by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, January 30, 2012

A rich life

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People say of themselves that they “just happen to be gay.” I think that’s bullshit. I am profoundly, inextricably gay, and being gay affects every single part of me. I didn’t “happen” to be gay. I am so deeply gay that if you took the gay away, there wouldn’t be anything left of me—or I would be a totally different person. 
I was gay, and I knew I wasn’t going to work for American capitalist enterprise, be an organization man and fit in and take orders and live in a suburb. I was a rebel from the gitgo. So starting in grade school, I gradually accustomed myself to being outside, being a loner, being a rebel, being against.
I always felt like an outsider, so no matter what the endeavor, I was going to find a way to do it by myself. Liking boys put me in a different place from everybody else and the forces that drove many other people—get a profession, find the “lovely girl,” get married, have children, etc.—usually didn’t apply to me. I was in a free fire zone where there weren’t any rules. There were times when I had to pretend that the same rules that applied to everybody else were applicable to me when I knew they, profoundly, weren’t.
And the times in my life when I tried to join an organization—I got a PhD and became a college prof and got married—were notable for how very uncomfortable I felt until I gave in and abandoned the effort. Whatever I had to do, I never lost my sense that I was gay.
When everything else seemed to be just a series of pretenses, a long and difficult acting job I was trapped in, being gay liberated my mind. It gave me a firm foundation to stand on, a history to understand and build on. It gave me a future, a way to think, and, finally, a way to act. 
Being gay has meant that I learned something of what other minorities experienced in America—Jews, black people, atheists, native Americans, Japanese Americans, others—and I knew that “We the People” did not include all of us unless we fought for it. Because I was gay, much of Christianity came to feel narrow and discriminatory. Being gay, I watched while people claim privileges for themselves that they tried to deny me. Yet they seemed to want to be my friend. It was an interesting—and distancing—experience.
It’s a rich life being gay has given me. Part of our family was just here for a quick visit—C’s and my children and grandchildren. We baked bread and did homework and talked for about twenty-four hours straight. We’ve got it good. But none of this just happened to us. We worked to get what we’ve got—two queer granddads and our kids and grandkids. 

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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Freedom to feel

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Freedom. We are in an election season, and the word is everywhere, but we don’t usually feel we have to ask what it means. For us, the big gay-rights cases before the Supreme Court place the word in a constitutional context. That’s important, but there are other meanings from other sources besides court cases. It is important that gay people know what meaning we assign to the word, so we know what we’re fighting for.
The organization that was formed within a month of the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 was called “Gay Liberation Front.” “Liberation” means, according to the New American Oxford Dictionary, “the act of setting someone free from imprisonment, slavery, or oppression; release: the liberation of all political prisoners.” and also “freedom from limits on thought or behavior: the struggle for women's liberation.” 
In my last posting, I quoted two pages from near the end of Part Two of my novel, Ceremonies, in which Dana contemplates Marc, her infant son, and considers what it would be like for him to be truly free. She imagines a time in the future when their culture is characterized by sexual anarchy, when “Marc would be free.” Later in Ceremonies, Deborah and Sally contemplate what freedom means. Sally says, “It must mean something more than the freedom to choose between candidates, or to choose between faiths, or even to choose between ideas. It must reach deeper than that—” Deborah proposes, “Freedom to feel without constraint.” It seems these two middle-aged, middle-class women instinctively understand themselves politically in the terms of the sixties Stonewall revolutionaries. 
In December, 1969, when the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) was formed, its manifesto demanded basic rights, the first of which was “the right to our own feelings. This is the right to feel attracted to the beauty of members of our own sex and to embrace those feelings as truly our own, free from any question or challenge whatsoever by any other person, institution, or moral authority.” 
The sixties revolutionaries understood that the form their oppression took—what they were fighting against—was the loss of the right to their own feelings. This is an intimate—and consequently sadistic—kind of oppression. Most queers today might say that, if they feel oppressed, this is the way they experience it: the loss of the ability to feel freely, to recognize what their feelings are, to honor their feelings, because their feelings have been devalued and mocked by the culture they call home. 
I like the GAA formula. When I was a child, I knew that there was something wrong with my feelings. Everyone told me that. There were times when I hated my feelings. I was ashamed of them. I didn’t want them to be my own. So the first step toward liberation for a kid like me was to learn that I had a right to my own feelings and that they were truly my own, and they were good.


Information on Gay Activist Alliance and Gay Liberation Front and related matters is drawn from the following two books:

David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2004.
David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006



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Friday, January 6, 2012

All around us are ruins

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Before I983, when I announced that my marriage was over, I had always been monogamous.
It was not until 1990, as I was beginning another relationship and still in the first bucking, sweaty throes of it, that I felt I needed to say something that was commensurate with the enormity of what was happening: I promised monogamy, words that came out of my mouth, expressions of an idea buried deep. I remember feeling surprised. I wondered where that had come from. 
Between these two big relationships of my life, much had changed. I had come out, I had spent the better part of seven years reading canonical texts of the gay movement, and I had begun to think for myself. Also, I was writing Ceremonies, In this excerpt Dana is on the way home with her partner, Marcia. Marc is their child: 


Tonight we will make love. She has a long pale yellow silk nightgown, and she will come into the bedroom wearing it after she has brushed her hair. She will be standing by the bedside table waiting for me, taking off her rings one at a time and placing them on the table. She will ask me if Marc is sleeping. Her nightgown falls all the way to the floor, showing only her white arms and her toes and when I say he is sleeping, she will smile and turn off the light, and we will find our way to the bed by the glow of the moon through the window. Then we will make love.
At the cars, we say goodbye. They [Luke and Arthur] go to theirs, and we stand by ours. I look up toward the theater. Derek [another friend] said he would join us by the lake. I am disappointed. He has been called away to something else. I feel like being called away to something else myself, a cottage on the coast, me and Marcia and Marc and a stack of books. I feel called away to friends who have maintained their freedom in the midst of this ruin. The last lights in the theater are turned off, and the entire landscape is lit now only by the cool platinum light of the moon. 
Suddenly I hear their car behind me and, "Goodbye my dearest friends!" I turn around. It is Arthur, leaning out of their car window, waving, blowing kisses with both his hands. Luke waves also from the driver's side. They drive way, Arthur still leaning from the window, throwing out his arms blowing kisses, calling, "Goodbye, my dearest friends!" They drive to the end of the parking lot and enter the driveway to the road, their lights disappearing among the trees. I hear him call, "I love you!" the last long ooooooo sound diminishing into the dark distance. 
We get in, and Marcia starts the car. We drive home through the deserted country. I slide down in the seat and rest my head. The Republican convention is next month. They will celebrate family values. The first woman candidate for a national office has been under continuous attack all week for her husband's finances. The boys are going to be tried as juveniles [for the murder of Bernie Mallett], and their harshest punishment will be confinement in a juvenile home until their twenty-first birthday. All around us are ruins. We are trapped in a moment in history which allows us almost no freedom, except the freedom to define ourselves inside an utterly oppressive culture. 
Marc is five-and-a-half months old. He grows daily, discovering his body and Marcia and me, what he likes, what he doesn't. How will he grow to express himself? How would he be if he were free? How would we express ourselves if we were free? Would Marcia and I be as we are now, in love, committed to one another for all our lives? 
The road winds up and down and from side to side among the evergreen trees, the moon sometimes on this side of the road, sometimes on Marcia's. I imagine perfect freedom. Would many women live as Marcia and I live, without a man at all, if they were able? Would many women live together happily and with purpose in communes? their children in common, the men somewhere else, there for the occasional coupling? Would some of us—or most of us—live with men in couples, sharing sex and affection and the raising of children? going to other men or women for primary affectional needs? Would the relationship with men be primarily economic and for the raising of children? Would we resort to serial monogamy? first women, then a man for children, then women again for spiritual values? And polygamy? one woman and many men? or the other way around, one man and many women, whose primary sexual and affectional needs would be met in each other? 
If Marc were to grow up in perfect freedom, in a culture without fear of sex, a culture that celebrated all the diverse sexual and emotional and intellectual possibilities of men and women, wouldn't things be more fluid? less rigid? And wouldn't it be certain in such a community where anarchy ruled that there would be no rigidly defined groups who were constrained to limit their affections and their desire to members of only one other group? Wouldn't Marc be free? Would Marc have to define himself straight or gay? 
What of Marc's feelings? Don't his feelings flow from object to object, person to person, occasion to occasion without break, a rich continuum of emotional life, flowing over and around and under whatever comes into his life? Don't we feel desire with one—or some or many—forever or for a little while, at the same time or at different times? And doesn't our desire take different forms and different intensities according to the moment and the object?  
Dana sees what freedom in the future is going to be like. 
Oxford University Press has announced a new book, to be published this month, January 2012, by Eric Anderson, The Monogamy Gap: Men, Love, and the Reality of Cheating. I have my order in, and when it comes, I’ll review it here. Anderson’s book has already been reviewed by Vicki Larson, Huffington Post.
These quoted pages are the last two pages from the end of Part Two, “Dana,” Ceremonies, by Dwight Cathcart, ebook published by Adriana Books, 2010
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Sunday, January 1, 2012

The will to assert the right to be different

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What are we going to work for, after all of us can get married? And what, now that we have DADT repealed? Will they really accept us then? And will we be happy? What about the people who don’t get married? Or who don’t go into the Army? Who don’t want children? What will be our relation to the larger culture? And what should be our culture’s relationship to us? What is going to happen to our gay bars? It’s already happening to our gay bookstores. And do we like that? Many of us know that Provincetown is changing. What will P-town be like when everybody in what used to be called the gay community is married and has children and serves in the Army? Will there be drag queens then?

Our culture will be different, sure, but it will also be poorer, less diverse, less vibrant, less capable of giving its children another way to be different. Right now, being gay means something radically important—the will to assert the right to be different. In huge technological cultures like ours in the US, the right to be different is valuable to the individual and to the culture as a whole. The people who made Apple Computer were different and thought differently and so made a different and surprising and beautiful computer. But in ways even more valuable, we will miss Marcel Proust, E.M.Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Alan Turing, Cole Porter, W. H. Auden, who are what they are, in part because they are gay. What they added to the culture because they were gay was immeasurable.

In 2011, Mark Hatzenbuehler, a Columbia University psychologist and researcher published a study in Pediatrics that asserted that “suicide rates among teenagers are dependent upon which county a teenager lives in.’” Harzenbuehler said “the results show that ‘environments that are good for gay youth are also healthy for heterosexual youth.’" It may be that the mere presence of gay kids is good for straight kids. 

This is something that Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961, understood. A good neighborhood was a neighborhood with a cross-section of different kinds of people. And according to Jill Grant, Jane Jacobs believed that “cities have natural advantages over towns and suburbs because size gives them the diversity that generates vitality.” Generates vitality. It’s a goal for all people who care about our culture. In our cities, there should be space for African-Americans, for Spanish-speaking Americans, for Chinese, for other ethnic minorities from around the world, and for those who are a whole range of sexualities and genders. And these citizens should not be assimilated to be called Americans.

Men and women who are not married and who don’t have children, who read gay books and rent porno videos, who refuse to go into the Army, and who call themselves queers instead of gay people, who are the least assimilated of our tribe, are important to the culture of America and add to the diversity that generates the vitality of this nation. Meddle with us at your peril. Literally. 

Reconsidering Jane Jacobs. ed. Max Page and Timothy Mennel, American Planning Association,  Chicago: Planners Press, 2011. p. 99


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