by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

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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Sunday, June 3, 2012
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Brandon K. Thorp posts on Towleroad, about President Obama proclaming Gay Pride Month: “At some point, I'm sure the novelty of seeing presidents speak this way about LGBT folk will wear off. For this writer, it hasn't yet.” To get the same sense of satisfaction, check out both the text of the proclamation here, and the video here. 
In other news this week, the Illinois Attorney General has announced that she will join the suits being brought by the Lambda Legal and by the ACLU against Illinois civil unions laws on the ground that they do not meet the state constitution’s guarantees of equal protection. First, Obama’s Department of Justice declines to exercise its traditional responsibilities to defend all the laws of the government when it declined to defend DOMA, and now we have the same thing happening on a state level. We make progress.
On the other side of the coin, Lila Shapiro, writing in Huffington Post, brings notice of a report from the National Coalition of Anti-Gay Violence Programs. More anti-gay murders were committed in 2011 than in any of other year since 1998. Chai Jindasurat, one of the authors of the report, said. "I think we're really just getting the tip of the iceberg here."
One of the difficulties with determining how much anti-gay violence is going on has always been the fact that many of the people most vulnerable to that violence would have to out themselves in order to report the violence. 
Despite how dark the new data is, Jindasurat points to a possible positive aspect of the on-going tragedy: "We feel that it's not an actual increase in violence but that there are reasons this kind of violence is being recognized for what it is," Jindasurat said. "One big reason is that now it’s more acceptable to talk about LGBTQ communities in general."
That’s a positive point. And we can take away this idea: If it is more acceptable to talk about LGBTQ communities, and if that helps LGBTQ people most vulnerable to that violence, then the more we talk, the more publicly we talk, the more likely our talk will increase the ability of those vulnerable LGBTQ folks to seek help for themselves. 
And finally, a book. Linda Hirshman has written a book entitled Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, which will be published on June 5, 2012. I have read two reviews of this book, and both state what they think is the theme of the book, then they argue with that theme, and then they come around to saying, She’s right, of course, in many ways. That’s an interesting response. I have ordered the ebook version. I’ll let you know whether it leads me to say, She’s right, of course, or There has been no victory. There can be no victory, despite Presidential proclamations and Attorneys Generals, while so many Americans are being murdered every year for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. 
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