by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Thursday, February 28, 2013

The gifts of time

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I lived in New York for most of 1963, and one of my best friends was an actress, three years older than I, who had a major part in a major soap broadcast from New York. She was my cousin, and we had much the same background in South Carolina—conservative family and a desire to leave the South. The actress lived with an antiques dealer who had a shop on the East Side. The antiques dealer came from Mississippi, and her family owned a plantation. The three of us sat up many nights, drinking too much, talking about ourselves, our families, politics,  and about America at the beginning of the Sixties. We enjoyed being together, going out to dinner, to the movies, and to the theatre. We supported each other. They were gay, but at that time, and in my cousins’s profession, it was difficult for any of us to come out, even to each other. They are both dead now.

This morning, the headline on the front page of The Boston Globe, read, “Firms call Defense of Marriage Act unfair.” The lede read, “Nearly 300 companies and business groups across the country, including many prominent Massachusetts firms, are asking the US Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, saying it forces them to discriminate against married gay employees.” In the next paragraph, the article says, “A who’s who of corporate America signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief filed Wednesday.” I was astonished that a who’s who of corporate America could be brought together to support such a goal. But as the day went on and I thought more about these events, I began to think about the people who would have been even more astonished than I at such at a headline and grief-stricken that they had not lived to see it. 

I know plenty of people who didn’t live to see what’s happening now, who fought for it but who died before we were this close to victory. The slow march of time presents us with one victory after another, and that same march takes down one friend after another. What we hope for is that we will accumulate more victories than defeats. For decades in many of our lives, it has been just the other way around. My friend the student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, coming from Pride one year, said to me, “They are all celebrating, but I don’t know what there is to celebrate.” He had AIDS, and he saw his life dribbling away at a faster rate than science was accumulating cures. He understood very clearly that he was in a race, and he suspected that he was going to lose that race, and the expression on his face, every day, said, hurry hurry.

So, on a day like today, with a headline like today’s in The Boston Globe, and thinking of the actress and the antiques dealer in New York and that art student in Boston, I know the meaning of bittersweet.
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Friday, February 22, 2013

What we demand

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The papers and the web have been full of news about Barnes & Noble—they’re cutting back on the number of their bookstores—with analyses on why that has happened and what this means for the future. I went by B&N today and was told our local, intown B&N is one of the biggest and most profitable bookstores in that whole chain. The employee told me that the Boston B&N, along with one or two others, are sure to survive if the company survives. 

I was at B&N to talk to an employee about the Nook, B&N’s reader, and about putting my books on the Nook. I was aware that what I was talking about was one of the cultural shifts that was driving these big bookstores out of business. They were being polite to me and helpful, but the fact remains that I am writing books and selling them directly to the public, and there are no New York publishers or booksellers involved. I suspect there is not room in the playing field for B&N and for me too. And the straits that B&N and other booksellers find themselves in today is a result of the many book buyers who have been dissatisfied with the job that book sellers have been doing these many years. The corporate structure of many of these big booksellers has prevented them from responding to the market so as to continually offer interesting and important literary works. Money talks, and the booksellers have needed to sell books that are big sellers.

The ecology of publishing—finders, agents, publishers, booksellers and the industry built around the fact that books, once printed, need to be stored and shipped and distributed—is big money, so publishing finds it more profitable to publish one book selling one million copies than to publish one hundred books selling 10,000 copies each. The effect of this kind of fiscal structure is that minorities—people like us, gay people—are placed at particular risk. We don’t produce many books that sell enough copies to make it profitable enough for big publishers to publish a wide range of books for us. And so, after decades, smaller minorities stop going to the big publishers when they want certain kinds of books. It is like the markets for certain kinds of popular music and for independent movies. Some moviegoers haven’t been to a big-budget movie in decades.

The publishers and the booksellers have turned away from us and left us to our own devices. As it happens, our device of choice is the reader, the iPad, the Nook, the Kindle and the others. Now, what’s left is for us to loosen the grip the readers have on the publisher’s bookstores. It is possible to find books for readers that don’t come from publisher’s bookstores. The manufacturers of our readers—Apple, Amazon, and B&N—don’t make this easy, but we can learn how to find these books, and we can learn how to put them on our readers. By doing so, we can gain control of our reading again. And this will happen: if we use our freedom to find the books being written for us, then writers, knowing we are out there, will write their books for us and for our readers, and those books will be interesting and important, because that’s what we demand. 
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Monday, February 11, 2013

Interesting times

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Race Point Light doesn’t end when the narrator comes out. Like most LGBT persons, the narrator of Race Point Light still has at least half a lifetime to live after he moves into the gay community. He has things to do. He has to find a way to live. He has to support himself and has to choose a place to live where he can connect with a gay community and where he can continue to be in contact with his children. He has to find out which of the friends from the first half of his life will also do for the last half. What relatives does he still have? And he has to do all these things in a world where AIDS has taken hold, where the president of the United States, a pleasant, grandfatherly type, smiling, says it’s “Morning in America,” while LGBT persons, almost every one of them, would agree that our culture is fast approaching midnight. This is only partially a novel about the culture of the US. It moves through the forties to the first decade of the twentieth century, when gay men and women started marrying legally for the first time, but that’s not where the focus is. We’re reading about a man determined to think well of himself and at least one of his goals while a teenager and young adult is to find out how. As a young person, he is not ready to be a rebel—what his cultures, gay and straight, offer him is alternatively seductive and repellant—until he tries their offerings and finds them to be failures. He is ready to create a new life. He gets off the Interstate down from Maine Labor Day, 1984, and finds himself in the middle of AIDS. 

“Coming out” is a theme that occupies the narrator all through his life. He asks questions. What is it? How do I do it? When? Where? I am out now, but I don’t remember how I got here. He wonders, Is the question of Coming out too steeped in sixties radical politics to be applicable to anybody’s life in 2004?

Race Point Light is a big novel, epic in scope, a narrative of a culture in crisis, and yet the focus is intensely on the narrator, who thinks about the intimate issues of his life and lays them out for the reader to see and feel and understand, and who moves toward a quiet resolution. He moves in no strict chronological order from Commercial Street in Provincetown in 2002 to the South Carolina beach when he is three or four years old to Race Point beach, when he is sixty-five, moving from idea to idea, wars, the deaths of presidents, impeachment and conviction, presidential indifference to his obligation to attend to the health of citizens, the scandal surrounding the discovery of the AIDS virus, feeling and understanding the impact of events in his culture. It is a giant novel about what the narrator comes to see is the most interesting—and powerfully important—sixty years for gay people in all of western history. Race Point Light is a fascinating, absorbing story, alternating between large scenes and intimate, small scenes like a single man crossing Arlington Street alone in Boston, late at night, in deep snow, considering the meaning of the Serenity Prayer. Race Point Light has the fascination of some kinds of gossip, where the person speaking is someone we trust and is willing to tell all she knows.

And yet, all she knows, since this is an autobiographical novel, not only suggests everything about a person we could know, it suggests a serious and comprehensive narrative about the whole culture of the United States during the last half of the twentieth century, its successes and its catastrophic failures. The narrator of Race Point Light says, in Provincetown in 2004, “We’ve lived in interesting times, for a gay man the most interesting times of all. It may be that there haven’t been, since the beginning of the earth, a more interesting sixty years than 1940 to now for gay people.”

You can read Race Point Light about this man and his interesting times by going to http://www.dwightcathcart.net. There you can buy an ebook copy of Race Point Light for your iPad, Nook or Kindle. We’ve moved on from print editions.
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Designed by Edward Wharton.