by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Friday, August 31, 2012

The homeless man, his son, and me

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Right now, I can’t escape thinking about politics and our choices. The question that occupies me is raised in my walks around the city by the demands made on me—on my time and energy—by various groups asking for money and support, by a homeless man holding a sign, “For me and for my son.” I get home and find emails from the president asking for “$13 before midnight tonight.” Then there are the ones closer to home, The Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD and the other gay rights organizations. 

I could ignore all this, saying, “Those things have nothing to do with me.” And they may not. Gay men normally don’t have anything to do with women’s issues and don’t necessarily have anything to do with the issues of homeless men. It may be that the strongest connection between those causes and me is that I care about the welfare of other citizens, which is a pretty tenuous connection. 

So, walking around the city, I search for a stronger connection between me and the malnourished kid, the homeless men, and the women seeking abortion, and the political campaigns. Why do I have to get deeply involved in Obama’s campaign for re-election?

We’re human—me and the malnourished kid and the homeless man, the woman seeking abortion—and we all get our rights from the same place, the Constitution and also from the basic fact of what we are. Not because we are good or kind or thoughtful, but because we are human. We can’t escape the fact that we are all connected, and if I want respect because I am a gay human male, I can’t escape giving respect. I can’t get it unless I give it.

It is only a short step to being committed politically, giving money and carrying signs for the candidate who is going to do something for the malnourished kid, the woman seeking an abortion, and the homeless man and his son. As gay people, the vision we have is of a world in which, if we are free, all must be free. We can't equivocate on that.

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Friday, August 24, 2012

Gentle, stylish, astonishing

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Check this one out. It’s a car ad, and it’s running in Japan only. 

It raises the issues we’ve been talking about here—the beauty of men and of women, the range of possibilities before us which may or may not include sex, the essential need for surprise, a fluid impermanent sense of gender, and, overriding everything, the knowledge that all of these things are more valuable than their opposites. 

Life is better, now.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Focussing on the most important thing

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Now it is time to focus on the Supreme Court. 

Here are the stakes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933, Stephen Breyer in 1938, and Anthony Kennedy in 1936. These three justices were part of the majority in both major GLBT civil rights cases of the last twenty years. It is possible that one of these justices will have to be replaced before the next presidential election. If Romney is elected, and if he has a chance to nominate a replacement for any of these three justices, it is likely that he will choose someone like Samuel Alito or John Roberts, or, even worse, like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, who dissented in both of these cases.  

If that were to happen, this would be the result: Lawrence v. Texas, decided in 2003, which overturned all sodomy laws, could itself be overturned. The majority on that decision would flip from a presumed Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, to a four person dissent facing a majority composed of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and a new conservative justice. Romer v. Evans, decided in 1996 by a 6 to 3 opinion, recognized that gay people must be constitutionally protected. The majority on that case would flip from a presumed Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, to a four person dissent facing a majority composed of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, plus the new conservative justice. 

The point here is that, were Romney to win the election, the makeup of a court would make it possible for a conservative majority to work its will with our rights. We are one vote on the Supreme Court away from being a different kind of nation, and the election of Romney would supply conservatives with the chance to get that vote. See also Daily Kos. Time. and Huffington Post. 

When you consider what to do with your support this summer and fall and with your vote, consider this: there is no more important issue facing gay people than the makeup of the Supreme Court. 
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Friday, August 17, 2012

Travolta and the failure of our language on sex

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Last week people wanted John Travolta to come out, and he wouldn’t, and then writers retracted their requests, ending up with statements like, “Nobody’s personal life is my business.” We think very badly about sex in our culture.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, writing in Salon, says “frankly, if being a guy who regularly has sex with other guys doesn’t make you gay, I’m not sure what does.” She gets close to the heart of the confusion here.  She would have “being gay” defined by the man’s actions. It’s not. Sucking cock does not make you gay. Even enjoying sucking cock, does not make you gay. Sleeping with women does not make you straight either. In our culture, during my whole life, we have told ourselves that a series of actions made us a certain kind of person. That is emphatically not so. A man’s sexuality is defined by how a man thinks and feels. I have only to look at the humanity around me to see that this is so. 

Consider these things: There are more than two genders and gradations of each one, with no clear bright line separating anything, as each story of a transgender person tells us. And how do we find out what gender a person is? That person will tell us. My desire may likewise take many forms—life-long for one gender and for one person or for several people for a shorter period or for many people. I may, in fact, have two or more different kinds of relationships simultaneously—a long-term, permanent relationship based on the totality of the way humans can connect and a series of short impermanent relationships based on sex, or vice versa. In and Out don’t describe anything real. I am what I am. I don’t need coming out as a gateway to myself nor do I need coming out to tell other people about such a private thing as my sex. In short, I can be a major Hollywood star, in a long-term marriage, and can have sex occasionally with men, and it’s nobody’s business but my own. (What I can’t do, of course, is be publicly homophobic while sucking cock.)

In these matters, one size does not fit all. The Christian church did humanity in the West a huge disservice by trying to impose one set of vows on all people in the Christian marriage liturgy. Some people wanted monogamy, some didn’t. The agreements people arrive at to give structure to their relationships should be open to occasional renegotiation by the people involved. No one else can know the factors that are brought to bear upon any person’s choices. The choice is private.

I have nothing to say about John Travolta’s sex. On the other hand, no public figure has anything to say about my sex, either. I seek what is right for me, with one great commandment governing all—do no harm and allow no harm to be done to us or our children.
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Sunday, August 5, 2012

When Larry Kramer and 200 men taught us how to fight

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My partner is out of town for the weekend, and this afternoon I went by myself to Dark Knight Rises. Much of the outdoor shooting takes place on Wall Street in pitched battles between the New York police and the bad guys. In the first image, Wall Street is cleared of traffic and the cops are crowded at one end of the block in front of the Stock Exchange. The bad guys are crowded down at the other. Powerful image.
It made me think of the first big AIDS demonstration, which was in the same place—on March 24, 1987, in front of the New York Sock Exchange. There were about 200 gay men and women. They stopped traffic, and by doing so, captured the media. Because many of the participants had AIDS, they had manipulated the cops into putting on rubber gloves and masks, and they looked terrible. Our guys were in all the papers the next morning—except the Times—and it was clear from the media that the guys with AIDS were the good guys. It was from this demonstration that Larry Kramer formed ACT UP, focussed on the chokehold that the FDA had on AIDS medications. 
It was a small demonstration—two hundred men and women—in comparison to all those policemen in Dark Knight Rises, and what I was thinking of this afternoon, sitting in the cinema, was how huge the effect of ACT UP had been on vast stretches of American life—on public health, on the practice of medicine, on pharmacology, and, of course, on the place of gay people in American public life.  
A friend made the same point about the Stonewall Riots. They were really very small, weren’t they? Well, yes. But it doesn’t take vast throngs of men and women to change the nation, if the few you have are of the right sort. Our few had science on their side, and the Constitution, and, of course, morality. No wonder they were powerful. And another thing. The men and women at this first demonstration of the group that became ACT UP taught us that decorum is a weapon the other side uses against us. So ACT UP taught us again (we have to keep learning this) to stop being polite.
On AIDS and the transformation of America, read Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 
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