by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Boy Scouts, here are our medals

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When I was thirteen or fourteen in South Carolina—we're talking about the early fifties here—the Boy Scouts were different from all the other activities a boy could do. We went on weekend overnight campouts to some local "woods," and I looked forward to it all week long.  At night, after the campfire and after the songs and stories, and after whatever else we did, I rolled out my sleeping bag next to one of the adult leaders, and then, when it was dark, I reached behind me and found the Scout leader's arm and pulled it over me. I loved that. It was the only place in my life where I could snuggle up close to a man. The adult allowed his arm to remain across me for a few minutes and then he removed it. Often I got his arm again and pulled it over me, and after a few minutes he pulled it back. This helped me to go to sleep. When I had grown up some, I regretted having lost those moments at the overnight camping trips with the Boy Scouts, but the memory of them kept me going until, several years later, I was awarded Eagle Scout rank and Order of the Arrow. I have forgotten what the Order of the Arrow was, but I remember believing at the time that it was important.
I don't believe that organizations like the BSA contribute much to the growth and development of children. I don't think I am a different adult from what I would be if I hadn't gone out for Scouts, but I do remember vividly lying in my sleeping bag next to my Scout leader after dark and feeling warm and protected and comforted, when I didn't get those feelings at any other place in my life. At a time in my life when I felt isolated, alone, fearful, inadequate, Scouts gave me comfort. 
It is the memory of lying in my sleeping bag next to my Scout leader—and my gratitude for that memory—that has prevented me from returning my Eagle Scout Badge to BSA. Even though it is clear that the BSA has turned its back on me, I didn't feel I could turn my back on that memory of that man who understood what some boys need and let me get what I needed from him.
In the intervening years, my son was born and grew up and chose not to enter Scouts. Now my grandson is approaching that age. Given the situation, I am going to stay away from his decision to go into Scouts or not. I doubt that he does. 
But today, I have mailed off to Irving, Texas, my Eagle Scout badge and that sash that Boy Scouts wear with all the merit badges. My partner, C, asked what I was doing, and then said, "Wait a minute." And in a minute he came back with his badges. He said, "Here, put these in too." And I did.  
Returning these badges is a way of coming out to the Boy Scouts of America, letting them know that they have—and had—gay scouts they have to respect. When we have in our culture organizations like the Boy Scouts of America and, up until the repeal of DADT, the armed services, it is important to constantly inform them and everybody in the public that we are gay and that we're here, that, in fact, we have always been here, gay in the Scouts and gay in the military (I was gay in the military from 1959 to 1961), and in all the other organizations that have pretended they could change reality, get rid of us and make us not exist. We’ve always existed, and we haven't ever gone away, there are still gay boys in the Scouts now, and the Boy Scouts of America can’t make us go away, just by passing some silly little rule in Irving, Texas. There are always going to be gay boys in the Boy Scouts of America. Do the Scouts really think they can succeed where the Army, the Marines, the Navy, and the Air Force of the United States of America have failed? 

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Friday, July 20, 2012

Our literature, our lives, coming out

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Some writers have taken “coming out” as the beginning of the plot and then made a novel of it. It might start, “In 1993, when I was fourteen, I came out to my best friend….” Others have taken “coming out” to be the climax of the plot, whose final sentence might end, “And then, in 2006, I came out and lived happily ever after….” 
If you’re a new novelist, there are several problems with these plots. One is that we’ve read these novels already. A more serious complaint is that, whether you make coming out the climax of the novel or the beginning of the novel, a major part of a person’s life is going to be ignored (or have to be imagined). In some kinds of fiction, that’s OK. When Shakespeare’s lovers get married in the fifth act, we are not invited to wonder what comes next. 
But some kinds of modern fiction, being more realistic, do wonder. For many of us, coming out happens somewhere in the middle of our lives, after some major event and before some other major event.  Even a guy coming out at ten years old has some pretty intense stuff going on, before and after.   
When I sat down to write Race Point Light, I planned to base this novel loosely on a typical life of a man in my generation, and all the different parts of that life were real life, every single part of it—his childhood, the run-up to his marriage, his marriage, his children’s births, the run-up to his divorce, his divorce, his coming out, his move to an urban gay community, AIDS, his meeting the man who was going to become his partner, their fighting disease together—and it makes a different kind of novel.  In Race Point Light, coming out is neither the end of anything nor is it the beginning of anything. Much more realistic. There is nothing about this life that is ever after.
Race Point Light tells a story that begins a long time before the narrator comes out and that ends a long time afterward. It’s the story of a man’s life that is typical of many gay men in post-war generations. Race Point Light explores the drama in these lives, and it has the added advantage of being close to the way we really experience ourselves. There is no fairy tale here.
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Friday, July 13, 2012

Uncomfortable truths

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I was on Boston common today, talking to a friend. We’d just gotten to know each other and we were asking the kinds of questions people ask, exploring each other’s lives. He asked me, “Since you’re gay, how did you manage to stay married so long? How did you do that?” 
I told him, “Even though you’re straight, you could do that too, have sex with a man,if you wanted to bad enough, or if you needed to, or felt you had to.”
He said, “Not if my life depended on it.”
I laughed. “That’s probably the wrong kind of stimulus to be brought to bear on this issue. But something else. Look, people do it all the time. They don’t change their orientation. You can’t do that. What they do is go outside their orientation for a short time. I did it.”
“No. Nothing can make me able to have sex with a man.”
Probably each person requires a different kind of stimulus, but people are subject to external stimuli.  Money is a stimulus for some people. Give them enough, and they’ll do anything. Other people, something else—respect, place in the community, power. There is a whole range of things that affect how men and women choose the gender of the person they are going to have sex with, and getting turned on is only one of them. Witness the millions of gay men who have gotten married and fathered children in the last hundred years. And the probably smaller number of straight men over the years who have had sex with gay men under a range of stimuli—often alcohol or drugs. We discussed the opening scene of True Romance and Christian Slater’s character telling us under what conditions he would have sex with Elvis Presley. If I had to. I mean had to. He thought Elvis was as pretty as any woman.
What I didn’t say to my friend, but could have, since it is true, is that sexuality is malleable—to an extent and for a short time. I could also have said that a man can’t permanently alter his sexuality. But anybody can do anything tonight, if the stimulus is right.
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Friday, July 6, 2012

Honoring what gay people know

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I recently wrote to a friend: “Like most peoples who are faced with the possibility of assimilation, many gay people wonder what they will be giving up in the process, and what they will be getting in return.”
You see it every day in the city, watching Hispanics, some struggling to adopt English, others not, many of whom are determinedly holding onto Hispanic ways. Blacks have been facing the same dilemma for the last 150 years. And women too, as any woman will understand. While gay people have been discriminated against, they have developed modes of self-defense, which, they fear, will be lost if they are assimilated. It is not all about loss or gain of civil rights. It may not even be mainly about civil rights. What I think people would like most is to get freedom (that is, to get civil rights) without giving up anything. One example: We would like to get marriage equality, but have the "marriage" be an arrangement of our own creation, not the creation of heterosexual courts or the heterosexual congress, or patriarchal, heterosexual churches. I think we want a "gay marriage" that is more profoundly honest for both parties than the heterosexual marriage we see before us. I think we fear getting into a relationship in which we are forced to play out the gender roles that the straight community plays out in marriage. 
Many gay people resist giving up what we have learned during our time in the wilderness. A person rarely reads, anywhere in the straight media, anything that would suggest straight people understand that they might have something important to learn from gay people. And gay people know this. Gay people think, we have learned so much, and straight people don't value what we know.
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