by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Understanding our communal present

Edit Post

I have been writing to a man who went to the school I attended my first two years of college. I didn’t know him then—1957-1959—and we haven’t written in the intervening years. Then, about a week ago, he found my page in a leaflet for our fiftieth class reunion. On my page, in that slot where they ask you what you are doing now, I had said, “I am writing gay novels” and gave the URL for my website. He’s gay, so he wrote, and I was glad he did. The school was in Tennessee, on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau.
We’ve been asking each other questions, What’re you doing now? He’s a college professor. What was school like for you? He had plenty of gay sex, I had none. I left after two years and went into the Army, he stayed for four. We asked each other what our lives would have been like if he had left after two years and I had stayed for four. We approached the questions, Why did I leave and you stay? It is surprising that such a small school (1300 students) could have given two students such radically different experiences.
The given, which doesn’t have to be talked about much, is how homophobic that world was in 1959. The question that I raised with him was this: Would my teachers have been supportive and nurturing even if I told them I was gay in 1959? Or would they have expelled me from the university, there on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau? Would something worse have happened? Something violent? The stakes were high in 1959, and those were dangerous times, and it is hard now to reconstruct exactly what we were aware of and what we were feeling at that school.
The effort at reconstruction is necessary. It helps my friend and me build a friendship. It helps us determine why we did what we did in 1959. It helps us to understand how we ended up in such different places. Understanding ourselves enables friendship. But it’s bigger than that. Accumulating the facts about our gay past enables us to understand our communal present. The effort to recover the gay past has as its goal a new Descent of Man. 

0 comments
Thursday, May 17, 2012

Disambiguation among Buchanan, Obama, Clinton, Shakespeare, Cellini and me

Edit Post

Newsweek’s cover, “Our First Gay President,” has caused people to ask, “Is he really?” Andrew Sullivan used the word in the same metaphoric sense that “black” is used in the sentence, “Bill Clinton is our first black president.” It meant that much of Obama’s experience has been similar to the experience of gay people. In the words of Joe Biden, he gets it. 
I think he does too, and he’s proven that by being the most gay-friendly president ever. I don’t understand gay people like Michelangelo Signorile, who thinks we ought to save the title for an actual gay person. That’s silly. Nobody said that when Bill Clinton became known as our first black president. Nobody thought to say of Barack Obama, he’s the second black person, after Bill Clinton. The first one got a metaphoric title and the second one got an actual title, and nobody was confused. 
Underneath all this is still lingering bitterness directed against Obama for not directing all his energies against federal homophobic bigotry from the beginning in January 2009. Since he has already done so much of what he promised, I’m willing to cut him some slack and not begrudge him a hyped Newsweek cover, which, in any case, was a beautiful cover. In the end, we are going to be able to look back on the Obama years and say, That was the beginning of the end of official bigotry. 
The other thread from this week has been this one: But James Buchanan was the first gay president! That’s as silly as Signorile’s proposal. Buchanan was president 1857-1861, nine years before anyone had an idea that there was such a thing as a gay person, and nine years before the word homosexual was invented. Even though Buchanan wrote that famous letter saying, “I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen,” he was never gay because there was never a gay community for him to come out into. He was never out except, apparently, to a few friends and to “several gentlemen,” and he had none of the political awareness or self-awareness that we associate today with being gay. Saying Buchanan was gay is as false as saying Shakespeare—or Benvenuto Cellini—was gay. I, on the other hand, am gay. I am deeply in love with my partner, C, I am self-aware, and I am aware of the politics of being what I am. And everybody who knows me, knows I am gay.

0 comments
Friday, May 11, 2012

When we needed to hear what Obama said, but there wasn't anybody to say it

Edit Post

At ten, in 1949, in the fourth grade, I was aware first of what was happening on the playground. I couldn’t play ball. My father tried occasionally to teach me, but he didn’t know how to teach me and didn’t really know what it was he was supposed to be teaching. I hated recess, because that was when I felt most humiliated.
There was something wrong and the first part of the problem was that nobody knew what it was. It had something to do with playing ball, but it was way bigger than that. It was something about my having done something terrible, being something terrible, with my failing at being a boy. At ten, I was just beginning to hear from other kids things I didn’t understand. I had no idea what was happening. 
My teachers ignored it. The other kids on the playground could see what was going on—I couldn’t play ball—but they just had one response, call him a sissy. My parents didn’t want to hear about what was happening. If they listened to me tell them what was happening, then they would have to do something, and they didn’t know what to do. I was already having feelings about other boys, but I didn’t know whether these feelings were connected with what was happening on the playground. Did these feelings have anything to do with being a sissy?
There was nobody to tell me what was going on. It wasn’t on the radio. It wasn’t in church. My parents. My teachers. I didn’t even know if this was the kind of thing you asked anybody else. I went through my whole life before I graduated from high school bewildered and humiliated. 
And now, there’s Barack Obama, the President of the United States speaking this week, and I wonder for a moment why I am so moved. It’s because I grew up—years, decades, all those years of hurt and bewilderment—waiting to hear what Obama has just said this week. It’s so much more powerful coming from him than from the Supreme Court.
Adults get tough and do what we have to do without kind words from anyone. But what we’ve all been getting in touch with this week is how it felt at ten on some playground somewhere when we needed to hear what Obama said, but there wasn’t anybody to say it. 

0 comments
Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Precious citizenship

Edit Post

In North Carolina, returns are in, and we lost, as predicted. Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell both pointed out that some version of this issue has come before the voters thirty times in various states, losing every time. Maddow also made the point that each time the civil liberties of gay people are put up for a vote of the people, gay people lose. There was a lot of chatter tonight about what this means for Barack Obama, whose views on this issue are “evolving,” or doesn’t mean. Some say it will have no effect on the November election, and some say that nothing Obama does can affect the movement for marriage equality. It is going to come, they say, with or without the president. 
I can say that a whole evening of MSNBC is a painful experience for me personally, with or without bad news from North Carolina.
But the news made it worse. Even after a couple of decades of these elections, I still salivate at the announcement of one, feeling I suppose that this time, we will win. When we don’t, I get in touch with my ancient cynicism. The American people will always vote against gay people. Except they don’t, always. Sometimes they are not allowed to vote. In my own state, the leaders of the legislature repeatedly refused to allow the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to vote on the civil rights of other citizens of the Commonwealth.  This went on long enough for the citizens of the Commonwealth to see for themselves that marriage between two men or between two women had no effect on anybody else’s marriage. I never forget how precious my citizenship in this state is to me. 

0 comments

Designed by Edward Wharton.