community, and this made me think of the long-standing discussion in the gay community over assimilation or separatism. I wondered whether it was ever going to be possible for gay people to totally assimilate into the larger community. Aren’t we going to always be to some extent separate, divided from the larger community by all the things that have always divided us? And this because homophobia isn’t ever going to go away completely? And because the larger community isn’t going to recognize the value of what gay people have learned while wandering in the wilderness? We’re just still so far apart.
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Sunday, November 20, 2011

Ebooks and ereaders mean freedom to gay people

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I hear or read how sad it is that the publishing industry is collapsing. People resist ereaders. “I stare at a back-lit LED screen enough already.” 
There are a few things to remember. The publishing industry has not worked well for a lot of people. It has not worked well for writers who are just starting out. It has not been receptive to writers who write in difficult or unusual styles. It has not been receptive to writers whose subject matter isn’t mainstream or doesn’t invite broad readership. It has not been receptive to writers who write for a minority population in the culture. In an industry dominated by a concern for the bottom line, there isn’t much place for the guy who, from the beginning, never thought his book would sell a lot of copies. In a rich and vibrant culture, many books, which may be very fine books and which may add immeasurably to the depth of the culture, may never sell more than a few copies.
In a culture such as ours in America, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, where publication decisions are usually made on the basis of what is going to sell the largest number of copies, it is the culture of minorities such as ours whose vitality is most in danger. The publisher can’t afford to publish a book which is content to remain in its niche. Yet often the book that is most productive of new ideas or of a new take on old ideas is exactly the one that is not a cross-over book and is content to be sheltered within the community from which it sprang. A book written by a gay author for a gay audience about a gay subject, with no consideration for straight people or straight concerns, is much like a dissent in the Supreme Court. It may not carry the day in the whole culture, but it has been written, and it exists, and it enters the discourse of the whole culture, and, if it is a good book, it exerts its influence, which may grow until it becomes dominant.
According to publishers, the market for gay books has “vanished.” I can’t believe this is because today’s gay people are less intelligent or less interested in good books. This is the result of the publishing industry giving gay people sillier and sillier books so that gay people learn that if they want a serious and hefty book, they needn’t look for it in the gay section of Barnes & Noble.
We—gay people—are being disenfranchised. Publishers are not adding gay books to the culture at the rate our numbers would suggest, and our reading is being censored. 
eBooks in ePUB, like my own novels known collectively as the Stonewall Triptych, break through this censorship, give an outlet to gay writers for the publication of their books, and restore to gay people the power of the pen and of the press and restore to us the freedom, which is inherently ours, to choose our reading from all the books that are being written. 
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Monday, November 14, 2011

the Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray

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Marcel, the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, is in Balbec, a resort on the north coast of France. We read this:
One very hot afternoon, from inside the dining room [of the hotel], which was in half-darkness, sheltering from the sun behind drawn curtains, which were a yellow glow edged by the blue dazzle of the sea, I saw, traversing the hotel’s central bay, which extended from the beach to the road, a tall slim young man with piercing eyes, a proud head held high on a fine uncovered neck, and with hair so golden and skin so fair that they seemed to have soaked up the bright sunshine of the day. In a loose off-white garment, the like of which I would never have believed a man would dare to wear, and which in its lightness was as suggestive of the heat and brilliance of outdoors as was the cool dimness of the dining room, he was advancing at a quick march. His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the color of the sea. We all sat there intrigued, watching him as he passed, knowing that we beheld the young Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, famous in the fashionable world.
Marcel is more than “intrigued.” The young marquis, in his early twenties, is only a few years older than Marcel, and Marcel is seeing him the first time. In this glowing, highly charged portrait, we see how Marcel sees the marquis and the beginning of the intense friendship between the two men which, for the next five volumes, is going to totter on the edge of erotic fantasy. 
Even if we didn’t know that Marcel Proust was queer, and even if we didn’t know that the marquis turns out to be queer, this description of the marquis—so charged with the beauty of men—is the kind of thing that makes us know this is a queer book.  

       In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust (Penguin, James Grieve, translator, 2002)

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Sunday, November 6, 2011

Mourn no longer for Malone.

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Sometimes a work of art does not present itself so that we know who it is about. Maurice, by E. M. Forster, seems to be about Maurice Hall, and then it seems to be about Maurice and Clive Durham together, and it is only later that the reader discovers the novel is about Maurice, and about Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder. This is important because Maurice isn’t about failure between Maurice and Clive but about success between Maurice and Alec.
The Law of Desire, by Pedro Almodovar, seems at first to be about Pablo, the director, and his love for Juan, and it is only late in the movie that it begins to be apparent that Law of Desire is about Pablo and Antonio and what they can learn from each other, which happens in the final minutes of the film. Again, it’s not about failure, it’s about triumphant success.
The Skin I live In seems to be about Dr. Robert Ledgard, played by Antonio Banderas, the doctor who runs the research institute trying to develop an artificial skin, but it is only in retrospect that it becomes clear that the movie is about Vera Cruz, played by Elena Anaya, and that the “skin” which Vera lives in is the artificial skin of gender and that the movie is “about” her discoveries and not about the doctor’s madness. 
All this is to say that we have to discover things slowly. The Dancer from the Dance, by Andrew Holleran, which seems to be about Anthony Malone, the principal dancer in this particular dance—Lower East Side and Fire Island in the seventies—is only apparently about the beautiful dancer whom everyone fell in love with. The book is really about the world that Malone inhabits, the dance nobody can separate him from. And it is also to say that we ought to understand these works of art slowly. And not rush. Or jump in, because long after Malone has walked into the bay, men are still writing letters trying to determine what it all meant, and Paul writes the concluding lines of the novel: “No, darling, mourn no longer for Malone. He knew very well how gorgeous life is—that was the light in him that you, and I, and all the queens fell in love with. Go out dancing tonight, my dear, and go home with someone, and if the love doesn’t last beyond the morning, then know I love you.” It is the dance that we have to see and not the dancer.

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