by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, December 31, 2012

Resolutions for 2013

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C and I were in a bar Friday night. I talked to a friend about the difficulties of using an iPad or Nook or Kindle outside its own ecosystem—on an iPad, you need to read books from the Apple bookstore, and Amazon books from the Amazon bookstore on a Kindle, and so on. I think the question now is how long people will put up with this. It’s supposed to be about freedom, isn’t it, this digital revolution? These things are getting more and more technologically advanced, and less and less politically progressive. We’re buying books for our ereaders and feeding the corporate giants on Wall Street while doing so. That’s not what we wanted, is it? The corporate giants on Wall Street are certainly not feeding us—gay readers across America—the books we want.

Later that same night, C and I went to dinner with two friends and talked about the qualities a man brings to a relationship and which ones have a positive effect on the relationship and which ones not. One quality that we agreed on was his experience with relationships with men. A man can more confidently fall in love with a man who tells him he has fallen in love with him, if that other man has been around the track a few times and knows what he is declaring when he says, “I love you.” I have only had two loves in my life—one with a woman and one with C—and six years of screwing around between those times. C had more than ten years of experience in the gay community before I met him. I think we both knew what a long-term relationship was about.

C and I discussed marriage over the weekend. We’ve been discussing marriage since 2004, when it became possible to marry in Massachusetts. The Supreme Court says it will rule during 2013 on the constitutionality of DOMA and Prop 8. Most commentators seem to think that the Supreme Court will approve marriage equality to some extent, but nobody knows, and it may be that the only feeling a person can have at this moment is anxiety.

Friday night, C and I met a soldier on leave after having been to Afghanistan twice and to Iraq once. We talked about his service, and I thought about DADT. We don’t know yet what social changes are going to come in our culture as a result of the repeal of DADT. I suspect we don’t know the effect on all of us of the homophobia driven by a huge engine like the armed forces, which then stop and become an engine of mutual respect. This is disorienting.

2013, which begins tonight, is almost certain to be a year when gay people experience huge changes in their place in our culture. In a time of uncertainty, it’s OK to look back at what has worked in the past—keeping up the pressure and fighting back. What this means in practical terms is to give money to the people who can fight for us, the legal organizations of your choice and the social service organizations. Subscribing to tough gay political journals too. What is not acceptable for gay people in a time of large changes and uncertainty is lassitude. So, it’s a time for resolutions, and here are three. Remember Larry Kramer and ACT UP. ACT UP! Fight back! Fight AIDS! Get out your credit card, open your computer. Join HRC, contribute to GLAD and ACLU, and give money to your local AIDS service organization and anybody else you know of who has contributed to our successes in this past year and to the betterment of your life. You’re welcome.
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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Goals to fight for and what they mean

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The goals are freedom and a community that is supportive. 

We’ve won major legal victories—Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v Texas and more recent court cases—and victories at the polls and in public opinion polls in the last few years. 

I have been searching for freedom all my life, and it may be that I am, right now, as free as I have ever been.

I am supported in this freedom, by a small group of people. My partner, C, my son, my daughter, my older grandchildren (the younger children don’t know anything about freedom, yet). I have friends, a couple in London, some here in the States, some here in Boston and Somerville who want me to be free and autonomous. 

Of course, there are forces that try to deny me freedom. There is the conservative Christian right,  and there are those folks who are in the conservative social right. These people say abusive things, and sometimes do abusive things. There are some members of my biological family with whom I am not in contact. I’ve been fighting against these people for the last twenty-five years. But they aren’t strong enough to prevent me from exercising my freedom, from being what I want to be. 

Last week, Guy Branum, who is gay himself, complained at length on Huffington Post because Nate Silver, who is gay, hasn’t come out the way he wanted him to. Nate Silver appears to be a wonderful person, successful at what he does, and he told the world about a month ago that he is gay “sexually,” but not “ethnically.” Guy Branum didn’t like that. “Silver's refusal to fully participate in gay identity is the real problem,” he says. What Branum means is that Silver’s refusal to fully participate in the way that Branum wants is the problem. Silver has no obligation to be gay in the way that anybody wants.

We live in a transitional period. There was a time when, in order to add strength to the gay community to fight its fights, we have had to, all of us, come out and increase the numbers of us who demanded our freedom, but we’re moving out of this transitional time. We’re moving into a period when one of the successes of our movement is the number of people who are able to live uncompromisingly gay lives without actually joining the numbers in demonstrations. 

It’s OK for Nate Silver to live his life any way he wants. Actually, what he’s expressing is what many of us are driving toward. Freedom.
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Thursday, December 20, 2012

The highway, the dark, the silent bus, the tablet screen, thoughts of a friend

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Our son called twice yesterday, working out the details of a gift for his children. Our daughter came on Saturday and spent the evening here—I cooked, and she talked—before going to Logan to pick up a friend of hers. 

I have been corresponding with a friend in a border state about a twenty-year-old student and coming out and the role of a faculty member in that process. In the last week, we’ve written six emails back and forth. My friend the faculty member is navigating the shoals of different generations, different geographies, different cultures and the effect of all of these on a person’s coming out.

Another friend texts late at night from one of those cheap buses between Boston and New York. “Things are going backwards, not forward,” she says. She talks about people in NYC who are gay and who are mixed race or mixed orientation and “are feeling the shit along with me.” She talks about racism and homophobia. In the big city men and women who are mixed race and mixed orientation can—and do—find a home, even if they also, sometimes, are “ambushed” and swear they’re not going to live in the USA any more.

C and I saw Lincoln last night and noted the venal reasons given by the players for being against the Thirteenth Amendment, some thing that now—once Lincoln worked his work, and we’ve had one hundred and fifty years for it to sink in—has the clarity and obviousness of Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Robert Bork died this week. The media seems to have adopted the judgment that opposition to his elevation to the Supreme Court introduced politics into the confirmation process for the first time. This is stupid. The Constitution assures that Supreme Court Justices will be confirmed in the middle of a political process by handing the process over to the Senate. Secondly, Bork arrived on the scene trailing his own political agenda, and that seemed shocking for a nominee. He deserved to be borked.

Time Magazine has named President Obama Man of the Year. His winning the election is a permanent achievement and to be celebrated, but he still has to fight Republicans, and that means, as Lincoln teaches us, getting his hands way dirty to achieve change. 

Life’s a mixed bag, here at the end of December, 2012—some wins, some losses, all of them big—and it’s easy to get frustrated and discouraged. Are we better, now, than we were twelve months ago? Why aren’t things better, clearer, now? But they’re not, and we still have a way to go. We’re going to get tired and pissed off, and it may not ever be clear that we have won anything permanent. There’s a lot of pain in that. But the story of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments is the story of rights won eventually, partially, over a long period. That realization brings at least partial satisfaction. 

What brings more complete satisfaction is a friend like the lady on the cheap bus, who spent part of her trip to NYC texting me about the people she knows in the city. When I got her text, I pictured it. The highway coming up toward her out of the night, the dark silent bus, her tablet’s  bright screen, and her, punching in the letter to a friend she wants to keep in touch with. Love. 

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Wednesday, December 12, 2012

What do we want?

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‘Tis the season for it. Wanting things. But the question is really about us gay people and what’s happening now as we wait for the Supreme Court. 

A commentator this week makes a point about the effect of marriage equality on the behavior of gay people. Apparently we want to be like the straight middle-class.

I once sat in an audience while one of the lawyers who had argued the gay marriage case before the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which resulted in the first legal gay marriages in America, said, “Gay people want the same things as straight people.”   

That is manifestly not true. 

There are many, many things about straight marriage that I do not want anywhere near my long-term gay relationship with my partner C. 

At least some of us want long-term relationships which have room for experimentation.  At least some of us want to escape the laws influenced by this nation’s puritan past and accept more open display of our bodies, in private and on the beach and in our parades and in our art. What we don’t want is to have our long-term relationships defined for us by judges in California or Justices in Washington. I don’t think we want to enter an institution whose major framework was determined in the fourteenth century or even the nineteenth century or the twentieth century. We want to do it ourselves and make it fit our lives now, in the twenty-first century. We don’t want religious people to impose their beliefs on us in these matters of sex, love, and relationships.

I wrote about this earlier this year, 

Without having determined what we want, aside from “marriage,” we are rushing into a situation where the most restrictive of us are going to try to lay down rules for the rest of us about our bodies and our sex and try to make everybody adhere to rules. An emotional loving commitment between two persons necessarily means a commitment to sexual monogamy. “I love you” necessarily means “I am going to promise you.” It means, I will love you only and in return you must love me only, which, for many people, is akin to a declaration of ownership and an expectation of ownership and has no place when a man says, “I love you.”

The only declaration I feel compelled to make to the man with whom I share my life is that I don’t own him or his body, and he doesn’t own mine, even though the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has declared that, in the Commonwealth, “marriage” means, “The voluntary union of two persons, as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.” Why should a judge make such a requirement on me and C?

It may already be too late to stop the people who want to control us and to turn us into something we’re not. In any case, as these things move forward, it is possible for all of us to say, “Wait. Wait. That doesn’t apply to me. We are free. Take your rules to another country.” 
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