by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

The promise of the future

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The press has not gotten over it. The president, in his inaugural address, included Stonewall in the short list of significant moments in the great civil rights movements in this country. He said, “Seneca and Selma and Stonewall.” Seneca Falls, New York, was a town where, in 1848, there was a convention of women who effectively started the women's suffrage movement. Selma happened during our lifetime and was the town in Alabama where Martin Luther King began a march to Montgomery. This march would demand explanation for the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, an unarmed voting rights demonstrator, and publicize the need for a new Voting Rights Act. As the demonstrators marched out of Selma, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, they crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge. They could see the end of the bridge and a crowd of cops and of state police waiting there. The marchers knew they would be beaten if they proceeded. They proceeded, and the police attacked the unarmed marchers. All this was caught on film and televised nationally. “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, became one of the great defeats of southern segregationists. Selma became the staging ground for two more marches later in the week, with the number of marchers increasing from 525 in the first march, to 8,000 in the third. In response, President Lyndon Johnson and the Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

To these grand and compelling images in the American consciousness, President Obama has now added a third, Stonewall, reminding Americans that the movement for gay rights began at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York, on the night of June 28, 1969, and with the Stonewall Riots, which occurred when New York police raided the Stonewall and arrested customers, and gay people fought back. Many say this is the beginning of gay liberation. This is thrilling. 

Everybody noticed what Obama had done, as soon as the word was out of his mouth. He listed Stonewall with Seneca Falls and Selma! The press specifically focussed on the fact that Obama "used the word gay!" Talking heads kept saying on all the networks, No president has ever done that before. The talking heads fooled around with what that meant. These talking heads were principally straight people, so what they had to say had all the subtlety of white people, in 1965, whispering in the Court House in Selma when a black citizen walked in to register. Now the gay community is weighing in on what Obama did and on what it feels like to have the President of the United States refer to our iconic moment of revolution. I would say, for one thing, it is hard to feel like a revolutionary  when the president takes our moment of revolution and makes it his own.

But there is something else. We have long since forgotten the anguish and struggle and pain that caused Seneca Falls and Selma to be what they are today in the national memory. Today we remember mainly the heroism of the women and of black Americans, and those who opposed them hardly matter anymore. We remember these times and these places as triumphs in movements that changed America. 

So, what Obama did in his speech—by putting us where he did—was to make an implicit promise to gay people, that there will come a time when those who opposed us most of my life will be hardly remembered, and gay people, instead of being seen as deviates who demanded way too much, will be remembered for their heroism. That's the promise contained in his putting us where he put us in his address. We will finally end as feminists and civil rights demonstrators have ended—as American heroes. 

A person with a long memory may remember with what skepticism I have thought of "American heroes." I don't like the concept very much. But when our President, an African-American himself of mixed race parentage, tells us that this is how we are going to be remembered and puts us in such company, I am willing to accept his promise with gratitude. 
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Monday, January 21, 2013

We are where we belong

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Barack Obama said this today:

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”
and Stonewall. 
We knew Stonewall belonged in that list. We just didn’t know they knew it. Now we know they know, and that’s entirely new.
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Saturday, January 19, 2013

Leave Jodie alone! Leave Manti alone!

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First everybody jumped all over Jodie Foster for waiting so long to come out and for not saying what everybody thought she ought to have said, because there were all those people she could have helped (see here, and here), and now there is the mystery around Manti Te’o, which led at least some people this week to say this man is gay and to turn a “mystery” into a scandal and then into a judgment in which Te’o is said to be closeted and using a desperately sick woman as his “beard” and for not helping all those people he could have helped (see ¨here and here, this last as an aid of those who have trouble with pronunciation). 

Our culture—both gay and straight—makes it clear that we admire gay people who come out and who are not closeted. The more prominent they are—an actor in maybe a third of the greatest American films since the early seventies or a Notre Dame linebacker up for the Heisman and a pro career—the more we demand that they come out and “help everybody else.” We don’t like it when a person, Hollywood royalty-style, hides behind her privilege or maybe uses a fake girlfriend to keep everyone from knowing he is gay. We want to believe that gay people are heroic fighters for freedom.

But, independent of the needs of the gay community, an individual gay person has needs too, among which is the need to protect her privacy during forty-five years of celebrity and the need to grow up a little when you’re only twenty-one, almost twenty-two. Our needs are not the preeminent ones, always.

Coming out and being heroic was never the only stance for gay people anyway. Gay people have always been able to make their contribution by living their lives and getting on with the business of it, making clear the nature of their sexuality only to the people who need to know, which was certainly always Jodie Foster’s case. Just because we are gay doesn’t mean we have lost our right to privacy. These cases—and Michelle Obama’s case too, with the criticism of her being mom-in-chief instead of coming out as a major corporate lawyer—show our exaggerated need for heroic fighters. A major actor! a major and good-looking football player! We don’t need this. Leave Jodie alone. Leave Te’o alone. Let them do what they want to do. Come out or not, or come out in any way they want. And we can say, always and welcomingly, There’s always a place for you here when you feel it’s right. 
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Monday, January 14, 2013

Watch it, our freedom grows, inch by inch

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News important to gay readers came this week. Andrew Sullivan and his blog The Daily Dish have left The Beast and have struck out on their own. Henceforth, without what Sullivan calls a “sugar daddy” to pay the bills and without advertisements, Sullivan will host his own blog, supporting himself with contributions from his readers, who will be asked to pay $19.99 for a year’s worth of access to content. Out of the money he collects from his subscribers, he is going to pay his own salary, the salaries of five staff members, and other expenses of publishing his blog. The reason this is important to gay people is that Sullivan is cutting out all the gatekeepers—all the big publishers and papers—and showing a gay person how to gain  direct access to readers.  This would be incredibly liberating, if it works.

Sullivan’s plan raises a question—Would it be good for journalism and for the rest of us as readers? Would the end product be better than the product produced by a reporter working under the umbrella of the whole NY Times editorial structure? Would we end up with better material to read? For gay people, more different kinds of writing would be available to readers, and gay readers would have access to a broader range of writing.

There are writers all across the English-speaking world who are following Sullivan’s adventure—newspaper reporters, because they wonder if this is going to be one more nail in the coffin of print journalism, and bloggers and writers because, if Sullivan can do it, maybe they can do it. 

I used to read Andrew Sullivan, beginning ten or twelve years ago. I was impressed that he had been editor of The New Republic, he wrote well, and he was gay. But I quit reading him during the first Bush administration because he was too conservative. See the screed by Mark Ames in the Daily Banter. His interest in racial intelligence, among other things, seemed way out of the American mainstream.

Now he’s moved left and offers us a plan that may prove that the internet can be a source of freedom for many of us.  It may be possible for us to free ourselves of The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and Random House and Vanguard and Penguin and all the rest of the big gatekeepers. Gay people have been shut out for much of the twentieth century by the big gatekeepers, who say, even now, that the market for gay books has “vanished,” or “collapsed,” and who publish only those books that will fit their business plan for their corporations. But what has vanished is the ability of gay readers to find serious gay fiction. It may be that, if more intelligent gay books are offered to the public, the gay reader will return to booksellers, this time on the web.

It may actually be possible to make this work for us. 
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Monday, January 7, 2013

We can't forget our past

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Here, at the beginning of the year, it is important to remember several things. First, those who suffered during the years we spent in the wilderness. No matter how many victories we experience during this year 2013, we are still going to be living among our LGBT brothers and sisters who spent most of their lives not living with victories, but living instead with one defeat after another. Our brothers and sisters lived through the long time between the Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, 1986, which gave federal constitutional support for sodomy laws, and Lawrence v. Texas, 2003, which voided all sodomy laws, and lived with the effects of the Defense of Marriage Act, passed and signed in 1996, and lived with the effects of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (1993) until 2011, when the act was repealed. Each of these three laws affected the LGBT communities, but what isn’t said much is that the fact they were enacted put a stigma on the individual gay people, whether or not he or she chose to engage in any kind of sex—the sodomy laws stigmatized our thoughts—or wanted to join the armed forces, and so these laws were damaging to all of us. In a time of great change, it is critical that we remember what our past has been like, and that we remember those who suffered and were damaged by the stigma we bore. 

Second, we are not out of the wilderness yet. Children are the most vulnerable of us. Forty percent of homeless youth are LGBT and forty-six percent of homeless youth are homeless because their parents rejected them and their sexuality. These data are from a study made practically yesterday—between October 2011 and March 2012. Abusive teaching of LGBT youth, rejection by their families and by city relief organizations, homeless, on the streets of large cities, too young and with no skills to sell, many of them turn to hustling. The suicides of LGBT youth, random acts of violence against LGBT people, and repeals of congressional acts and Supreme Court decisions in our favor aren’t going to change these things, at least for a number of years. All bigotry is not going to go away. After all, much of what has driven national politics in the last four years is racism directed at our President. Why should gay people think that a congressional act or a Supreme Court decision is going to make our lives perfect?

Third, we are being assimilated into the culture of marriage. This assimilation is dangerous. See here and here and here. On the other hand, this week, there is this which is wonderful to read. It’s a study that shows something that many gay people have known: non-monogamous couples are as happy as other couples. We already know this, and during this time when we are being assimilated so quickly, it is good to be reminded of it. Let’s hang on to ourselves.

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