by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

When it's the government that commits crimes

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On Saturday, December 28, the Boston Globe ran an editorial comment about the British Government’s pardoning Alan Turing. The comment is entitled Britain: Reclaiming the Hero it Maligned. I wrote about Alan Turing here. In that blog post, I said, “This posting isn’t about quantum computing, and it isn’t about Alan Turing and his contribution to the effort to win World War II, but it is about gay people and our tendency to forget the past. Alan Turing was a homosexual.” 

Well, this posting isn’t about any of those things, but it is about the things that a pardon does. Once Alan Turing was dead, there was nothing that any of the survivors around him could do to change the fact that the man had killed himself as the result of appalling treatment by the British government. And the Globe this morning is wrong when it says, “Alan Turing deserves an untainted place in the history books, and now he has one.” Actually, because of government action, Alan Turing was dragged out of the closet into the harsh light of day, then charged with crimes which were not crimes and sentenced to chemical castration. He then committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple, and all of this is permanently hung on the name and reputation of a brilliant man who helped the Brits win the war and helped create computers for the rest of us. None of that is going to be removed by this pardon. The British Government caused Turing untold suffering and changed the things that are said and will be said about him, and none of that will ever be changed. Turing does not need a pardon. He did nothing wrong. I assume the British Government has issued this pardon to put the focus on Turing’s life instead of the government’s own appalling crimes.

What to do?  Leave poor Alan Turing alone. He has suffered enough. What the British Government should do is to get down on it s knees and cry, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and do this continually until every one knows exactly how much suffering the government has caused in the name of morality. The Globe is correct in raising the question of the 50,000 other men who were convicted under the same law that persecuted Turing. Those that are still alive should be asked, person to person, how they would like the government to respond to its own culpability. I expect a goodly percentage of those who have suffered under this law will say, Go fuck yourself.  The point is to remove the government from the ranks of those who may assume virtue. 

And, next step, What about the US? We learned this same lesson about our government when it became clear what had happened at the Tuskegee Institute in the thirties, and, of course, the massive persecution of gay people in the last century. Now we know about the hundreds of thousands who have suffered at the hands of government. What to do? First, don’t forget them. Know where their suffering came from. Try to make their lives better now. Think reparations. Don’t ever believe that there is anything the government can do to make itself virtuous again. It can’t.  The government is successful at building highways and maintaining the safety net. When the government tries to impose morality on citizens or allows itself to be used as the instrument of certain religious points of view, it fucks it up, every time, and then it ends up, not with egg on its face, with blood on its hands. The pardon that the British government this week extended to Alan Turning gets it backwards. The government should ask us for a pardon for its crimes.

Read The Rebel, by Albert Camus, about assassins in judges robes.

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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The gay protest novel (1)

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First New Mexico last Thursday and Utah Friday, making eighteen. Life is good right now for LGBT people, but I am reminded of the long years during which we experienced no victories. I remember what those days were like, and the people who didn’t make it to see these current victories, and I take a moment to honor them.

I’ve been reading Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, by Jaime Harker, the University of Minnesota Press, 2013. I’ve been interested in Isherwood since I was in graduate school in the sixties. Isherwood wrote Goodbye to Berlin, The Berlin Stories, the play and musical made from them, I am a Camera and Caberet with the stories of Sally Bowles and Christopher in Berlin just before Hitler came to power, and also A Single Man, which I read in 1964 and then rediscovered in 2011, and many other novels. I’ve written about him here and here.

Jaime Harker says that during the Cold War—the period 1945 to 1989—ideas of gender construction and a paranoid defense of heterosexuality got mixed up with national policy and with the struggle against the Soviets.  She says this:

During the 1940s and 1950s, Cold War intellectuals sought to establish the United States culturally as well as politically (and many did so with covert CIA support for key literary journals). The discipline of American studies—established in books by Leo  Marx, F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler—sought to establish a mythic American spirit; critics in the Partison Review contrasted the freedom of highbrow aesthetics with the niggardly realism of totalitarian regimes. These cultural interventions were marked by an aggressive masculinity, any deviance was denounced as aesthetically compromised and un-American. Literary criticism implicitly enforced conservative gender roles and betrayed anxiety about inordinate cultural influence of women and gay men in the United States, an anxiety alleviated through prescriptive and narrow literary norms. (p. 5)

A paragraph later, Harker says, “Michael Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture points  out that gay visibility was high in the late forties and early fifties: critics warned  of a nefarious lavender menace undermining the masculinity and virility of American culture.” (pp. 5-6) The ‘masculinity and virility’ of American culture were assumed to be critical to fighting the war against totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Harker says, gay novels represented a corrupting force in American culture, and we were subjected to constantly repeated charges leveled against gay men by Senator McCarthy, by many politicians, and by the editor of The State, the daily paper I read as a boy in Columbia, South Carolina. There were two stigmas attached to gay men in 1950. One was this charge of corrupting the culture, and the other was the charge leveled against homosexuals by the American Psychiatric Association, that we were “sick.” Harker points out that “Cold War intellectuals lumped together and pathologized all novels that touched on gay themes” (p. 14). 

To “pathologize" all novels with a gay theme means that it was going to be difficult to justify writing a novel about such a theme. Critics could say that no novel on such a subject can be a good novel. It may be  that this is the source of the critical condemnation of gay political novels,  that they are propaganda for being a corrupting force in the culture..

Christopher Isherwood sought to establish himself as an American writer during this period, a difficult attempt, given that Isherwood was already known as a gay man from his earlier work before he came to America. Isherwood, however, achieved the impossible and wrote major gay novels during this period all of which were attacked for being a corrupting influence on the culture. Harker quotes Isherwood himself in his own defense: “‘There are certain subjects—including Jewish, Negro and homosexual questions—which involve social and political issues. There are laws which could be changed. There are public prejudices which could be removed. Anything an author writes on these subjects is bound, therefore, to have certain propaganda value, whether he likes it or not.’ So despite the considerable differences in style and content, I believe it makes sense to talk about this group of gay novels in the late forties and early fifties as the gay protest novel.” 

To anyone trying to determine his own motivations for his actions during that period—I’ve done this myself—it is a relief to be reminded that the writers I was reading, these Cold War intellectuals, were feeding me bitter bigotry, and I thought they were wise. And, considering the actions in the last week in New Mexico and Utah, I find that my joy is easily restrained when I calculate that it has taken some sixty-three years for this progress to be effectuated. Observe the damage these “Cold War intellectuals” did in the late forties and fifties: a generation or two of gay people savaged by people they thought they could trust, a generation of gay writers whose works were savaged, but most of all, a critical principle repeated so widely that it became everywhere accepted, that gay novels on serious political subjects can be no more than mere propaganda and not in themselves capable of being interesting and compelling literature. We were told, gay art cannot be high art. That’s a crime, to have told us that. We’ll never know what literature has been lost to us in the last sixty years because of these “Cold War intellectuals.”
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Thursday, December 12, 2013

...and who they love.

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Barack Obama, speaking in a stadium filled with South African people and representatives of the world’s nations, said Nelson Mandela emerged “as the last great liberator of the 20th century. Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement — a movement that at its start had little prospect for success. Like Dr. King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral necessity of racial justice.” It was a powerful way to organize our awareness of the history of the twentieth century. In his second inaugural address, he did the same thing for the history of the United States when he referred to the places of the civil rights movements in the United States: “Seneca and Selma and Stonewall.” By adding Stonewall to the other, established civil rights movements, he elevated us and implicitly made a promise to us.

He’s done this several times, a practice I am not accustomed to yet. (I am just not familiar enough with being given that level of respect from an unimpeachable source at the very pinnacle of respect in our culture and delivered on the world stage to know how it makes me feel. I think I worry about it a little.) 

Now the president has done it again. Toward the end of his eulogy for Mr. Mandela, he said this:

The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality or universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before, but they are no less important. For around the world today, we still see children suffering from hunger and disease. We still see run-down schools. We still see young people without prospects for the future. Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs, and are still persecuted for what they look like, and how they worship, and who they love. That is happening today.
Apparently he is going to do this regularly, give us respect and demonstrate that he understands our situation in America, and it is not going to take a major gay crisis to get him to do so. This is happening today, he says. I don’t know about you, but this has been so long in coming that it’s going to take a little time for me to adapt to this new world.


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Monday, December 2, 2013

Tim, Prior, Lt Choi—they present a problem

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I was on the Red Line here in Boston, going to Cambridge to attend a concert in Paine Hall at Harvard. My husband was playing the harp in the orchestra. The train was crowded because it was rush hour—six o’clock—and when I pushed onto the car and grabbed a strap, there was still a stream of people coming onto the car from the next door down. Just before the door closed, a few more people pushed into the car and stood next to me. I glanced at them, and then I saw a man two people from me. He was Tim DeChristopher, about whom I have written here. He is the environmental activist who disrupted the auction of federal oil lands in Utah and who went to federal penitentiary for two years. He had said, in his sentencing statement, “This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this [i.e. my going to prison] is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.”
The car was too crowded for me to move, and I didn’t feel I could speak to him over the heads and shoulders of the several people between us. And yet, I knew he might get off, and I would lose this opportunity to speak to a man I very much admired. I was also thinking that every person who gets on a subway train deserves—and has a right—to be left alone.

Finally I spoke. “Tim?” His head jerked around to look for the source of the voice. It was apparent that he really was Tim DeChristopher. He looked exactly like the pictures of him on the DVD “Bidder 70.” He located me and smiled. I smiled. Then I said, “Thank you.” He grinned and shrugged, and that was all of it. The car was too crowded for anything more. He got off at Harvard Square and went up the Church Street exit, and I went up the main exit into Harvard Square. 

Tim DeChristopher had found a way to act in our culture, when action by single people is rare, and most civil action has been taken over by professionals and large organizations. Tim DeChristopher had the courage to accept the culture’s punishment for his civil disobedience and has been able to turn it to his own advancement with his sentencing statement and then has been able to use it in political organizing since that time once he was released.

Tonight, I finished supper and sat down to the computer to begin work on this posting when I found that HBO was showing Angels in America: the Millennium Begins and Peristroika, and, before I could turn off the tube I was sucked into the tragedy of Prior and Louis. The cat came in and lay beside me, his head resting on my thigh. I ended up watching the whole drama, finished after one, this whole stupendous work by Tony Kushner, ending with Prior’s famous words, The Great Work Begins.

This is hard for many of us, because the “great work” that Prior suggests—the work which will bring full citizenship to gay people, the work of renewal, of living fully, of loving ourselves and others, of “more life” as Prior puts it—seems largely to be over for many people. We don’t fear the deaths of all of us from AIDS, and the struggle for our rights has been co-opted by mainstream America. Even our opposition seems to be giving up. Cardinal Dolan said on Sixty Minutes yesterday, that the forces for same-sex marriage seem to have won. 

The Great Work Begins. Work means Life, and that’s what Prior wanted. More Life. But what does this mean? A person can write a check or put a gift on a credit card, but there is not much one can do comparable to disrupting a federal auction of oil rich land. Or is it that we haven’t thought creatively enough about this new phase of our lives? Exactly what can each one of us do to make life better for all of us? Tim DeChristopher found it. Lt Choi found a way to do it, which only he could do—he chained himself to the White House fence, and then did it over and over and over again until DADT was repealed. Well, then, what for the rest of us? 
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Monday, November 18, 2013

The man on stilts in a kilt in the wind

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I wrote about this briefly the other day. The point was that as we assimilate into the heterosexual world, the gay community seems to pull in its horns, so it speak. It seems to become less flamboyant, less “out there,” less extravagant in the way it presents itself. Some might say, the more the gay community is accepted by the heterosexual community, the less fabulous we become.

On this particular day, during Gay Pride, there was a man on stilts wearing a kilt. And of course the wind blew and showed to the 150,000 people who had come to watch the parade that the man was wearing nothing under his kilt. This was wonderful, I thought. Many people thought differently, including Jeff Epperly, the editor at that time of the Boston gay weekly, Bay Windows. Epperly surmised that the man on stilts had no taste. Many people weighed in about the man on stilts—no one seemed to know who he was—and most people seemed to agree that the man on stilts had no taste. 

I was pissed. I thought the gay community was certainly less a place I wanted to join if there was no room for the man on stilts with the wind blowing his kilt, so I responded the way I usually do, I sat down to the computer and pounded out a response. I thought it was exactly the right thing to say at that point, but I couldn’t get it published anywhere. So here it is:

I am the naked man on stilts
by Dwight Cathcart

Jeff Epperly wanted to know who the naked man on stilts was, and I am writing this to let him know that it was me.  My name is Dwight Cathcart, and I am a gay man who has been practicing on stilts for a number of years so I could pull off this stunt, as all of my friends know, and, as Jeff and all of your writers have said, I have no taste.   I do have a good tight butt, however, and my dick is a greater than average length and girth, as all 150,000 people at Gay Pride 1996 will attest.

I haven’t had any taste for a long time.  Probably not since I came out.   Before I came out, I had a lot of taste.  I wore the right clothes from the right stores and married the right woman and had the right children and went to the right schools and had the right kind of house, all filled with 18th century antiques, which are very tasteful.  And I liked Sargent’s paintings, which, in Boston, are very tasteful, except when they are very obscene and the MFA hides them for years.  I moved among people who also had taste. They were miserable, of course, in their tasteful houses, doing their tasteful things, but they didn’t rock any boats or offend anybody, and everybody said of all of us, They are people of taste, even in their misery.  None of us ever wrote a novel or painted a painting, of course, because people who do those things can’t be thinking very hard about taste.

But one day, I decided that taste was not what a life should be based on, because I was miserable in my good taste, all locked inside of a narrow little cage, trying to follow all these piddling little rules, and wondering all the time if I was still tasteful.  Taste is such a trivial little way to judge people and things.  Am I tasteful?  What a waste of energy even to consider the question.  Even to think about taste makes your lips purse up as if you were sucking lemons.   What I needed, I discovered, was a little honesty in my life, and a little sense of humor, and a little courage.   So I bought some stilts and worked on erasing my tan line.   And you all see the results.   Freedom.

What I achieved, of course, was vulgarity, which was what I had been missing all my life.   After I quit being a person of taste, I discovered how many things my dick would do that tasteful people never dream of.  And my mouth.   And where I could put them!   I discovered the energy there is in questioning these leaden values people have which they subsume under the tight nasty little word taste.   Vulgar.   The word’s roots have to do with the common people, and I discovered the energy, the vitality, there is in the common people, the honesty there is in the common people, that people who purse their lips and say taste never dream of.  Vulgar.   It is impossible even to say the word without coming on strong.  Vulgar.   God, it sounds like the bass pipes in an organ, doesn’t it?   Name me one leader in any field of human endeavor anywhere in the world whose primary concern was being tasteful.   

When I got up on my stilts in my vulgar manner, showing my dick and my ass, what I was doing was coming on strong.  Coming on against the limits which our society has always placed—and continues to place—on gay sex and style and fetish.  I was coming on strong against people in our own community who have lost a sense of themselves as common people, who are striving to rid themselves of the dirt of their humanity and bleach out all their quirky, amazing sexiness.  I was coming on strong against Arline Isaacson, who thought that everybody at the parade but me was normal, whatever the fuck that means in this context.  And of course, up there on my stilts, showing my ass and waving my cock, I was remembering how gay people have always had tasteless thrown against them and their behavior.  I was remembering how lewd and indecent  is still thrown against them.  Well, here I am, folks, tasteless, lewd and indecent, having my good time.  In your face.   But my lips aren’t pursed.

I saw Stonewall, the movie, last night at the MFA.   The most painful parts had to do with the men and women in the fifties, who thought that wearing a coat and tie and hats and gloves and stockings and walking around in a neat little circle in front of Independence Hall would gain them freedom.   So tasteful.  So ineffective.  Nobody ever got freedom by being tasteful. 

I scorn to be tasteful.   I revel in being vulgar, a man of the people, aware of where my cock hangs, and proud to call it by its right name, its ancient name.  You can take your taste and shove it.  And I think any man, seeing a naked guy on stilts at Gay Pride, doing our job, ought to be proud to say, Hey, that’s me up there.

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Thursday, November 14, 2013

It could be a bum trade-off

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Gay people have recognized for a long time that learning how to live in a largely straight society presents the possibility of assimilation, and assimilation presents problems, different ones at different times. Over the weekend, I was reading Gay Men at the Millennium: Sex, Spirit, Community, a collection of essays loosely organized around the questions Where have we been? How far have we come? Where are we headed? Thirteen years ago, these writers were looking around them and trying to figure out where we are. The editor, Michael Lowenthal, collected essays or chapters from various books to look at these questions. 

The writers of some of the essays bring up the concept of assimilation a number of times, and usually the dangers of assimilation are spelled out. The danger of assimilation differs from decade to decade. In one decade gay people may fear that they will lose their “edge and their sense of style, their fabulousness.” In another decade, they may fear that they will lose their willingness and ability to experiment sexually. And in a third, the fear is that they will lose their relative freedom from class. Almost no one thinks assimilation is a good thing. What this means is that, depending on his age, a gay man may be indifferent to one danger and sensitive to another, and his lover, ten years younger, has a different set of responses. It also may mean that a person’s fear of assimilation in the deep South may be significantly different from the fears held by someone in the Northeast.  

The fear that we feel in the second decade of the twenty-first century is a consequence of the great social movements brought about by the Obama administration: the coming out of large numbers of gay military personnel and the movement of large numbers of gay men and women into the county clerk’s offices to get marriage licenses. Some significant numbers of us wanted these things to happen—the repeal of DADT and the overturning of DOMA—but the anxiety many of us feel is brought about by changes in the gay community whose effect on all of us we don’t know. We fear that we are going to lose something that’s important. We don’t know what we are willing to give up to get something important.

Years ago, in 1996 actually, Gay Pride in Boston began to get boring. It started that year when a man wearing a kilt got up on stilts, and played around in the street, between and among the groups and the floats of the parade. The wind came too, of course, and played around with the man’s kilt, blowing it up like Marilyn Monroe’s white skirt over the subway grate, revealing that he didn’t have anything on underneath. Just his tight ass and his cock. There were other things in that parade that year. There was a bed being pushed through the street with two women making love. The resultant uproar attacked the man on stilts and the women in the bed. The editor of Bay Windows said none of them had any taste. Apparently the mayor said he wasn’t going to take part in Gay Pride in the future if it didn’t clean up its act. What we should have done is thank the mayor for his participation in the past, and tell him that we could do without his services in the future. Then we should have had our parade. But instead, we cleaned up our act, and we lost something major as a result. Pride got boring, and people stopped coming. Except the banks, who come in droves.

Gay Men at the Millennium: Sex, Spirit, Community, edited by Michael Lowenthal, and published by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York.  Sorry, no digital version apparently.
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Sunday, October 27, 2013

Remember them, remember us

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At the end of the Stonewall Riots,  in my novel Adam in the Morning, four men are sitting on the high stoop of the building just west of the Stonewall Inn. It is eleven or twelve, the night of July 2, 1969, and the men are resting after fighting New York cops for five or six hours. Other men stop by the stoop and ask if they’re OK—they are bruised and have blood in their hair—and they make plans for the coming days. The four men watch the cops and the crowds disperse. They talk about what’s happened. They know it was something stupendous, and they agree it was fine. Their conversation gets slower, as it does when people, having just had a life transforming experience, are lost in their own thoughts. Then Joseph, the actor from Los Angeles, says, “I’m thinking of all the people not here, who would like to have been here.” 

“Yeah, that’s right,” Andrew [the partner of the narrator] says, “we ought to drink a toast to them. To everybody who couldn’t make it. And to all those who survived the time before the riots.”

“Great,” Bo [the narrator and Andrew’s partner] says, “Remember our brothers and sisters here and everywhere, now and since the beginning.” They hug each other’s shoulders.

During the five nights of the rioting, a man who wasn’t there the first night, says, “I wish I had been there.” Belle says, “I am aware of all of you having had this life-transforming event last night and everybody is feeling like comrades, and suddenly I feel left out,” and makes plans to riot the next time the cops appear. The men tell her she’ll have to run from the cops so she should chuck her wedgies and wear sandals.

 During all the fighting, the people on Christopher Street are aware that they have been given an opportunity which others would like to have had—men and women who would have fought if they had been in New York during the riots or been alive or been old enough or not too old. 

 It’s not complicated. After many of the great moments of recent gay history, there have been people who said, We have to remember all the men and women who aren’t here, but who are one of us. The gesture answers a human need to think of the others. 

 Humans tend to forget the past, to forget the people who were not here, to forget those who came to the conflict late, to act as if the only gay people who matter are the ones on the street, fighting. But we can’t forget our past. In addition to winning the battle for marriage in the Supreme Court and in fourteen states, we have to win the battle for our history and not let it be lost to us. The guys in the street in New York were not the only guys in the gay community in 1969. Gay men and women were everywhere then, just as gay men and women are everywhere now. We do this for everyone’s sake—recognizing that everyone contributed to our history—and also for our own. 

Andrew and Bo and Joseph and Belle are characters in my novel, Adam in the Morning, Adriana Books, 2010. You may read about Adam in the Morning on my website www.dwightcathcart.net, where you may also buy this book for your ereader.


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Saturday, October 19, 2013

Where we are now

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Many people—both gay and straight people—think because gay people can be married in thirteen states that we have solved that problem, and, at least in those thirteen states, we can move on to other issues. That’s only partly true.

Think of the long fight for our civil rights as a war. During the time when we were actively fighting, many many people were wounded by the experience, by the cruelty of parents and friends and doctors and teachers and politicians. They are, now, similar to the wounded warriors to whom the Wounded Warrior program devotes its energies. That is, the gay people who fought bigotry and received psychic wounds that were crippling or disabling are now walking in our cities and towns and through the countryside, and while these walking wounded may not have lost a limb or bear physical scars, their emotional well-being has been crippled and their psychic health is lost and maybe permanently gone.

So when we consider the events of the last year or two—the revocation of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the repeal of DOMA, and, for many of us, a more openness to our lives—we must not ever forget how many of us still bear the scars of the way this culture treated gay people fifty and forty and thirty years ago and who walk along our streets with a severe psychic limp. 

I said some of this on the beach at Race Point when C and I married, and a straight friend commented, “We don’t treat people that way any more.” Which is just the point. As the rest of the gay community moves on to marriage and military service and community respect—and the straight community moves back to thinking well of itself again—some among us remain permanently crippled by events forty years ago when we had neither marriage nor military service nor community—or family—respect. These are the survivors, home from the war, walking with crutches.

We have to remember these wounded, who are going to be with us for decades. They deserve our respect and our memory of their wounds and of the battles they fought which wounded them.
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Thursday, October 3, 2013

Marriage

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It is inevitably a political act, for men, for women, regardless of whether they are marrying someone of the same sex or the opposite sex. It is a political act for economic reasons, and, for gay people, it has been a political act since the first gay person asked for a marriage license and was turned down. County clerks were dispensing licenses to some citizens and not to others,which is essentially political. For gay people to get married today, DOMA had to be overturned by the US Supreme Court, and laws had to be passed or overturned in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

But it is more than that. My partner, C, and I have been together for twenty-three years. We have a good relationship. We don’t argue with one another. We treat each other with respect. We find it easy to give in to each other. We love one another. I have often wondered how getting married would make our relationship different from what it has been. I didn’t want to do anything that would make our relationship less than it has been. 

Since the late winter, my partner and I have been planning to marry. Last Saturday, September 28, on Race Point beach in Provincetown, on a perfect day—low seventies, cloudless sky—we were married, surrounded by his father and stepmother, by his brother and his wife and their children, by my brother and his wife and by my niece and her guest and my nephews and their wives, by C’s uncle and aunt, their son and several of C’s cousins, by my children and their children, by a man and his wife whom I’ve known for 45 years, by a neighborhood lady and her husband, and by our friends. I walked through the dunes from the parking lot at Race Point beach, along the path with the blue mesh, and when I reached the top of the dune and could see the vast drama of Race Point beach below me, under that intense cloudless blue sky, I could see gathered over to my left around a tall rainbow flag all of the good people we had asked to join us, waiting. Someone was running toward me across the sand. As she got closer, I could see it was one of our granddaughters, followed by another granddaughter, and her mother, all of them beautiful. 

Then I knew the difference between what C and I had done for the last twenty-three years and what we were about to embark on. Our relationship has been essentially private. This was going to be a relationship embedded in a community of people who cared about us—our relatives and our friends—and drawing support and strength from being surrounded by them, but free, still free. These people love us as we are.

I hugged my granddaughter and her sister and my daughter, and we walked down across the sand toward the flag and the crowd and C, who were waiting for us to arrive, so he and I could marry. We could have stayed the way we were. It was good, C and me, loving each other. But this is good too. Different, but good. C and me and everybody around the rainbow flag on Race Point beach on Saturday, under a cloudless sky.
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Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The validity of the lives we lead

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“I don’t really think that it makes sense for a work of art to take on a social purpose. Just because there are so many constraints that you’re working under already — what material is available to you, what your capabilities are with the abilities you have, what will the market bear, what’s the nature of your audience — these are the constraints you have to satisfy. If you have a purpose of social reform, I don’t think it’d be art.”

Caleb Crain, who wrote Necessary Errors, said these words, which were reported recently by Daniel D’Addario in Salon. Reading them, I begin to think of the “social purpose” in novels I have read and of the “social purpose” in three of the novels I have written. In the third sentence above, Crain defines “social purpose” as “social reform,” meaning, I think, that when Macbeth argues against regicide Shakespeare’s social purpose is to support the Tudor myths, and that is impermissible in a work of art. But he couldn’t mean that. I guess that a study of literature could argue that half the works of literary are about the causes or the effects of murder of one kind or another.

The sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill, is a kind of tennis net that functions in the literary work for the character to deal with. It exists in thousands of novels, causing difficulties, suffering, illumination, more suffering, and in the end, sometimes, release. A social purpose is a subject like anything else, and it exists to be written about and to be dealt with by the character.

An elaboration of the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill gay people, exists the same way. We have hundreds of plays and novels about killing the king, but almost none about killing the gay kid next door. Listening to Caleb Crain, it would seem that the former are art and the latter not. He thinks we should not write about the moment when the gay kid next door is murdered or about its consequences, because this would give the novel social purpose. This murder is intrinsically important. It is interesting. It has moral significance. In fact, killing the gay kid next door satisfies every one of Aristotle’s requirements for tragedy, including, as we have seen in our own lives, the disruption of all society when the victim is found tied to a fence on the prairie outside of Laramie. Or, to choose an illustration closer to home, the murder of Bernie Mallett in Ceremonies, the first novel of the Stonewall Triptych, which then disrupts everything in Cardiff, Maine, and destroys the accommodation straight Mainers had made with the gay people in their midst. And nothing is ever the same again.

It’s not the social purpose that makes bad novels out of gay political events or movements. I doubt that every work of art is, as Craig would have it, its own thing. I think of Guernica. Of September 1, 1939. Of Intruder in the Dust. Of Mrs. Dalloway. A novelist, dealing with all the constraints that Crain lists in the first paragraph above, can surely find space in his novel to make the point that Murdering a gay kid violates the same codes that murdering a king or a queen or a president or four little girls in a Birmingham church. Now, to be clear, not all novels are about murder. Some are about men falling in love with one another, and, given the realities of literature, it is true that not even most novels have to be about heavy subjects. But it is legitimate—and appropriate—when an author chooses to write about the murder of a gay person, to believe that that event is not a merely private event, and is worth of the effort of both writer and reader.

I don’t think gay literature has been dumbed down by writers who have a social purpose. We live among social purposes all the time, all day, every day. A novel about my going to the Boston Common at seven o’clock six days ago to join a demonstration against any action against Syria can be as compelling as anything being published today—it might be a very long novel, with a cast of thousands, and a very complicated plot, and, of course, a profound and subtle treatment of its subject. What is dumbing down our literature is the publisher saying, Don’t write about it. It will offend somebody, including straight people, and the readers saying, Don’t disturb me. The result is that we can’t find books about ourselves. Even though most of us—or many of us—live lives which are deeply political, and even though many of us are deeply anguished by the politics and the violence of our lives. We are already disturbed. 

We can’t continue to allow publishers and writers to ignore the lives we lead. 
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Sunday, September 8, 2013

We don't tell the truth about ourselves

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What should be the subject of a gay writer?    

I ask this question seriously. I have read a recent article in Salon by Daniel D’Addario which seems to explain what is happening now in publishing.

The headline over D’Addario’s article is, Where’s the buzzed-about gay novel?  D’Addario knows something isn’t working. There are just not enough gay characters in current literature getting the same intense examination that heterosexual characters routinely get. He also says, even the LGBT characters who do make it into books in the bookstores are from a narrow range of experience. D’Addario says, “Publishing is not a charitable endeavor devoted to equal reception for all: it’s a business catering to the interests of an audience comfortable with gay people but not necessarily comfortable with stories that don’t cohere with a mold recognizable from, say, the most recent Michael Cunningham novel.”

There seem to be two causes for this present situation. D’Addario quotes Matthew Gallaway, the gay author of The Metropolis Case, “The publishers want to sell as many copies as possible,” so they want to stay away from anything that might be controversial. Readers, too, bear some responsibility. Sarah Schulman, lesbian activist and novelist, says readers “have gotten used to a certain kind of white gay [writer] who does not have very overt sexual content in his work, who fits paradigms they’re comfortable with.” The result of this is that “the gay character must not experience homophobia from middle-class white people, he can experience it from rednecks, but not from people like the reader. He’s not allowed to be angry about his life.”

Concluding, D’Addario discusses something he calls “minority lit,” in which the minority writer will write, in the words of Alexander Chee, “about the difficulties one faces as X minority in the US—and so this becomes the expectation.” Chee concludes, “even before you pick up the novel, it can feel like you’re about to read a long-form complaint.” D’Addario seems to feel that the possibility that a novel is a “long-form complaint” is a terrible thing, driving away publishers and readers. 

But something else is happening here too. Twenty or thirty years ago, academic historians started assigning novels to their history students as a way of teaching them about some historical phenomenon. Intruder in the Dust, Absalom, Absalom! Native Son, Giovanni’s Room, and Portrait of a Lady. If D’Addario is right in his assessment of current publishing, where will future historians go, among current gay novels, to find the truth about the lives of gay men and women in the first decade of the twentieth century? If publishers don’t want anything controversial, and if readers don’t want anything outside their comfort zone, who will tell the truth? 

When I was seventeen, in high school, I came to understand that a writer—we were discussing Herman Melville—was a truth-teller.  It was not until twenty-five years later that I was handed, as on a silver-platter, the subject about which I was to tell the truth—what happened to a group of gay people in a small town in Maine when one of them was murdered by bigots. 

Later, I wanted to write about the life of a gay man who had gotten married in 1964, then read about Stonewall in 1969, then divorced and moved into the gay community in 1984. There was nothing about this man in literature. In fact, whole important swaths of the American population have been ignored by writers who create America’s literature, and fiction treated them as if they didn’t exist. But they did exist, and we need to know about them. 

What was the effect on individuals of DOMA and DADT and the various obscenities of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association during the forties, and fifties and sixties, and of the constant assault on the persons of gay people from Christian churches? Where has been the writer who could tell us that the most savage abuse that a gay person experienced during those decades usually came from his own family? 

No wonder the buzzed-about gay novel does not yet exist. We have people like D’Addario explaining to us why gay writers need not tell the truth about gay lives. The reason we have the literature we have is that intellectually lazy agents and editors and commentators and critics say over and over to readers and writers that it’s OK—even necessary—not to tell the truth about our lives. 
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Friday, August 16, 2013

What makes good people good

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This week the news is out of Russia and has to do with the anti-gay laws there, their effects on Russian LGBT people and on the Winter Olympics 2014, and what the rest of the world is going to do about it. First response was from gay bars around the world dumping Stoli down the drain, then from people who said Stoli was made in Latvia and owned by Russians in Luxembourg. What to do? Then came the discussion over whether the anti-gay laws would be enforced against gay Olympic athletes and against gay travelers visiting Russia for the Olympics. Apparently. People proposed moving the Olympics to Vancouver, which has an Olympic site already built from its own successful Winter Olympics in 2010.

People have been weighing in on whether it is right to move the Olympics—or to cancel them entirely this Olympiad. These people speak of the Olympic athletes who have trained for four years and who expect to be given the opportunity to test their skills against other athletes from around the world. People compare the right of these athletes with the right of gay and lesbian people in Russia to be safe. This is a nice argument, if you can ignore the LGBT persons whose rights are being trampled on so that an athletic contest can take place.

I don’t know at what point I would think it is legitimate to abandon the defense of the rights of lesbian and gay persons so that some other event can take place, but, so far in my life, I have never encountered such a moment. The people making the decision to abandon the defense of the rights of gay people are all—pay attention here—straight people. I would have some respect for this process if I saw that gay people were being asked to give up the defense of their rights in favor of some other, greater,  good. But actually, there is no other, greater, good that exists that could possibly justify the gay person giving up his human rights. We are being told to give up the defense of our rights, because this other thing is more important to the whole world than your rights are to you. But you didn’t ask the gay person, before you bartered away his rights. This is blackmail, and the gay community should not submit to it. 

Beware of people who want you to make a severe sacrifice for them. Good people don’t do that. Good people sacrifice for you.
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Monday, August 5, 2013

This is what is essential about us

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There has always been the danger that the more assimilated we are, the more we will become like them and therefore lose what makes us unique. Assimilate us, and eventually we disappear. This has been a danger for Jews, for black people, for women, for Native Americans, and for every wave of new immigrants to arrive on these shores. It may be that assimilation means loss of identity. Assimilation has been the technique our culture has used since the beginning to cope with new populations: It will make them like us.

This is bad because the gay community has learned how to conduct its romantic and sexual relationships without benefit of the law. That’s major, and in that area we have it all over heterosexual people. We conduct our relationships without benefit of divorce, charges of adultery, property settlements. We know the difference between sex and love and can talk about which persons are available as sexual partners without having the state play a part in any of these arrangements. And when necessary, we know the point at which our agreements among ourselves need to be re-negotiated. If we’re assimilated—just because there are more of them than there are of us—the probability is that we will drop all this and take up the practices of heterosexuals. 

We have developed a way of preserving the freedom of individual persons while enabling that person to form various kinds of important  relationships. We know how to conduct long-term relationships without any officer of the state anywhere to be seen. Every week, as new states offer marriage equality, we see pictures of couples who have been together twenty, thirty, forty years, who are now getting married. We have been refining our ability to live long and successful lives with no partner, and we show every week that we know how to live alone. We already know how to do it. We make a contribution to our culture just to the extent that we don’t allow heterosexuals to make us forget that we know these things. We need to teach them what we know. We need to say, very loudly and repeatedly, We know these things. And then we need to say, You folks need to learn what we know. 

There’s another reason that it’s bad for us to assimilate. If we care about the civilization we are a part of, we care about preserving our ethnic heritage—that is, the ethnic heritage of gay people— just as much as we care about the ethnic heritage of the various waves of Africans who were brought here or of European Jews before and after World War II, or of the tribes of Native Americans who’ve always been here. 

What we need from heterosexuals is the equal protection of the laws. What they need from us is our difference. 
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Friday, July 26, 2013

Chris Matthews, Anthony Weiner, sex, and language

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I had the TV on to MSNBC, listening to the progressive cable channel chew over Anthony Weiner. Chris Matthews was sputtering with (I suppose) astonishment and dismay, talking to two psychologists, trying to understand why Weiner did what he did. In a very brief exchange, he said, “I just don’t get it. I think, I get, I get sex—.” By which he meant that he understood sex, but didn’t understand the motivation of a man like Weiner. He went on, “—like we all do. We get sex. Male and female. Gay and straight—” By this point I am sitting up and listening hard. He is going on, and then he begins that characteristic thing he does. He stutters, searching for his next word. He can’t immediately come up with it so he says, “—and—other possibilities.” He didn’t mean to say that. His stuttering displayed his ignorance. Don’t start with gay, unless you know what you’re going to say after you’ve said straight. 

 Chris was exploring how and why the sex drives of all of us end up making damned fools of a lot of us, even making some of us call ourselves names like Carlos Danger. But people have never been able to control their sex to any great degree since the beginning of the earth, and what is astonishing is that Chris Matthews was acting astonished and dismayed by that fact. 

 If Chris had started with gay and ended with straight, he would have painted himself as even more offensive than he did when he ended it with “—and—other possibilities.” At least Chris recognizes that there are others—all the rest of us, men and women who are neither gay nor straight—who have to be acknowledged, even if we are not named. This brief exchange puts his ignorance, and the poverty of our language, on display. He didn’t know what to call them, those other possibilities, so it is a pretty fair bet that he didn’t know how to think about them, either.

 Chris’s real mistake was in starting his analysis of sex by thinking of sex as if it were a binary construct. “I get sex, like we all do. We get sex. Male and female.” The way he edged into his little discussion is to introduce male and female and sex and the idea of straight, an understandable if parochial mental knee-jerk. He took what he knew best, introduced that into the discussion, and then used gay and straight to start a progression. But the trouble with such a progression—gay, straight, and other possibilities—is that you can’t wimp out like that. You have to name the genders, one by one, once you name the first one. Unfortunately, the human race is built so you can’t ever name them all.

 What Chris Matthews should have done on his program tonight was open his line of inquiry by asking his two psychologists, “Can you talk about what drives us when we want to have sex with another person?” And then, “What is it about sex that often makes us lose ourselves in it?” And, in that rapid-fire way he has, he should have asked another question, before the psychologists had had a chance to answer his first two, “Why does sex so often make us make fools of ourselves?”

 What we need are new words, new ways of talking about these matters, and so new ways of thinking.
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Saturday, July 6, 2013

People who were careless and malicious and ignorant

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It’s satisfying, having access to a right that everybody else has access to, and to have that right unencumbered by any factor. These rights are inherent and do not come from the Constitution. Justice Kennedy recognized that. We can get married. Our marriages are recognized by the federal government, and nobody can limit those rights, including the US government. The people who try, like the various conservative churches and religions and the Republican Party, will, I suspect, lose adherents of their own rather than change our behavior. That’s already happening. 

The recognition of these inherent rights is affecting the gay community in a variety of ways, depending on generation. A young friend, when the marriage cases were being debated before the Supreme Court, said he found it hard to believe that this debate was taking place. This should have been dealt with decades ago, he said, with a noticeable strain of impatience. Others, in the middle generations, see that these victories are the result of decades of work by thousands of activists. Now that we have arrived at the resolution we should have arrived at decades ago, we can move on. For myself, I don’t trust it. Our opponents fought too hard to prevent this from happening for us now to arrive on the scene and greet everyone present with good will.  I think of all those in my generation who never had the option to marry—decent men and women who lived their whole lives without basic rights, without marriage and without the right to serve openly in the Armed Services, and without ever being able to be  public about their feelings for their own gender. It is hard for me to turn around and to accept as my comrades the people who caused all this, people who were careless and malicious and ignorant of the lives of gay people. I remember the damage that has been done—people robbed of a portion of their lives—and I won’t forgive and can’t forget. 

Two days ago, I read a brief piece on Huffington Post by a mother whose son came out to her in 2001, when he was twelve. This mother reacted badly,—she was a religious person—and the son grew up into an alcoholic and a drug addict and ultimately died of a drug overdose. The mother is pictured kissing the face of this son while he is in a coma, apparently before he died. I read this piece, and was almost incapacitated for days afterward, the thing was so painful. 

I remember the people who didn’t get their rights during their lifetimes, who died before they were fully recognized. Now that we are getting our rights recognized, we have to remember the people who went before us. We can’t be the kind of people who forget.
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A demonstration of happy people, the 54th Regiment Memorial, rain, Bromfield Camera

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I went into town to find a demonstration of happy gay people, but the only demonstration I could find was in front of the State House around a man running as a Democrat for Congress. Everybody seemed happy, but they didn’t seem gay. I crossed the street. There were tourists with cameras around the 54th Regiment Memorial. Several listened to a guide telling about the memorial. Not disappointed, I thought the 54th Regiment Memorial was perhaps exactly the right place for me to be after the Supreme Court decisions this morning, even standing alone. Both celebrated moments of changing American democracy, the inclusion of the African-American soldiers among the troops fighting in the Civil War, and the inclusion of same-sex couples among those who must be given their rights under Article 5 of the Constitution, liberty and due process. The soldiers in the Memorial seemed so brave, marching off to war, carrying their rifles, so entirely admirable, and even though most of them died at Ft Wagner, still they were victorious, like all the generations of gay men and women have been victorious in their long march.

It began to rain, and I considered the danger to my camera. I turned my camera off and took out the battery. Bromfield Camera was nearby, and I ran, crossing streets and dodging pedestrians. There were three gentlemen behind the counters in Bromfield Camera, good friends, two up at my end of the age scale, and one way down at the other end of the scale, and we joked. “I’m in danger of getting wet.” Being New Englanders, they said that was impossible, that it wasn’t really raining hard enough, you know, to actually wet someone. I told them I needed a plastic bag to protect my camera. We talked about the Supreme Court.

The younger one said, “Now that we have gay marriage with all the federal benefits—” He paused. “Will you marry me?”

Everybody laughed. I said, “Sure. If this doesn’t work out with C, then I’ll marry you.”  C and I have been testing this out for the last 23 years, so I think this may last. But it was nice to be asked. 
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Gay men, gay women, the truth, and the Supreme Court (3)

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What we are looking at here is a developing definition of gay man that is very porous. There isn’t really such a thing. Alfred Kinsey collected data on sexual histories that resulted in his creation of a seven point scale in which he said everyone could be placed. Most men in the population can be placed in the 0 column “if they make no physical contacts which result in [homosexual] erotic arousal [...].” On the other hand, men can be placed in the 6 column “if they are exclusively homosexual, both in regard to their overt experience and in regard to their psychic reactions.” [p. 639-641]  A man can be placed in 4 column “if they have more overt activity and/or psychic reactions in the homosexual, while still maintaining a fair amount of heterosexual arousal activity [...].” Other more recent scientists have created vastly expanded scales by which to measure human sexual activity, and there are scales that attempt to measure psychic activity of a person engaging in sex, but they have not created anything that successfully attacked Kinsey’s work. [See Kinsey, The Measure of All Things, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1998, p.450-452 ]

Today, we are in a peculiar situation. Our science comes from Kinsey and his heirs, and our politics comes from the Sixties, the Stonewall Riots, and the Gay Liberation Front’s cry, Come out! The cry has nothing to do with the accumulation of accurate data. If you are a Republican Member of Congress and are caught having sex with a man in some restroom somewhere, it may be because you are generally always wanting a man but haven’t ever told anybody, or it may be that you have never wanted a man before now. What is clear is that the self-definition “I am gay” or “I am straight” are independent of the specifics of your sexual history—that is, independent of the data drawn from you. Either “I am gay” or “I am straight” may be true without regard to the data drawn from you that may define you as a Kinsey 1 or a Kinsey 3 or a Kinsey 5 or some other designation. 

And now, tomorrow the Supreme Court is going to rule on the marriage cases, and somewhere in the Court’s decision may be a reference to the phrase “gay people,” and the Justices will not be referring to the science of the incidence of sex. The Justices will not make reference to the percentage of gay people in the culture or they will make reference to “ten percent” of us who are gay, but this will be thrown into the opinion without much regard for where it comes from. As far as gay people are concerned, the justices might as well be making up their opinions out of whole cloth. We will be able to get married, or we won’t be able to get married, depending on factors that don’t have much or anything to do with us. We will enter into relationships which are monogamous—or not—based on factors that don’t have anything to do with the Supreme Court. They don’t know us. Only occasionally, when one or some of us drift into the same petri dish as something they are familiar with are they able to get us partly right. Biologically male. Well yey. But most of the time, they don’t know much about what is valuable to us or what drives us. And when the lawyer in Massachusetts said, “Gay people just want the same thing straight people want,” the lawyer said something that was manifestly untrue. 

I’ve written about all this before, when there was a run of court cases at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. Follow this link. Things have not gotten better since then, and the danger is greater, because this time the court is the Supreme Court. I wrote then, “We can now see that the intellectual foundations of the future are being constructed. I don’t just mean the legal constitutional structures that are going to control how we are going to fit into the body of the republic, but also the emotional and psychological structures that will control the way we think about ourselves. The concept of “gay people” is congealing and solidifying.” And it is almost certain that they are getting it wrong. We are not like that. We are not like straight people. We don’t divide our sexuality among three options.

Why do it, then? It’s fun, it’s heart-warming, it makes it easier to live together in our culture, it’s great to feel the warmth and approval—and love—of friends and family, which is sustaining during hard times, and it is a public expression of what I feel for C, my partner. Gay people, even those who get married, should remind themselves and each other that their relationships were just fine before they decided to get married, that marriage brings financial advantages and the approval of the community but does not make their relationship better, and that marriage does not make those who undergo it better in any way than those who don’t. Nor are those who have children. And they don’t conduct their relationships better than those who don’t. 

In a moment when “marriage” may be vastly expanded, it is essential to remember all those during all those years who were in love but who were never married.
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Gay men, gay women, the truth, and the Supreme Court (2)

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When I was growing up, everybody around me—my parents, my grandparents, my sister and brother, my cousins, my scoutmaster, my teachers, the priest, politicians—thought the same way about how I was feeling. I was definitely aroused by men and by particular aspects of men’s bodies, and when I started becoming aware of this, I was aware that I should absolutely not tell anybody else what I knew. My whole culture condemned me for feeling the way I felt. Today I remember how it felt to feel something and to know that everybody thought I was feeling the wrong thing or that I was wrong to feel the way I felt. Part of what I wanted, after I divorced my wife and moved to Boston, was the right to feel without being condemned. It was years after I moved to Boston before I first began to know what it felt like to have my own feelings and to know that other people around me felt those same feelings or respected those feelings. 

What was needed—and I didn’t know this when I was in my twenties—was some change in the culture that allowed it to accept and to reinforce the feelings I had. At the time, I thought we needed to address the places in the law that prevented me from serving in the Armed Forces or, later, that prevented me from getting married, or that taxed me differently from straight people,  or that prevented me from getting into bed with a man without being afraid that I was going to end up in jail. But as we have moved toward success in those areas, we also have had to address the fact that our culture for years has refused to give me and others like me the elemental acceptance of our feelings. This was much more complex than my need for my culture to accept the way I felt about men’s arms. It was a need for the culture to accept my sense of the impermanence of feelings—what I both felt and learned—and my sense that love was not the same thing as sex, and that much of the impermanence of heterosexual marriages and the cause of the high divorce rate among straight people was the consequence of the heterosexual culture always seeming to think that sex was love. What was needed was for us to tell the larger culture what our life was like, to say it over and over again and then to expect the straight world to take seriously everything we said. Taking the Stonewall Riots as a plan, we needed to demand respect.

What makes a gay man is a serious question, and the four men, and two women (one adult woman and one fifteen-year-old girl) in Adam in the Morning don’t agree on an answer. They don’t argue about it—they love one another and respect one another and so don’t argue about most things—but they do discuss. Belle, for example, backs away from her proposal:

‘I think I may get pregnant without asking any of you for help. I don’t want to be in a position of asking any of you men to give up being gay, even for a minute, so I can get pregnant.’
[Bo answers] ‘Belle, there is no brick wall between gay and straight. Being gay is not something you can give up, no matter what you do, but it’s also not something that governs every single sex act and thought you engage in.’ [Belle and Bo in conversation, Tuesday afternoon, on the roof, Adam in the Morning, Adriana Books, 2010]

If the affection among these folks is strong enough, he may do it, on the other hand he may not, and he’ll tell us what he’ll do and what he won’t, which is the way it should be, and we will respect him.

The courts don’t want to allow this. Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which declared that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, also declared marriage in the Commonwealth to be “a voluntary union of two persons, as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.” But we, not so committed to the identity of sex and love, know that we can have commitment and  love without monogamy, and so even though we can now have marriage in the Commonwealth, it is marriage defined by the Justices of the Supreme Judicial Court and is not ours, not defined by us or by our experience.

In the Commonwealth, the Chief Justice defined marriage in a way that conflicts with the feelings and the actions of a significant number of gay people. We’ve been here before. We’re being told, “We’re going to let you do this. These are the rules.” I expect what will happen is that we will vote with our feet, gradually changing in new and unexpected ways the institutions we now are getting legal access to. Until we change marriage, we will have to live with another version of what we lived under from my birth in 1940 to my heterosexual marriage in 1964, a dishonest contract, imposed from outside.
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Waldman on Towleroad on Supreme Court (6)

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In this video (one of “Law Talks” that I have just discovered), Ari discusses the effect of the decisions already announced on the decisions not announced and on the drive of gay people for equality. Watch it here.
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Waldman on Towleroad on Supreme Court (5)

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Ari Ezra Waldman has a post up on Towleroad about  the implications of the affirmative action decision and its implications for the marriage cases tomorrow.  The post can be read here.
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Monday, June 24, 2013

Waldman on Towleroad on Supreme Court (4)

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Ari Ezra Waldman and Towleroad published the fourth post in the run-up to the Supreme Court decisions this week. He gives us eight things to keep in mind when we read the decisions. Here is the link.
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Sunday, June 23, 2013

Gay men, gay women, the truth, and the Supreme Court (1)

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It’s at the end of the last, the third, night of the fighting, people are drifting away, some of them to go down to the piers for sex and some to the trucks, but our guys are still sitting on the high stoop next door to the Stonewall, watching and listening to things dying down. It’s the end of the novel, Adam in the Morning, and our guys—it’s all guys because Belle, who wants help from the guys to get pregnant left a few minutes ago, and Mitzi, a fifteen-year-old homeless girl who has been on the front lines of the fighting for three nights has gone back to her gang—turn their attention to final things. What now? 

“Our guys” are Bo, a carpenter at the local repertory theatre, his lover Andrew who is a waiter and a writer who writes from a radical leftist perspective for counter-culteral rags and is strong, tough, brilliant, Joseph, an actor who has just come from the West Coast and has experience with the best Black Arts Theatre in America and wants to move in with Bo and Andrew and plays Caliban in a Village repertory theatre, Bo’s straight brother Billy up from Houston to help Bo in the fighting, and Gus, the youngest and prettiest of them, a fighter from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore and also an actor, who plays Ariel. These men address the question, What do we need to put our energies into now?

“Besides, guys, we need to take time this summer to look at the question Andrew raised,” Joseph says.
“What’s that? I’ve forgotten.”
“The obvious one, the most basic one of all.”
“And what’s that?”
“Why this one. Andrew asked it this morning on the sidewalk, going to get Billy’s tickets.” Andrew is enjoying this. “What are we? What is a gay man? What is he for?”
Everyone laughs.
“I’m serious, guys. That’s the most important question of all. And we don’t know the answer to it, either.” (a couple of pages before the end of Adam in the Morning)
 
It was something their gang had been talking off and on about since the beginning of the riots.  What is a gay man? Someone who has sex with men. That’s for one thing. Everything seems to follow from that, but Bo has been invited to have sex with Belle and father her child. Is he still gay? How much sex with women can a gay man have before he stops being gay? And, of course, Republican lawmakers raise the question, How much sex with men can a Republican have before he stops being straight, or a Republican? Bo Ravich, the narrator of Adam in the Morning, doesn’t want to take that approach to the problem. “I can do what I want. I’m free.” It’s the Sixties in Adam in the Morning, and freedom is a powerful symbol. I want to be free.  

The question of a gay man—what is he? is important right now in this week between June 21 and June 28, 2013, because a week from today, at the latest, the Supreme Court is going to deliver its judgments in the marriage cases, and it is unlikely that their decisions are going to even mention the science around the answer to the question, What is a gay man? The science around the question studies the behavior of a man like those in Bo’s group. The actual behavior of gay men on the street is not going to figure in the Supreme Court’s decision. It is also unlikely that the Justices are going to mention the politics around the question. The politics around that question divide humanity into two or more groups, name them, and then determine appropriate behavior for each. It is unlikely that the Supreme Court is going to recognize that there is a politics around this question. That means that, however the cases are decided this week, things are going to be more complicated afterward than they are now. This is always the way when great decisions are made while ignoring great bodies of knowledge.

The quoted passage is from the ebook Adam in the Morning, Adriana Books, 2010, which is available from Adriana Books (www.dwightcathcart.net)
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Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
I am gay. I have a partner, called "C" in this blog. I have children and grandchildren, and I like cities.

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