by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Thursday, March 29, 2012

An intensely private pursuit

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In Ceremonies, Mickey gives two television interviews. In the first his face is lit so he can’t be recognized, and when he sees the broadcast of the interview, Mickey sees what he has done:
“The reporter, on screen, is a warm and vibrant person with attractive middle-class American middle-aged steadiness. He looks directly into the camera and, with smiles and winks and floating eyebrows, establishes trust with the audience. The person he is interviewing—me—is shown back-lighted, his face entirely in shadow. There is nothing identifiable about his silhouette: the cut of his hair, the set of the jaw, the way he moves his lips when he talks, and most particularly, the absence of moist eyes with lashes. There is no feature that would make it possible for someone to respond emotionally to him, to grasp him. His voice seems hostile, resentful, and aggressive. I sound even shrill at moments. This is not me. I feel exposed. I have allowed myself to be used. I feel shamed, and I hate it. I look shamed.”
When Mickey sees himself on TV, his face in shadow, he says, This is not me, and during the next several days, he looks for a better fit between the kind of person he is and the way he is presenting himself. 
He grows bold. He comes out to his boss because he needs to go to Bernie’s funeral, and he doesn’t much care whether his boss likes it, and to the cops who come to his house because someone has painted DIE FAGGOT in red paint on his front door, to his landlord who threatens him with eviction because of the door. He says to his landlord, “I’ll get a lawyer and fight you every step of the way. I have money, I want you to know. I’ll spread this all over the newspapers too. You’ll come out of this looking like a bigot, Mr. Fellowes, because I know what this is about—this is about bigotry against a gay man, Mr. Fellowes. And I am going to fight you every fucking inch of the way and do it as publicly as I can, and I want you to make no mistake about me, Mr. Fellowes. I’m not afraid of you or anything you can do to me—” Mickey is searching for a way to be, about which he can say, this is me. But it is the two television interviews that indicate how much he has changed.
On Friday, after the funeral at the cemetery, the TV reporter and the cameraman ask permission to interview Mickey. In a beautiful setting, with Bernie buried only minutes before, Mickey allows the cameraman to take him in completely as he talks “answering the reporter’s long questions on Bernie’s death and its effect on the gay community in Cardiff, on [Mickey] and [his] homosexuality, on grief and loss, staring into the large black round glass eye.”
Whether this suits the bigots around town—or whether it suits the new gay community in Cardiff—what Mickey is doing is suiting himself, finding the me in all this chaos. At first, he didn’t know that was what he was looking for, and at first he didn’t know how to recognize it when he found it, but once he found it, he held on to it like a rock—the me in the swift-running, violent, turbulent stream of his life. 
People call what Mickey does in Ceremonies—these are just a few brief scenes from his rich life—“coming out.” It is important to notice that finding the me in the chaos around him is an intensely private pursuit. He is the only person who is going to know when he’s found it, and the effects of finding it are going to be intensely personal. It’s interesting that a process that leads those who go through it deeper and deeper into an intimate knowledge of themselves seems to be describing something very public and is called coming out.
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Jesus, another tour group

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In Ceremonies, after Mickey came out to his sister, and then to his mother the next day, he found he had to come out to his friend at work. He took his friend Charles to a fast food restaurant on the highway. After some preliminary talk about cars and tires and politics—it’s in the middle of the 1984 presidential election—Mickey says, 
“You know the boy who drowned?”
“What boy?”
“The one who was thrown off the bridge?”
“Oh, that. Sure.”
“Well, he was a homosexual—”
[Charles] doesn’t say anything.
“—and it upset a lot of his friends, a lot of the homosexuals in Cardiff—”
“What are you telling me?”
“It upset me. It made me real angry that somebody—”
“Why did it make you angry?” His eyes have narrowed and he has pulled away a little bit.
“I’m a friend of his.”
I am aware of the children shouting and squealing on the slide.
“You queer?” His face has crumpled up into a mask of disbelief.
“I am a homosexual.”
A pause.
“No shit!” He lifts his hands from his knees and then drops them down again and leans on them. “You’re a fucking queer!” He starts to laugh. People look at us. “Why are you telling me? You coming on to me?” He laughs. “I know, you’re telling me to be careful around you, you can’t help yourself, right?”
So, Mickey was out to his little gang—his boyfriend and Jack and Claire and Timothy and Bernie, people who came to his house and ate his food and watched his TV—and then he came out to his sister and to his mother, and now he is coming out to Charles, the guy from work. Later, he will come out on television—by which he comes out to everybody—after the funeral service for Bernie. A television reporter and cameraman stop them as they are walking down the lane from the burial plot:
It is 3:45 p.m. in the afternoon on Friday—the funeral began an hour ago—and the sun is beyond the trees. There is no cloud in the sky. The trees, great elms up against the hillside and willows along the lane, in a light breeze, rustle and cast deep shadows. The cemetery grasses are a deep, rich green, the effect of lavish care, and in the shadows the granite tombstones are gray and cool. The cameraman has turned the camera on me. At first I am aware of this only in the periphery of my vision. And then, drawn naturally toward it, I turn to the camera and face it down, talking, answering the reporter's long questions on Bernie's death and its effect on the gay community in Cardiff, on me and my homosexuality, on grief and loss, staring into the large black round glass eye. "Bernie was very courageous. He said, I am what I am. In many ways, he died of that courage." The camera's lens sees me, and in the broad light of day it takes me in without blinking. 
Another friend, Dana, a young woman who is slightly older and has a partner and a baby and a good job, and whom all the kids in Ceremonies look up to, says, “I learned, however, that you never get to the end of coming out. On the other side of the glass there is always a new tour group coming through who haven't been here before. They start using language about you that doesn't apply, and if you're not careful, the words will begin to seep into your mind and cause damage, like water in a gas tank. They need it all explained to them, and you have to put down your business and lay it all out in simple terms.” 
You may never get to the end of coming out. You can’t ever come out to everybody, even on television or the newspapers. You may have to do it over and over. It’s not ever going to be finished.
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Sunday, March 25, 2012

Everybody is different

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In Ceremonies, a young woman is walking down the street, preparing to attend a memorial service for a friend. She turns the corner and sees TV lights focused on the door of the church.  If she continues to the door, she will walk past these TV cameras. She says to her lover, “I can’t go past that. I’ll lose my job.” Her lover says she can’t not go to the service. So, there in the dark, a block from the church, the couple split up, both of them sobbing, one to go on to the church and publicity, and the other to return to the home they share. 
After the memorial service, Mickey introduces his boyfriend to his high school teacher who is also leaving the memorial service. Robbie, the boyfriend, says, “That’s the first time you’ve ever done that.” Mickey wants to know what he meant. Robbie shrugged, “You never acknowledge me.” 
Later that night, Mickey is returning one of the many phone calls from his sister, who says she saw him on TV and wants to know why he went to that boy’s memorial service. 
“What will people think?”
“I think you should lower your voice—’
“They’ll think you’re queer!”
This is the moment. Mickey's mother’s way is to give him an opportunity, even an invitation, to lie. Marian’s is to dare him. She comes on like she’s training tigers, chair up and whip trailing.
“Lloyd already thinks so. He’s thought that for years, and you have no idea how hard  I’ve—”
“This is hard enough. You are not making it any easier.”
“Why is it so hard? Tell me that. What are you hiding?”
Every second Mickey waits now the lie rots the bone. “I’m queer, Marian.” And the release he should feel now is polluted by his knowledge that she’s had to force it out of him.
In these excerpts from Ceremonies, we’re watching the moment at which being closeted becomes out. What drives Mickey is a need for greater comfort or less pain or, when Marian goes on the attack, a need to defend himself. Self-protection also drives the young woman to turn away from the television lights. The girl on the street and Mickey are both out—to some people—and closeted to others, and what drives them cannot really be determined without a close knowledge of just what’s happening in that person’s life. 
You just can’t make generic statements about people and the closet and being out. Everybody is different.

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Sunday, March 18, 2012

Dharun Ravi and Tyler's coming out

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Ian Parker, writing in The New Yorker, says about Tyler Clementi, “there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.”

Writing at the same time, Angus Johnston, of the website Student Activism, says, “‘Out’ is not a binary concept, and it’s not at all unreasonable to describe Ravi’s actions — telling his friends Clementi was gay and posting the news on a public Twitter account — as ‘outing.’”

I suspect that most gay people, reading Ian Parker and Angus Johnston, would agree with Johnston. A person can be in different stages of being “out”—all at the same time, with different groups of people. 

Our premier news-and-commentary magazine disagrees with the conventional wisdom in the gay community about a common word—what does the closet mean—and somebody ought to be turning to a late-edition dictionary of English to update themselves. It’s worth our trouble to get us all on the same page when we’re describing the same thing.

The gay community is lax about the way it uses the word, too. Sometimes, as when we describe Tyler Clementi’s life just before he died, we’re willing to recognize that coming out is nuanced and has many stages; at other times, like when we describe gay men or women who are married to the opposite sex, or gay kids who haven’t yet told us that they are gay, we seem unable to use any word but “closeted.” That’s wrong too. 

Closeted, coming out, outed are all powerful words and powerfully useful words. The concepts they point toward are even more powerful and useful. It is worthwhile to use the occasion of Dharun Ravi’s trial to contemplate our confusion over these words and concepts. 

This is the first of several posts on this subject.

For The New York Times on March 17, 2012, 

And for a detailed, charge-by-charge listing of the verdicts, from the New Jersey newspapers: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/03/ravi_webcam_trial_verdict.html



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Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Dangerous Halls

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I found a short video on Towleroad today, Man in the Mirror, in which it is said that a “closeted jock faces outing in Joel Schumacher’s short.” It is also on PBS.org.
Jason is an athlete, a high school senior, maybe seventeen years old, beautiful, a Puerto Rican, and the movie catches him just at that moment when he is asking, Am I gay? He asks, How can I be gay, if I am so masculine? He has a girl friend, college scouts are coming by “every day,” he appears to be the leader of his little group, he’s very “male.” His cousin from California is arriving today, there’s a big ball game coming up, his mother wants him around the house more. The movie is shot in small bedrooms, narrow school hallways, small locker rooms, illustrating how claustrophobic Jason’s life is, how few choices he has. The camera is right on top of the actors. We can’t ever get far enough away from them to get any perspective, which may be Jason’s problem. Major things happen to the young people because other young people are spying on them, peering through doorways, watching them in the hallways. Nobody seems to recognize any boundaries in this world. This is very effective in showing how difficult it is to come out in high school, how impossible to know how people will respond, how dangerous this world is. There is an out gay student, named Eric, and the way he is treated suggests the kind of danger Jason faces.
The screenplay for this film was written by a high school senior, Treviny Marie Colon, when she was a senior at The High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan. Ms Colon was introduced to a curriculum at the high school called “What’s the REAL DEAL about Masculinity,” part of which was a writing contest. This curriculum apparently came from Scenarios USA, which made it possible for Ms Colon to make the screenplay into a movie, directed by Joel Schumacher, the director of such movies as St Elmo’s Fire, Batman Forever, and A Time to Kill. Ms Colon said about her movie, “When people see Man in the Mirror, I hope they’ll step into the unknown, see what’s rarely talked about and understand exactly what’s at stake for a gay man of color in the closet.”
Man in the Mirror is not quite eighteen minutes long and worth your time for several reasons. It will remind you, as Ms Colon says, that it’s still hard for gay men of color, no matter what people are saying about other gay men. It’s also a warning not to be glib about “how things have changed” around coming out.  I read about young people coming out at earlier and earlier ages and meeting with virtually universal acceptance, and this movie is a necessary corrective. The writer was in high school when she wrote this, which suggests she knows her subject. The difference between this story and my own high school experience was that Jason’s sister is prepared to be supportive, and his cousin also.  There’s something else, though. Jason asks, in his big conversation with his sister about his feelings. “I don’t know what to think.” “I can’t feel that way.” “Can I be this?” So that doesn’t seem to have changed. A major obstacle to coming out is himself. He was not what he thought he was.
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