by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, April 30, 2012

The business of this country

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Another gay teenager committed suicide last week. Apparently, we don’t know details yet. Towleroad has the bare facts.
Jack Reese, seventeen years old, killed himself near Ogden, Utah, last week just as his eighteen-year-old boyfriend was about to take part in a panel discussion of the movie, Bully. Jack’s boyfriend didn’t know Jack had died until after the panel discussion was completed. 
I don’t know what to say. Jack’s suicide drives me back to memories of my own high school life and to what it must have been like for Jack in Utah. I survived high school in South Carolina in the fifties, but I don’t think I was stronger than Jack or that my high school was less filled with hate. I think when you are there, tottering on the edge between life and death, it is only luck, mere luck, that makes you come down on one side or the other. Jack was unlucky in a whole string of ways. He was unfortunate. 
One of the things I hate about our political climate right now is that one of our political parties seems to take it as a matter of high political purpose to deny the existence of misfortune in people’s lives. They deny that it even exists. And yet whole political populations in this country are born unfortunate, and without recognizing that, the rest of us can’t help them. We can’t even feel that they need us.
I hate Dan Savage’s “It gets better” campaign. It is a weak, inadquate response. We should be out in the street crying, “Until these suicides stop, until every child feels loved, every person respected, no other business will be conducted in  this country.”

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Tuesday, April 24, 2012

North Carolina, Dean Tillman, the future

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On Towleroad, Krista Tillman, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina and is a mother of a young gay man (she’s also a dean of her college) explains why her gay son doesn’t live in North Carolina. “It’s not as open and accepting as other places are.” She tells what she thinks will have to happen in North Carolina to get him to come home, “where he can have all the rights and the privileges as anyone else in North Carolina.”
North Carolina is deciding on May 8, 2012, whether to adopt Amendment One, which will prevent marriage equality and take away basic legal protections from gay and lesbian couples. “The millenial generation [her son’s age group] are all strongly supportive of gay rights and gay marriage, and so strongly support it that they say they want to live in a place that’s open and accessible, whether or not they’ve gay. So [the passage of Amendment One will] affect our business climate, maybe not today, but as we try to attract the future worker, that’s how it affects us. The jobs follow workers, workers don’t follow jobs. We’ve got to have that creative class, we’ve got to have that younger generation, moving here to North Carolina, moving here to Charlotte.” Dean Tillman closes with a small riff on how having a gay son and his partner and his partner’s family has enriched her life.
Dean Tillman makes a powerful statement against the bigotry represented by Amendment One. but she says something else that’s interesting. It is her reference to her son, her son’s partner and their friends who, apparently, are a mixed crowd of gay and straight.
We get reports on this from everywhere. During the long public debate over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and recently over DOMA, it has been a staple of progressives to claim that young people are far less rigid about these labels than older generations.  Young people who are gay appear to be moving toward a position where being born this way does not lead to their being a separate kind of person who must define himself as gay or straight.  
The problem we have in front of us is that we have these young people who’re doing what young people do—they’re thinking and feeling for themselves—and, at the same time, we have the federal judiciary which is constructing an entirely different theory of our sexuality. (See “It ain’t necessarily so,” February 29, 2012, Stonewall Triptych)
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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Living on the edge

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When a person is on the edge between in and out, he is not often faced with a binary decision, either in or out. He is faced with a range of possibilities, only one of which is, in the particular situation, coming out. He may decide to do nothing. He may decide to tell the other person that he is gay and then tell no other person. He may start a process which ends with his coming out more or less publicly. He also may deny whatever circumstances precipitated this event and attempt to go back in the other direction. And he may do any of these things for a whole range of reasons—defiance, search for safety (conceived of in any number of ways), obligations to various persons, cowardice, bravery, or almost anything else, including love, any one of which is powerful enough to drive a person in either direction over the in/out divide.
While a lot of things have changed in the last fifty years, one thing that still seems to be true for all generations of people who experience same-sex feelings is this: people come up constantly against this question of coming out. Nobody who experiences same-sex feelings can really avoid this at some point, and often that person comes up against it again and again during his or her life.
Sometimes, a person hears somebody say, “I’ve always been out” or “I never came out.” But we have a world in which there are many more heterosexual people than there are people like us, and if we don’t constantly tell them to stop, they’ll act as if everyone here at this party is straight. It is impossible for me to avoid the moment when I am confronted with the questions, Should I come out? Must I come out? Can I come out here, without being killed? Have I come out without meaning to, to the wrong people?
We do not live in a post-coming-out world. The death of Tyler Clementi is only the most recent proof of that. The world is complicated, and it is not helped by our being sloppy in our thinking. Nothing matters more to a person who has same-sex feelings than the process of coming out, because the process—whether going in or coming out or maintaining the status quo—gives you an attitude, defines who you are, your relation to your own past, to your future, your relation to your community and to the culture we share. 
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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

The very private meaning of "coming out"

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Tyler Clementi was in the process of coming out when he died. We can’t know how he felt. Tyler is the only person who could know how he felt and the only person who could know how far he  had gone on the process toward coming out. 
It is appropriate here to ask, what is it that drives a person to move from one stage of the process of coming out to another? For example, in the excerpts from Mickey’s episodes in Ceremonies, what drives Mickey to introduce the fact that he is gay into the heated discussion he is having with his landlord, and then to say, “I know what this is about—this is about bigotry against a gay man.” It is a kind of reckless anger and defiance when he feels himself surrounded on all sides by enemies.
But it needn’t be. Dana comes out to her parents in part because she loves them—but also because her brother, Kevin, now knows she is a lesbian and will eventually tell her parents. To protect herself, Dana tells her parents. 
And what of Carole, the woman with whom Ceremonies opens? Why does this very intelligent, very accomplished graduate student at the Wharton School, turn from Esther and reject all that she offers? Why does Carole choose what is a kind of closet? Perhaps she doesn’t like feeling out of control—as emotions so often make one feel. But it is more complex than that. She likes being able to share her life with her father, and she likes playing the game he has chosen, so he will understand her achievement. She says, “Since I left Wharton and Philadelphia, winning is all I have ever cared about.” Her tragedy is that, after modeling her life on her father’s, he grew old and died, and toward the end, she says, to her own amazement, “I don’t think he cared how much money I made. He simply ceased to care.” She says, “I am not a fool. I know what I sold and why. I know what I bought. I know what a bed feels like when two people are in it.”
The point here is that we don’t know what “coming out” means for any particular person. Everybody is different. What is true about one person is rarely true of the next person. This ought not to be difficult to remember in a community so built on transgression and an awareness of difference as ours is. 

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