by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, December 31, 2012

Resolutions for 2013

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C and I were in a bar Friday night. I talked to a friend about the difficulties of using an iPad or Nook or Kindle outside its own ecosystem—on an iPad, you need to read books from the Apple bookstore, and Amazon books from the Amazon bookstore on a Kindle, and so on. I think the question now is how long people will put up with this. It’s supposed to be about freedom, isn’t it, this digital revolution? These things are getting more and more technologically advanced, and less and less politically progressive. We’re buying books for our ereaders and feeding the corporate giants on Wall Street while doing so. That’s not what we wanted, is it? The corporate giants on Wall Street are certainly not feeding us—gay readers across America—the books we want.

Later that same night, C and I went to dinner with two friends and talked about the qualities a man brings to a relationship and which ones have a positive effect on the relationship and which ones not. One quality that we agreed on was his experience with relationships with men. A man can more confidently fall in love with a man who tells him he has fallen in love with him, if that other man has been around the track a few times and knows what he is declaring when he says, “I love you.” I have only had two loves in my life—one with a woman and one with C—and six years of screwing around between those times. C had more than ten years of experience in the gay community before I met him. I think we both knew what a long-term relationship was about.

C and I discussed marriage over the weekend. We’ve been discussing marriage since 2004, when it became possible to marry in Massachusetts. The Supreme Court says it will rule during 2013 on the constitutionality of DOMA and Prop 8. Most commentators seem to think that the Supreme Court will approve marriage equality to some extent, but nobody knows, and it may be that the only feeling a person can have at this moment is anxiety.

Friday night, C and I met a soldier on leave after having been to Afghanistan twice and to Iraq once. We talked about his service, and I thought about DADT. We don’t know yet what social changes are going to come in our culture as a result of the repeal of DADT. I suspect we don’t know the effect on all of us of the homophobia driven by a huge engine like the armed forces, which then stop and become an engine of mutual respect. This is disorienting.

2013, which begins tonight, is almost certain to be a year when gay people experience huge changes in their place in our culture. In a time of uncertainty, it’s OK to look back at what has worked in the past—keeping up the pressure and fighting back. What this means in practical terms is to give money to the people who can fight for us, the legal organizations of your choice and the social service organizations. Subscribing to tough gay political journals too. What is not acceptable for gay people in a time of large changes and uncertainty is lassitude. So, it’s a time for resolutions, and here are three. Remember Larry Kramer and ACT UP. ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS! Get out your credit card, open your computer. Join HRC, contribute to GLAD and ACLU, and give money to your local AIDS service organization and anybody else you know of who has contributed to our successes in this past year and to the betterment of your life. You’re welcome.
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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Goals to fight for and what they mean

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The goals are freedom and a community that is supportive. 

We’ve won major legal victories—Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v Texas and more recent court cases—and victories at the polls and in public opinion polls in the last few years. 

I have been searching for freedom all my life, and it may be that I am, right now, as free as I have ever been.

I am supported in this freedom, by a small group of people. My partner, C, my son, my daughter, my older grandchildren (the younger children don’t know anything about freedom, yet). I have friends, a couple in London, some here in the States, some here in Boston and Somerville who want me to be free and autonomous. 

Of course, there are forces that try to deny me freedom. There is the conservative Christian right,  and there are those folks who are in the conservative social right. These people say abusive things, and sometimes do abusive things. There are some members of my biological family with whom I am not in contact. I’ve been fighting against these people for the last twenty-five years. But they aren’t strong enough to prevent me from exercising my freedom, from being what I want to be. 

Last week, Guy Branum, who is gay himself, complained at length on Huffington Post because Nate Silver, who is gay, hasn’t come out the way he wanted him to. Nate Silver appears to be a wonderful person, successful at what he does, and he told the world about a month ago that he is gay “sexually,” but not “ethnically.” Guy Branum didn’t like that. “Silver's refusal to fully participate in gay identity is the real problem,” he says. What Branum means is that Silver’s refusal to fully participate in the way that Branum wants is the problem. Silver has no obligation to be gay in the way that anybody wants.

We live in a transitional period. There was a time when, in order to add strength to the gay community to fight its fights, we have had to, all of us, come out and increase the numbers of us who demanded our freedom, but we’re moving out of this transitional time. We’re moving into a period when one of the successes of our movement is the number of people who are able to live uncompromisingly gay lives without actually joining the numbers in demonstrations. 

It’s OK for Nate Silver to live his life any way he wants. Actually, what he’s expressing is what many of us are driving toward. Freedom.
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Thursday, December 20, 2012

The highway, the dark, the silent bus, the tablet screen, thoughts of a friend

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Our son called twice yesterday, working out the details of a gift for his children. Our daughter came on Saturday and spent the evening here—I cooked, and she talked—before going to Logan to pick up a friend of hers. 

I have been corresponding with a friend in a border state about a twenty-year-old student and coming out and the role of a faculty member in that process. In the last week, we’ve written six emails back and forth. My friend the faculty member is navigating the shoals of different generations, different geographies, different cultures and the effect of all of these on a person’s coming out.

Another friend texts late at night from one of those cheap buses between Boston and New York. “Things are going backwards, not forward,” she says. She talks about people in NYC who are gay and who are mixed race or mixed orientation and “are feeling the shit along with me.” She talks about racism and homophobia. In the big city men and women who are mixed race and mixed orientation can—and do—find a home, even if they also, sometimes, are “ambushed” and swear they’re not going to live in the USA any more.

C and I saw Lincoln last night and noted the venal reasons given by the players for being against the Thirteenth Amendment, some thing that now—once Lincoln worked his work, and we’ve had one hundred and fifty years for it to sink in—has the clarity and obviousness of Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Robert Bork died this week. The media seems to have adopted the judgment that opposition to his elevation to the Supreme Court introduced politics into the confirmation process for the first time. This is stupid. The Constitution assures that Supreme Court Justices will be confirmed in the middle of a political process by handing the process over to the Senate. Secondly, Bork arrived on the scene trailing his own political agenda, and that seemed shocking for a nominee. He deserved to be borked.

Time Magazine has named President Obama Man of the Year. His winning the election is a permanent achievement and to be celebrated, but he still has to fight Republicans, and that means, as Lincoln teaches us, getting his hands way dirty to achieve change. 

Life’s a mixed bag, here at the end of December, 2012—some wins, some losses, all of them big—and it’s easy to get frustrated and discouraged. Are we better, now, than we were twelve months ago? Why aren’t things better, clearer, now? But they’re not, and we still have a way to go. We’re going to get tired and pissed off, and it may not ever be clear that we have won anything permanent. There’s a lot of pain in that. But the story of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments is the story of rights won eventually, partially, over a long period. That realization brings at least partial satisfaction. 

What brings more complete satisfaction is a friend like the lady on the cheap bus, who spent part of her trip to NYC texting me about the people she knows in the city. When I got her text, I pictured it. The highway coming up toward her out of the night, the dark silent bus, her tablet’s  bright screen, and her, punching in the letter to a friend she wants to keep in touch with. Love. 

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

What do we want?

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‘Tis the season for it. Wanting things. But the question is really about us gay people and what’s happening now as we wait for the Supreme Court. 

A commentator this week makes a point about the effect of marriage equality on the behavior of gay people. Apparently we want to be like the straight middle-class.

I once sat in an audience while one of the lawyers who had argued the gay marriage case before the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which resulted in the first legal gay marriages in America, said, “Gay people want the same things as straight people.”   

That is manifestly not true. 

There are many, many things about straight marriage that I do not want anywhere near my long-term gay relationship with my partner C. 

At least some of us want long-term relationships which have room for experimentation.  At least some of us want to escape the laws influenced by this nation’s puritan past and accept more open display of our bodies, in private and on the beach and in our parades and in our art. What we don’t want is to have our long-term relationships defined for us by judges in California or Justices in Washington. I don’t think we want to enter an institution whose major framework was determined in the fourteenth century or even the nineteenth century or the twentieth century. We want to do it ourselves and make it fit our lives now, in the twenty-first century. We don’t want religious people to impose their beliefs on us in these matters of sex, love, and relationships.

I wrote about this earlier this year, 

Without having determined what we want, aside from “marriage,” we are rushing into a situation where the most restrictive of us are going to try to lay down rules for the rest of us about our bodies and our sex and try to make everybody adhere to rules. An emotional loving commitment between two persons necessarily means a commitment to sexual monogamy. “I love you” necessarily means “I am going to promise you.” It means, I will love you only and in return you must love me only, which, for many people, is akin to a declaration of ownership and an expectation of ownership and has no place when a man says, “I love you.”

The only declaration I feel compelled to make to the man with whom I share my life is that I don’t own him or his body, and he doesn’t own mine, even though the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has declared that, in the Commonwealth, “marriage” means, “The voluntary union of two persons, as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.” Why should a judge make such a requirement on me and C?

It may already be too late to stop the people who want to control us and to turn us into something we’re not. In any case, as these things move forward, it is possible for all of us to say, “Wait. Wait. That doesn’t apply to me. We are free. Take your rules to another country.” 
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Monday, November 26, 2012

The way we are now

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The most interesting thing in the Times article by Micah Cohen, on the gay vote, on November 16, is that, among straight voters, the vote was roughly divided, 49% Democratic and 49% Republican. The gay vote, which was 5% of the total, was approximately 75% Democratic, more than enough to give Obama the ultimate advantage, according to a study by Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, in conjunction with Gallup. It appears that we gave Obama the decisive edge in the election. It appears, finally, we can claim we have power and the next goal is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. 

Carole Cadwalladr announces in The Guardian that Nathan Silver has announced he is gay. He’s the man of whom Rachel Maddow said, "You know who won the election tonight? Nate Silver." Jon Stewart “saluted him as ‘Nate Silver! The lord and god of the algorithm.’” After all, he correctly predicted the vote in fifty states, and he’s gay.

What else? Well, a gay Abraham Lincoln. J. Bryan Lowder, in Slate, writes, “In a particularly poignant moment in Lincoln, honest Abe spends a few moments with a handsome telegraph operator, played by a somewhat period-discordant Adam Driver. ‘Do we choose to be born? Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?’ the Great Emancipator wonders aloud, gazing tenderly at the young man.” The scene, and apparently the movie, don’t give a definitive answer to the question of Lincoln’s sexuality, but it’s suggestive in this scene with the young man, and it shows what it would have looked like, had Lincoln, our greatest president, been into men. That’s a step in the right direction.
Then there’s Daniel Craig, as 007, and Javier Bardem, the sexual object-choice for half the gay men in America, who plays a gay villain named Silva. Mark Simpson writes of their most charged scene, “Whether out of genuine desire or a desire to undercut 007’s masculinity, Silva slides up close to his bound antagonist and caresses his thighs: ‘There’s a first time for everything – eh, Mr. Bond?’ But Bond meets his captor’s gaze with his customary implacability and asks, ‘What makes you think it’s my first time?’” Well, whatever. 007 knows about gay sex, and he isn’t uneasy with it, whether it’s his first time or his thirty-third. He’s not bothered. 

That’s a lot of triumphs for the LGBT team in a short time, which we’re not yet accustomed to. We’ll remember election 2012 for many reasons, and I have no doubt that we will remember the folks who didn’t make it to this point. 
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Sunday, November 11, 2012

Unresolved pain

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There is a moment in Homeland, on Showtime Channel, when Damien Lewis, as Brody, sits at a table in a cell, supposedly in CIA headquarters, his feet chained to the floor, his hands chained to the table. Brody had been imprisoned for eight years in an Arabic country. Flashes of that experience make Damien Lewis look like Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If. Brody had long unkempt hair and beard and wild and suffering eyes. Now, in the CIA prison, Brody is battered by a CIA operative, Carrie, played by Claire Danes. This man was battered first by the Arabs and now by the CIA, and his face is raw with his pain. As the scene moves forward, he begins to weep. I have never seen TV like this before. 

“Unresolved pain is another recurring Homeland theme,” says June Thomas, the writer on Slate’s online discussion of this program—unresolved pain from the 1947 war, from the endless Palestinian conflict, from 9/11, from Brody’s eight-year imprisonment and torture. 

None of the characters in Homeland seem to have gotten past any of the horrors of their pasts, and none of the histories of these people seems to be resolved. Damien Lewis’s face, which seems stunned by his own suffering, by the sheer amount of pain his tormentors are willing to inflict on his body, is the face of that suffering.

And now, four days after the 2012 election, in which LGBT people have won historic victories—marriage equality in three states has won, an anti-marriage equality constitutional amendment defeated, a lesbian elected to the US Senate, and others—it is not time to dust out hands and say, We won that one, and move on.

We are in the midst of a great victory, but we cannot forget those who have been damaged and injured by the way things have been. By personal hatred and bullying that left generations of gay men and women psychologically and spiritually and physically damaged. By professionals in the American Psychological Association and in the American Psychiatric Association who, until the early nineteen seventies, insisted without any evidence that gay people were sick and made whole generations of American citizens emotional cripples. By the damage that even now is being done to gay Americans by the churches and by religious people. By the refusal of power brokers in our culture up until very recently to help gay people have children by adoption or by AI. By all those long years when we couldn’t get married, couldn’t get our books published, couldn’t write the truth about ourselves, couldn’t express the truth about ourselves, had no political power. 

The pain our people have suffered must now be remembered in this moment in which we have won great victories. We must find a way to resolve the accumulated pain from the past. And those who are celebrating today’s victories must include those who suffered the pain of the long struggle, but who have not been able to share in its victories. They are us too.

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Sunday, November 4, 2012

Now it's our turn

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Barack Obama has proven himself a friend of LGBT people. He’s a friend of the families of LGBT people, and he’s a friend of friends of LGBT people. He has done more for LGBT people than any other president. He steered the effort to overturn DADT, he directed the Department of Justice to refuse to defend DOMA. He released a fully argued and unprecedented case for giving any legal attempt to limit the rights of gay people “heightened scrutiny,” and he announced that he was over his process of “evolving” and that he was now in fact in favor of marriage equality. As scores of commentators have pointed out, by his actions the president has transformed the debate over the place of LGBT people in America. Now, the question is, “Why should any rights be denied any LGBT citizens?”

This is a huge transformation, and it has come about largely as a result of Barack Obama. Before him, we were still in the position of arguing for one right at a time. Is there anyone who really believes that DADT would have been repealed by any Republican and that its repeal would have been effected by any Republican so smoothly and without incident? And isn’t it necessary to see that this president, Harvard graduate and University of Chicago School of Law faculty member, is particularly powerful in his advocacy of LGBT issues because he is black?

Many on the left complain that the policies of the Obama administration seem to continue the Bush administration—the drones and the kill-lists and some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act—and it is necessary now for all of us to plot a strategy to publicize these wrongs in such a way as to stop any president from continuing them in the future. But the consensus on the left is that Obama is good at foreign policy. He’s cool, he’s knowledgeable, and he has good judgment. He’s handled Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Iran. We are less entangled now than we were in 2008, nothing new has started on his watch, and the War on Terror is over. He’s not a bully, and the world knows that.

Then there is the economy. All the numbers show that recovery is on track, and while the pace of recovery is slower than we wanted, it is going in the direction we want—toward support for the middle class and more income equality. 

I am going to vote for Barack Obama. He’s the first president in my lifetime that I could call, with any seriousness, my president. It’s just very good that, in addition to being for me, for us, for LGBT people, he’s also smart, tough, knowledgeable, has an historical sense, and is not an ideologue. He’s the only one running for president who could have written Dreams from my Father, and he’s the one the rest of the world apparently wishes we would choose. 
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Wednesday, October 24, 2012

The Court, the Court

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Remember the Supreme Court. Remember how fragile is the majority in Roe v. Wade and the majority in Lawrence v. Texas. 

These are essential cases, defining the kind of nation we live in. If the Supreme Court reverses itself in either one, the place of women and  of gay people will be transformed, and we will become aliens in our own land.

Do not forget the Supreme Court, when you come to vote.
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Thursday, October 18, 2012

Come Out! (3)

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Coming out—both the action and the word—differs depending on where you live. It seems it has always been easier to come out in coastal California and in the Northeast than in the South and the middle parts of the country. It has been easier in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other big cities, and it can be really difficult in small towns around the country. It also differs by your age. A man born before the Second World War would have been an adult for ten years before Stonewall changed everything, but a guy born in the early fifties might experience the sudden changes of Stonewall as if these things have always been this way. A guy born in 1990 might see Stonewall and all it meant as ancient history. Yet we all end up in the same Gay Pride Marches.

What’s interesting is that in the same hundred-thousand-person crowd, someone may say, “When I came out,” and mean something very different by it than the man walking next to him. Or, a person may say, “I never came out,” and be standing next to a man who has never come out either, but for reasons diametrically opposed to the first person. He never had to.

I don’t think I ever came out—or else the process was so long and done so gradually that there was never a moment when I was able to say, and after that I was out. But the man standing next to me in the parade, who has just graduated from college, can legitimately say, “I never came out, either,” because he grew up in an upscale family outside of Boston, and about the time he was discovering the idea of sex, he was discovering that it was all happening because he liked boys, and he talked to his dad about it. 

I suspect that there will be larger and larger percentages of people who say they never came out. I suspect that the phrase come out is going to have a mainly historical interest. Even more, the word closet is going to be less and less useful for gay people. It will be applied to a smaller and smaller period in one’s life—finally not even to the few month period between a boy’s discovering what his dick can do and his realization that it’s boys and this is not going to change. The whole point of the word will be lost.

I suspect that the admonition Come out! is going to be useful mainly for people in the movement for gay liberation to those not in it and finally is going to have only an historical meaning. Instead of being a statement of what all gay and lesbian people have to do, it is going to be useful only for certain people during a certain period of our history. And all those not interested in our past will forget about it. 

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Sunday, October 14, 2012

Come Out! (2)

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Conventional wisdom would have us believe that the period before we came out, was a terrible place. The closet. Billeh, in the Daily Kos, quotes Paul Monette, who calls it a “hidden life,” and “half a life.” This is the way gay writers and politicians think about what went before coming out. I am sure that is true for some people, but it is not true for many others. I got married in 1965 and I had children in 1969 and 1970, and while that life was difficult, it was not impossible and it was emphatically not “half a life.” During that time—a period that began for us in 1965 and ended finally twenty years later in 1984—I earned a PhD, my wife and I bought and sold three houses. I wrote a book that was published by a major university press. We raised two children, and I got a promotion and tenure, we established ourselves in our community, and we did all of this even though the conventional wisdom in the gay community was that I was closeted, living half a life. That’s outrageous. 

I have been gay my entire life, beginning when I was about ten. I have never been bisexual. I got married because I was looking for a way to live, and at that time the gay people that I knew seemed to be rebels and I wasn’t yet able to rebel against my culture. At that time, I thought I wanted to be a college professor and to live the life I did, in fact, live for almost twenty years. I met a woman, and she and I fell in love. We shared an amazingly rich world view. It is not true that if gay men fall in love with women and marry them, they are at least bisexual. These terms are dependent upon the subject’s self-perception. They are not dependent upon who or what gender he is having sex with. I never had any sexual responses to any woman even remotely comparable to the sexual response I have had to men. But the gender of the person I have fallen in love with was infinitely less important than the kinds of things she and I both found important—the paintings we liked, the furniture, the design of houses, our children at every stage of their growth, the books we liked—but I never lost my sense of myself as a gay man, and, during the almost twenty years of my marriage, I told many, many people, both men and women, that I was gay. I was gay, I was also monogamous, as I had promised at my marriage, and I was about as happy as most married men of 44.

But what astonishes me is that nobody is really happy with the way I was living my life. Certain people on the political spectrum didn’t like it that I had, in my mind, images of sex with other men while having sex with a woman. And after Stonewall in 1969, there were plenty of gay men who would have called me the dread word, closeted, and didn’t like it that I was living with a woman and fathering children while professing to be gay. And yet I didn’t think I was unique. To the contrary, I thought I was pretty typical of gay men of my generation, some large percentage of whom had gotten married and had fathered children. What was coming clear to me was that our sex lives were not nearly as clear as our language seemed to imply, with its short list of binaries: men and women, gay and straight. Things are messier than that, yet not less interesting, or valuable, or moral, or healthy. 
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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Come Out! (1)

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As long as our culture is homophobic, many gay people are going to feel they have to come out. It’s an act of courage, self-defense and self-respect. 

But I don’t think we think often about what we do when we come out and about what it means. Few people think about the fact that straight people don’t come out, although my children and grandchildren—all straight—individually came out to me several years ago. I take it that one difference between my children and grandchildren, on the one hand, and me, on the other, is that we continue to live in a mainly homophobic society, and it is necessary for me to declare myself against that bigotry and to take a political stand. While children and grandchildren aren’t required by the politics of their time to take a stand, they came out to me and to C, my partner, because they love us. 

A diary by STEVEinMI’s in Daily Kos today discusses the effect of coming out on the people around Steve in Michigan who are not necessarily gay. Another diary from Daily Kos, from Billeh, quotes Harvey Milk: "Gay brothers and sisters, you must come out. Come out to your parents ... Come out to your relatives. Come out to your friends, if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors, to your fellow workers, to the people who work where you eat and shop. Come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake." 

The trouble with all this is that Harvey Milk and Steve in Michigan are both telling me I must come out. In a free society, in which it is just as easy to be gay as straight, it should be a personal choice. I am aware we don’t live in a free society, and it is not just as easy to be gay as to be straight, but we shouldn’t forget that a free society is our goal. In a truly free society, my sexual orientation is an entirely personal fact. All of us ought to remember that, while we give money to candidates and to HRC and work to get out the vote. The more we are successful, the less permanent will be our present patterns of thought. 

There’s going to come a time when people don’t have to come out and don’t have to think about the good of all mankind and can think only of themselves. That’s what we’re going for on such a personal subject.

 It's also true that, even today, the language we use doesn't fit the present reality of people's lives.

There is a lot more to this subject. I will post Come Out! (2) and Come Out! (3) tomorrow and on the weekend, all as part of celebration of National Coming Out Day.
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Sunday, September 30, 2012

The operative word is "fight"

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Before AIDS, people got sick, went to their doctors, were told what to do, and got better—or worse and died—and that didn’t change until HIV had been among us for five years or so. Since the drug companies weren’t coming out with effective medications, and since the federal medical establishment seemed to be in no hurry, and since the government didn’t seem to have a plan, gay men and women stopped looking to others for a solution in their fight against AIDS. They started making noise, joining together and making a loud noise, making charges against the pharmaceutical companies that they were making obscene profits off ineffective drugs for AIDS. They fought against the FDA, which had no sense of urgency about releasing drugs that might be helpful to persons with AIDS, and against the whole medical establishment, which didn’t understand that it would practice medicine better if it worked with the affected populations instead of only operating on them. Gay men and women came together at a meeting in New York in March, 1987, and heard the irascible Larry Kramer make the charge that if AIDS was a medical crisis, it was also a political crisis. They formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in March 1987, and on March 24, 1987 stopped traffic on Wall Street to demand greater access to experimental drugs and a coordinated national policy to fight AIDS. This was the beginning of AIDS activism. It happened during the Reagan Administration and during the George H W Bush administration, both of whom had allowed conservative attitudes against gay people to infect their response to AIDS.

How to Survive a Plague is a documentary by David France that opened last Friday in New York and on Thursday here in Boston. It appears to be made up of videos made by participants in these meetings and demonstrations, using handheld videocams. The documentary is about ACT UP and its fight against the federal government. The documentary is messy, immediate, clear, and extremely powerful. If you don’t know this story, you should see this documentary. If you want to be reminded of it—it’s been a long time—then get yourself to this movie. 

Much of what happened as a consequence of AIDS and ACT UP and Larry Kramer proved that Larry Kramer was right. He was the nearest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet. It’s never comfortable living at the same time as an Old Testament prophet. People get tired of being bullied by a man who says he speaks for God. But when Larry Kramer shouts out into the middle of a meeting of ACT UP that has lost its way, “PLAGUE!” and all go silent, it is clear that Larry Kramer was right, The reason our medical research establishment operates the way it does today and the reason clinical research is conducted the way it is today, is, in large part, because of Larry Kramer and ACT UP. They didn’t mind being rude if they could save our lives. How to Survive a Plague makes clear that there are millions of people who are alive today because Larry Kramer and ACT UP learned how to push the federal medical establishment, including the FDA, and the pharmaceutical companies, to keep searching for effective drugs that would save our lives. The ACT UP motto is ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS. In case you missed it, FIGHT is the operative word.
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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The effects of the life I've led

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I told him I didn’t trust therapists. The young man said he didn’t know why a person wouldn’t trust therapists. I reminded him that half my life the American Psychiatric Association had in its diagnostic manual that gay people suffered from various kinds of mental illness because they were gay, and they didn’t change that diagnosis until 1971 when the Gay Liberation Front broke into their meeting and stopped the proceedings. Psychologists and psychiatrists were the source of all those things floating around in the culture that said, gay people are sick. At the APA meeting, Frank Kameny of the GLF cried out, “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you!” And it was then that the APA agreed that gay people were OK.The young man that I was talking to didn’t know about this and said therapists were not like that anymore. He was sympathetic and seemed interested in what I was telling him. Here in the city, at meetings, and in our bookstores, and everywhere else, gay men and women who have spent half their lives coping with the abuse they got from the APA mingle with everybody else.

This experience—this kind of experience—had a profound effect on the generations who came to adulthood before Stonewall. Many older gay men and women are wary of the recent gains of our community—DADT and what’s happening with DOMA and the various court cases around Prop 8 in California and recently even the football players in the NFL. Are these successes going to last? When the Republicans get in next time, will they chip away at our rights? Or revoke them entirely? These gains aren’t necessarily permanent. Older people sense the tentativeness of our existence.

One of the effects of the life we’ve led is a self-protectiveness that characterizes many older gay men and women, an unwillingness to give up the protective styles and attitudes they developed when it was hard and dangerous to be gay. They may need them again some day. I have an anxiety that is difficult to convey to my children or my partner—who is a different generation—or to younger friends, and I have a need to say, But you don’t understand. 

So, aside from the need to re-elect Barack Obama, the gay community faces a fault line between the generations which is going to stay with gay people until the older generation gradually dies off. I suspect this fault line between generations may make us less effective as a community. But then, in our effort to overcome it, we may learn something very valuable about love. 


For more on the war between the gay liberation movement and the American Psychiatric Association, see:

Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2005.

Clendinen, Dudley & Nagourney, Adam. Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
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Friday, August 31, 2012

The homeless man, his son, and me

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Right now, I can’t escape thinking about politics and our choices. The question that occupies me is raised in my walks around the city by the demands made on me—on my time and energy—by various groups asking for money and support, by a homeless man holding a sign, “For me and for my son.” I get home and find emails from the president asking for “$13 before midnight tonight.” Then there are the ones closer to home, The Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD and the other gay rights organizations. 

I could ignore all this, saying, “Those things have nothing to do with me.” And they may not. Gay men normally don’t have anything to do with women’s issues and don’t necessarily have anything to do with the issues of homeless men. It may be that the strongest connection between those causes and me is that I care about the welfare of other citizens, which is a pretty tenuous connection. 

So, walking around the city, I search for a stronger connection between me and the malnourished kid, the homeless men, and the women seeking abortion, and the political campaigns. Why do I have to get deeply involved in Obama’s campaign for re-election?

We’re human—me and the malnourished kid and the homeless man, the woman seeking abortion—and we all get our rights from the same place, the Constitution and also from the basic fact of what we are. Not because we are good or kind or thoughtful, but because we are human. We can’t escape the fact that we are all connected, and if I want respect because I am a gay human male, I can’t escape giving respect. I can’t get it unless I give it.

It is only a short step to being committed politically, giving money and carrying signs for the candidate who is going to do something for the malnourished kid, the woman seeking an abortion, and the homeless man and his son. As gay people, the vision we have is of a world in which, if we are free, all must be free. We can't equivocate on that.

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Friday, August 24, 2012

Gentle, stylish, astonishing

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Check this one out. It’s a car ad, and it’s running in Japan only. 

It raises the issues we’ve been talking about here—the beauty of men and of women, the range of possibilities before us which may or may not include sex, the essential need for surprise, a fluid impermanent sense of gender, and, overriding everything, the knowledge that all of these things are more valuable than their opposites. 

Life is better, now.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Focussing on the most important thing

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Now it is time to focus on the Supreme Court. 

Here are the stakes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933, Stephen Breyer in 1938, and Anthony Kennedy in 1936. These three justices were part of the majority in both major GLBT civil rights cases of the last twenty years. It is possible that one of these justices will have to be replaced before the next presidential election. If Romney is elected, and if he has a chance to nominate a replacement for any of these three justices, it is likely that he will choose someone like Samuel Alito or John Roberts, or, even worse, like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, who dissented in both of these cases.  

If that were to happen, this would be the result: Lawrence v. Texas, decided in 2003, which overturned all sodomy laws, could itself be overturned. The majority on that decision would flip from a presumed Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, to a four person dissent facing a majority composed of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and a new conservative justice. Romer v. Evans, decided in 1996 by a 6 to 3 opinion, recognized that gay people must be constitutionally protected. The majority on that case would flip from a presumed Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, to a four person dissent facing a majority composed of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, plus the new conservative justice. 

The point here is that, were Romney to win the election, the makeup of a court would make it possible for a conservative majority to work its will with our rights. We are one vote on the Supreme Court away from being a different kind of nation, and the election of Romney would supply conservatives with the chance to get that vote. See also Daily Kos. Time. and Huffington Post. 

When you consider what to do with your support this summer and fall and with your vote, consider this: there is no more important issue facing gay people than the makeup of the Supreme Court. 
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Friday, August 17, 2012

Travolta and the failure of our language on sex

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Last week people wanted John Travolta to come out, and he wouldn’t, and then writers retracted their requests, ending up with statements like, “Nobody’s personal life is my business.” We think very badly about sex in our culture.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing in Salon, says “frankly, if being a guy who regularly has sex with other guys doesn’t make you gay, I’m not sure what does.” She gets close to the heart of the confusion here.  She would have “being gay” defined by the man’s actions. It’s not. Sucking cock does not make you gay. Even enjoying sucking cock, does not make you gay. Sleeping with women does not make you straight either. In our culture, during my whole life, we have told ourselves that a series of actions made us a certain kind of person. That is emphatically not so. A man’s sexuality is defined by how a man thinks and feels. I have only to look at the humanity around me to see that this is so. 

Consider these things: There are more than two genders and gradations of each one, with no clear bright line separating anything, as each story of a transgender person tells us. And how do we find out what gender a person is? That person will tell us. My desire may likewise take many forms—life-long for one gender and for one person or for several people for a shorter period or for many people. I may, in fact, have two or more different kinds of relationships simultaneously—a long-term, permanent relationship based on the totality of the way humans can connect and a series of short impermanent relationships based on sex, or vice versa. In and Out don’t describe anything real. I am what I am. I don’t need coming out as a gateway to myself nor do I need coming out to tell other people about such a private thing as my sex. In short, I can be a major Hollywood star, in a long-term marriage, and can have sex occasionally with men, and it’s nobody’s business but my own. (What I can’t do, of course, is be publicly homophobic while sucking cock.)

In these matters, one size does not fit all. The Christian church did humanity in the West a huge disservice by trying to impose one set of vows on all people in the Christian marriage liturgy. Some people wanted monogamy, some didn’t. The agreements people arrive at to give structure to their relationships should be open to occasional renegotiation by the people involved. No one else can know the factors that are brought to bear upon any person’s choices. The choice is private.

I have nothing to say about John Travolta’s sex. On the other hand, no public figure has anything to say about my sex, either. I seek what is right for me, with one great commandment governing all—do no harm and allow no harm to be done to us or our children.
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Sunday, August 5, 2012

When Larry Kramer and 200 men taught us how to fight

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My partner is out of town for the weekend, and this afternoon I went by myself to Dark Knight Rises. Much of the outdoor shooting takes place on Wall Street in pitched battles between the New York police and the bad guys. In the first image, Wall Street is cleared of traffic and the cops are crowded at one end of the block in front of the Stock Exchange. The bad guys are crowded down at the other. Powerful image.
It made me think of the first big AIDS demonstration, which was in the same place—on March 24, 1987, in front of the New York Sock Exchange. There were about 200 gay men and women. They stopped traffic, and by doing so, captured the media. Because many of the participants had AIDS, they had manipulated the cops into putting on rubber gloves and masks, and they looked terrible. Our guys were in all the papers the next morning—except the Times—and it was clear from the media that the guys with AIDS were the good guys. It was from this demonstration that Larry Kramer formed ACT UP, focussed on the chokehold that the FDA had on AIDS medications. 
It was a small demonstration—two hundred men and women—in comparison to all those policemen in Dark Knight Rises, and what I was thinking of this afternoon, sitting in the cinema, was how huge the effect of ACT UP had been on vast stretches of American life—on public health, on the practice of medicine, on pharmacology, and, of course, on the place of gay people in American public life.  
A friend made the same point about the Stonewall Riots. They were really very small, weren’t they? Well, yes. But it doesn’t take vast throngs of men and women to change the nation, if the few you have are of the right sort. Our few had science on their side, and the Constitution, and, of course, morality. No wonder they were powerful. And another thing. The men and women at this first demonstration of the group that became ACT UP taught us that decorum is a weapon the other side uses against us. So ACT UP taught us again (we have to keep learning this) to stop being polite.
On AIDS and the transformation of America, read Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 
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Thursday, July 26, 2012

Boy Scouts, here are our medals

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When I was thirteen or fourteen in South Carolina—we're talking about the early fifties here—the Boy Scouts were different from all the other activities a boy could do. We went on weekend overnight campouts to some local "woods," and I looked forward to it all week long.  At night, after the campfire and after the songs and stories, and after whatever else we did, I rolled out my sleeping bag next to one of the adult leaders, and then, when it was dark, I reached behind me and found the Scout leader's arm and pulled it over me. I loved that. It was the only place in my life where I could snuggle up close to a man. The adult allowed his arm to remain across me for a few minutes and then he removed it. Often I got his arm again and pulled it over me, and after a few minutes he pulled it back. This helped me to go to sleep. When I had grown up some, I regretted having lost those moments at the overnight camping trips with the Boy Scouts, but the memory of them kept me going until, several years later, I was awarded Eagle Scout rank and Order of the Arrow. I have forgotten what the Order of the Arrow was, but I remember believing at the time that it was important.
I don't believe that organizations like the BSA contribute much to the growth and development of children. I don't think I am a different adult from what I would be if I hadn't gone out for Scouts, but I do remember vividly lying in my sleeping bag next to my Scout leader after dark and feeling warm and protected and comforted, when I didn't get those feelings at any other place in my life. At a time in my life when I felt isolated, alone, fearful, inadequate, Scouts gave me comfort. 
It is the memory of lying in my sleeping bag next to my Scout leader—and my gratitude for that memory—that has prevented me from returning my Eagle Scout Badge to BSA. Even though it is clear that the BSA has turned its back on me, I didn't feel I could turn my back on that memory of that man who understood what some boys need and let me get what I needed from him.
In the intervening years, my son was born and grew up and chose not to enter Scouts. Now my grandson is approaching that age. Given the situation, I am going to stay away from his decision to go into Scouts or not. I doubt that he does. 
But today, I have mailed off to Irving, Texas, my Eagle Scout badge and that sash that Boy Scouts wear with all the merit badges. My partner, C, asked what I was doing, and then said, "Wait a minute." And in a minute he came back with his badges. He said, "Here, put these in too." And I did.  
Returning these badges is a way of coming out to the Boy Scouts of America, letting them know that they have—and had—gay scouts they have to respect. When we have in our culture organizations like the Boy Scouts of America and, up until the repeal of DADT, the armed services, it is important to constantly inform them and everybody in the public that we are gay and that we're here, that, in fact, we have always been here, gay in the Scouts and gay in the military (I was gay in the military from 1959 to 1961), and in all the other organizations that have pretended they could change reality, get rid of us and make us not exist. We’ve always existed, and we haven't ever gone away, there are still gay boys in the Scouts now, and the Boy Scouts of America can’t make us go away, just by passing some silly little rule in Irving, Texas. There are always going to be gay boys in the Boy Scouts of America. Do the Scouts really think they can succeed where the Army, the Marines, the Navy, and the Air Force of the United States of America have failed? 

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Friday, July 20, 2012

Our literature, our lives, coming out

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Some writers have taken “coming out” as the beginning of the plot and then made a novel of it. It might start, “In 1993, when I was fourteen, I came out to my best friend….” Others have taken “coming out” to be the climax of the plot, whose final sentence might end, “And then, in 2006, I came out and lived happily ever after….” 
If you’re a new novelist, there are several problems with these plots. One is that we’ve read these novels already. A more serious complaint is that, whether you make coming out the climax of the novel or the beginning of the novel, a major part of a person’s life is going to be ignored (or have to be imagined). In some kinds of fiction, that’s OK. When Shakespeare’s lovers get married in the fifth act, we are not invited to wonder what comes next. 
But some kinds of modern fiction, being more realistic, do wonder. For many of us, coming out happens somewhere in the middle of our lives, after some major event and before some other major event.  Even a guy coming out at ten years old has some pretty intense stuff going on, before and after.   
When I sat down to write Race Point Light, I planned to base this novel loosely on a typical life of a man in my generation, and all the different parts of that life were real life, every single part of it—his childhood, the run-up to his marriage, his marriage, his children’s births, the run-up to his divorce, his divorce, his coming out, his move to an urban gay community, AIDS, his meeting the man who was going to become his partner, their fighting disease together—and it makes a different kind of novel.  In Race Point Light, coming out is neither the end of anything nor is it the beginning of anything. Much more realistic. There is nothing about this life that is ever after.
Race Point Light tells a story that begins a long time before the narrator comes out and that ends a long time afterward. It’s the story of a man’s life that is typical of many gay men in post-war generations. Race Point Light explores the drama in these lives, and it has the added advantage of being close to the way we really experience ourselves. There is no fairy tale here.
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Friday, July 13, 2012

Uncomfortable truths

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I was on Boston common today, talking to a friend. We’d just gotten to know each other and we were asking the kinds of questions people ask, exploring each other’s lives. He asked me, “Since you’re gay, how did you manage to stay married so long? How did you do that?” 
I told him, “Even though you’re straight, you could do that too, have sex with a man,if you wanted to bad enough, or if you needed to, or felt you had to.”
He said, “Not if my life depended on it.”
I laughed. “That’s probably the wrong kind of stimulus to be brought to bear on this issue. But something else. Look, people do it all the time. They don’t change their orientation. You can’t do that. What they do is go outside their orientation for a short time. I did it.”
“No. Nothing can make me able to have sex with a man.”
Probably each person requires a different kind of stimulus, but people are subject to external stimuli.  Money is a stimulus for some people. Give them enough, and they’ll do anything. Other people, something else—respect, place in the community, power. There is a whole range of things that affect how men and women choose the gender of the person they are going to have sex with, and getting turned on is only one of them. Witness the millions of gay men who have gotten married and fathered children in the last hundred years. And the probably smaller number of straight men over the years who have had sex with gay men under a range of stimuli—often alcohol or drugs. We discussed the opening scene of True Romance and Christian Slater’s character telling us under what conditions he would have sex with Elvis Presley. If I had to. I mean had to. He thought Elvis was as pretty as any woman.
What I didn’t say to my friend, but could have, since it is true, is that sexuality is malleable—to an extent and for a short time. I could also have said that a man can’t permanently alter his sexuality. But anybody can do anything tonight, if the stimulus is right.
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Friday, July 6, 2012

Honoring what gay people know

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I recently wrote to a friend: “Like most peoples who are faced with the possibility of assimilation, many gay people wonder what they will be giving up in the process, and what they will be getting in return.”
You see it every day in the city, watching Hispanics, some struggling to adopt English, others not, many of whom are determinedly holding onto Hispanic ways. Blacks have been facing the same dilemma for the last 150 years. And women too, as any woman will understand. While gay people have been discriminated against, they have developed modes of self-defense, which, they fear, will be lost if they are assimilated. It is not all about loss or gain of civil rights. It may not even be mainly about civil rights. What I think people would like most is to get freedom (that is, to get civil rights) without giving up anything. One example: We would like to get marriage equality, but have the "marriage" be an arrangement of our own creation, not the creation of heterosexual courts or the heterosexual congress, or patriarchal, heterosexual churches. I think we want a "gay marriage" that is more profoundly honest for both parties than the heterosexual marriage we see before us. I think we fear getting into a relationship in which we are forced to play out the gender roles that the straight community plays out in marriage. 
Many gay people resist giving up what we have learned during our time in the wilderness. A person rarely reads, anywhere in the straight media, anything that would suggest straight people understand that they might have something important to learn from gay people. And gay people know this. Gay people think, we have learned so much, and straight people don't value what we know.
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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

The Stonewall Riots and me

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Today is June 26th, and tomorrow is June 27th, and after midnight tomorrow night, one hour into June 28th, we will be into the forty-third anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. If you stay up one hour past midnight, it will be exactly forty-three years since Lt. Pine led his cops into the Stonewall Inn. 
I could say I don’t know why I am so moved by the story of the Stonewall riots. I choke up just reading about it. I know about the history before Stonewall, about the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis and the riots on the West Coast, and I know about Frank Kameny. I’ve read, over and over, about the big woman and her part in the riots—she was the first person to really fight back—and about the anonymous kid (just about everybody agrees it was a kid) who, when watching the big woman fight her fight so heroically, cried out, “Help her!” And they did, and that’s when it started. But that doesn’t add up to why I am so moved by the story of Stonewall. 
The reason I’m so moved is that I think I know what it must have been like to be a person who had never fought before and was so furious that he waded into that mob and didn’t care what happened so long as he was fighting back. When the time came for me to come out, I was afraid that the people I loved most at that time would cease to love me. I felt I was about to lose every thing that mattered to me, and every person who mattered to me, and I was afraid it was going to hurt, and I wouldn’t be able to stand the pain. Yet I went ahead and did it. I took a breath and laid it all out and refused to waiver. I just refused to say anything but, “I’m gay, and nothing’s going to change that.” And that gave me courage. 
It was days, weeks, months, a year, before the pressure eased up and I began to realize that I’m going to survive. They fought at Stonewall, and when my time came, I fought too, and when I read about Stonewall, it’s as if I’m back there, and I know how it feels to fight and be afraid and yet to fight anyway.

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Saturday, June 23, 2012

We live in a world they made

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Today is Alan Turing’s one-hundredth birthday. Alan Turing contributed to the Allies winning World War II by breaking the Enigma codes that Germany used to communicate with its submarines. He had a large hand in inventing the computer that we use today and that today Google is celebrating by the publication of a “doodle,” which you must have already seen because it’s everywhere on the web today. And Turing is an original gay martyr to bigotry and anticipated gay liberation by decades. He died June 7, 1954, the apparent victim of a suicide after appalling treatment by the British Government for acknowledging his homosexuality. A biography about him, Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, was published in 1983, and last month was brought out again (It is also available as an ebook for Kindles).  There was also a Broadway play. Google “Alan Turing”, and today see his name on the Google News page, under Technology or Google “Alan Turing Google Doodle.”
Paul Mariani published The Broken Tower in 1999, a biography of Hart Crane, out of which James Franco made a movie in 2011. Hart Crane was another major gay figure who committed suicide (April 27, 1932). Franco seems to have made it an artistic cause to retrieve into the cinematic canon documents from the gay past. He brought out HOWL in 2010, a movie about Allen Ginsberg’s first public reading of his poem.
The point here is the books about these men—The Enigma, The Broken Tower. There has been, in the years since Stonewall, a great interest in the lives of gay men and women in the past, and that interest has resulted in a flourishing of biographies and histories. 
The great histories—Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Europe, from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, by John Boswell, is one of the first great works of scholarship on our community. Hundreds of others have followed, notably Stonewall by David Carter, on the riots themselves. There have been the histories of gay New York that preceded the Stonewall Riots, principally Gay New York, 1890-1940, by George Chauncey, and The Gay Metropolis, 1940-1996, by Charles Kaiser, and scores more.
All these books pose the question, Who were the people who went before us? And what did they do? It is one of the strongest aspects in gay liberation, whose anniversary we are approaching next Friday and Saturday, June 27 and 28, 2012, which is the forty-third anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. 
This week I have re-read Ceremonies, about events in Maine during the summer of 1984 when Charles Howard was murdered and have been reminded of one of my goals when writing that book: What was it like to be gay in Maine in 1984?
We have inherited the world bequeathed to us by Alan Turing and Hart Crane and the men and women of the Stonewall Riots and the men and women of the summer of 1984 in Bangor. Put another way, we live in a world they made. And to know who we are, we learn who they were and why they created the world they made.
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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

But mainly just remember

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The mixed news from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, discussed here last post, and the continuing epidemic of gay teenage-suicides around the country—it’s hard to find any positive aspect of that fact—may be what caused some of us to find Gay Pride a mixed bag. 
I like it that we do it, and I like it that, buried under the glitter and the beads, is a communal memory of the Stonewall Riots. The reason we hold Gay Pride in June every year is that it was in June that the cops in New York mounted a sustained attack on the life of their gay community, leaving three bars permanently closed—the Checkerboard, Tel-Star, and the Sewer. The cops raided the Stonewall twice in June 1969, and this, even though the owners of the Stonewall—the Mafia—paid them off regularly. So, there’s something heroic happening at Pride, a history of bitterness. I could use a little more of that attitude, a little more militancy on these soft early summer days in Boston.
I understand that it’s hard to maintain bravado, an in-your-face attitude, hard to maintain an edge, when we seem to be winning all our battles. And yet, the edge was still there on Saturday, underneath the groups carrying banners from the banks and the churches and synagogues from the area, and all the gay-straight alliances. The Living Center was there to remind those of us who still remember what the Living Center was—a community center for persons living with AIDS—and there was a time when it seemed to be the beating heart of all that was gay in Boston.
I also missed the man on stilts. He was up there, wearing a short skirt and nothing else, and every time the wind blew, his stuff was clearly on display. The taste-makers in the gay community decided that things had gone too far, and Mayor Menino’s support was worth more to us than this particular dude’s stuff, so the word was passed and the community cleaned up its act, with the result being that everything got boring, which it largely is today.
The float from Machine brought up the rear, as it does every year, and I thought of that building on Boylston and the gay bar that used to be called the Ramrod which, like many other things, including the parade itself, has gotten bigger and slicker, but not better. I remember the Ramrod when it was only one storefront wide, and we were all fairly serious about our leather. I met my lover, C, there, one night in September, 1990, and we went home together that night and have been together ever since. That’s another achievement from that time that is worth celebrating.
So, standing in the sun on Boylston Street across from Copley Square, I was bored by the Pride parade—all those banks and churches! and not enough glitter and not one man on stilts. I suppose I have moved on from the time in my life when Pride was going to shock me. Now it just makes me think and remember, grieve and remember, and be grateful and remember. But mainly it just makes me remember.
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About Me

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Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
I am gay. I have a partner, called "C" in this blog. I have children and grandchildren, and I like cities.

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