by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, November 26, 2012

The way we are now

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The most interesting thing in the Times article by Micah Cohen, on the gay vote, on November 16, is that, among straight voters, the vote was roughly divided, 49% Democratic and 49% Republican. The gay vote, which was 5% of the total, was approximately 75% Democratic, more than enough to give Obama the ultimate advantage, according to a study by Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, in conjunction with Gallup. It appears that we gave Obama the decisive edge in the election. It appears, finally, we can claim we have power and the next goal is the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. 

Carole Cadwalladr announces in The Guardian that Nathan Silver has announced he is gay. He’s the man of whom Rachel Maddow said, "You know who won the election tonight? Nate Silver." Jon Stewart “saluted him as ‘Nate Silver! The lord and god of the algorithm.’” After all, he correctly predicted the vote in fifty states, and he’s gay.

What else? Well, a gay Abraham Lincoln. J. Bryan Lowder, in Slate, writes, “In a particularly poignant moment in Lincoln, honest Abe spends a few moments with a handsome telegraph operator, played by a somewhat period-discordant Adam Driver. ‘Do we choose to be born? Are we fitted to the times we’re born into?’ the Great Emancipator wonders aloud, gazing tenderly at the young man.” The scene, and apparently the movie, don’t give a definitive answer to the question of Lincoln’s sexuality, but it’s suggestive in this scene with the young man, and it shows what it would have looked like, had Lincoln, our greatest president, been into men. That’s a step in the right direction.
Then there’s Daniel Craig, as 007, and Javier Bardem, the sexual object-choice for half the gay men in America, who plays a gay villain named Silva. Mark Simpson writes of their most charged scene, “Whether out of genuine desire or a desire to undercut 007’s masculinity, Silva slides up close to his bound antagonist and caresses his thighs: ‘There’s a first time for everything – eh, Mr. Bond?’ But Bond meets his captor’s gaze with his customary implacability and asks, ‘What makes you think it’s my first time?’” Well, whatever. 007 knows about gay sex, and he isn’t uneasy with it, whether it’s his first time or his thirty-third. He’s not bothered. 

That’s a lot of triumphs for the LGBT team in a short time, which we’re not yet accustomed to. We’ll remember election 2012 for many reasons, and I have no doubt that we will remember the folks who didn’t make it to this point. 
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Sunday, November 11, 2012

Unresolved pain

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There is a moment in Homeland, on Showtime Channel, when Damien Lewis, as Brody, sits at a table in a cell, supposedly in CIA headquarters, his feet chained to the floor, his hands chained to the table. Brody had been imprisoned for eight years in an Arabic country. Flashes of that experience make Damien Lewis look like Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If. Brody had long unkempt hair and beard and wild and suffering eyes. Now, in the CIA prison, Brody is battered by a CIA operative, Carrie, played by Claire Danes. This man was battered first by the Arabs and now by the CIA, and his face is raw with his pain. As the scene moves forward, he begins to weep. I have never seen TV like this before. 

“Unresolved pain is another recurring Homeland theme,” says June Thomas, the writer on Slate’s online discussion of this program—unresolved pain from the 1947 war, from the endless Palestinian conflict, from 9/11, from Brody’s eight-year imprisonment and torture. 

None of the characters in Homeland seem to have gotten past any of the horrors of their pasts, and none of the histories of these people seems to be resolved. Damien Lewis’s face, which seems stunned by his own suffering, by the sheer amount of pain his tormentors are willing to inflict on his body, is the face of that suffering.

And now, four days after the 2012 election, in which LGBT people have won historic victories—marriage equality in three states has won, an anti-marriage equality constitutional amendment defeated, a lesbian elected to the US Senate, and others—it is not time to dust out hands and say, We won that one, and move on.

We are in the midst of a great victory, but we cannot forget those who have been damaged and injured by the way things have been. By personal hatred and bullying that left generations of gay men and women psychologically and spiritually and physically damaged. By professionals in the American Psychological Association and in the American Psychiatric Association who, until the early nineteen seventies, insisted without any evidence that gay people were sick and made whole generations of American citizens emotional cripples. By the damage that even now is being done to gay Americans by the churches and by religious people. By the refusal of power brokers in our culture up until very recently to help gay people have children by adoption or by AI. By all those long years when we couldn’t get married, couldn’t get our books published, couldn’t write the truth about ourselves, couldn’t express the truth about ourselves, had no political power. 

The pain our people have suffered must now be remembered in this moment in which we have won great victories. We must find a way to resolve the accumulated pain from the past. And those who are celebrating today’s victories must include those who suffered the pain of the long struggle, but who have not been able to share in its victories. They are us too.

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Sunday, November 4, 2012

Now it's our turn

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Barack Obama has proven himself a friend of LGBT people. He’s a friend of the families of LGBT people, and he’s a friend of friends of LGBT people. He has done more for LGBT people than any other president. He steered the effort to overturn DADT, he directed the Department of Justice to refuse to defend DOMA. He released a fully argued and unprecedented case for giving any legal attempt to limit the rights of gay people “heightened scrutiny,” and he announced that he was over his process of “evolving” and that he was now in fact in favor of marriage equality. As scores of commentators have pointed out, by his actions the president has transformed the debate over the place of LGBT people in America. Now, the question is, “Why should any rights be denied any LGBT citizens?”

This is a huge transformation, and it has come about largely as a result of Barack Obama. Before him, we were still in the position of arguing for one right at a time. Is there anyone who really believes that DADT would have been repealed by any Republican and that its repeal would have been effected by any Republican so smoothly and without incident? And isn’t it necessary to see that this president, Harvard graduate and University of Chicago School of Law faculty member, is particularly powerful in his advocacy of LGBT issues because he is black?

Many on the left complain that the policies of the Obama administration seem to continue the Bush administration—the drones and the kill-lists and some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act—and it is necessary now for all of us to plot a strategy to publicize these wrongs in such a way as to stop any president from continuing them in the future. But the consensus on the left is that Obama is good at foreign policy. He’s cool, he’s knowledgeable, and he has good judgment. He’s handled Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Iran. We are less entangled now than we were in 2008, nothing new has started on his watch, and the War on Terror is over. He’s not a bully, and the world knows that.

Then there is the economy. All the numbers show that recovery is on track, and while the pace of recovery is slower than we wanted, it is going in the direction we want—toward support for the middle class and more income equality. 

I am going to vote for Barack Obama. He’s the first president in my lifetime that I could call, with any seriousness, my president. It’s just very good that, in addition to being for me, for us, for LGBT people, he’s also smart, tough, knowledgeable, has an historical sense, and is not an ideologue. He’s the only one running for president who could have written Dreams from my Father, and he’s the one the rest of the world apparently wishes we would choose. 
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