by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, March 31, 2013

How are we winning this thing?

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All this is getting hard to take. Chris Matthews was just addressing the question, Why have numbers changed so quickly in favor of equal marriage? His answer and the answer of his guests, was that it had to do with the numbers of gay people who have come out. Every straight body, it seems, knows a person who is gay, and it becomes increasingly difficult to deny basic human rights to someone so familiar. Coming out, in this view, is a tactic for fighting the homophobia of straight people. 

I don’t believe a word of it. We all know gay men and women who came out years ago—some in their teens, some since then—and whose biological families have treated them like shit, with bigotry and hatred, and who have continued to do so for decades. The people who knew these gay men and women best were completely unaffected by knowing them. 

In Maine, during the summer of 1984, after the murder of Charles Howard, the local newspaper considered the options available to the community to restore calm and order. The paper acknowledged that many people in the city of Bangor, Maine, just wanted gay people now marching through the streets of the city“to return to the closet.” But what are citizens to do, the paper questioned, “if gay people will not go back into the closet?” 

That gets it exactly right. It is emphatically not true that gay people, coming out, will change the hearts and minds of bigoted citizens. But if we come out and then refuse to go back in again, if we pursue our own course, if we know what we want, and if we fight relentlessly for it, then, then, we can grasp victory. 

This is what has been happening for the last forty years or more. Men and women have come out, and then have refused to go back in. They have fought relentlessly for the things that matter to them. And they have never given in. The whole history of the marriage equality movement is a testament to our perseverance. The fight started in Hawaii in 1993 and moved on for the next twenty years to the sequence of states that have adopted marriage equality since Massachusetts adopted it in 2004. This happened because the gay people who were out were relentless and refused to give up and fought for it year after year after year. We have had more stamina than our opponents. It is likely that we have been clearer about our goals than our opponents. We have been smarter about tactics, and wiser about choosing our allies.

We fought, and gradually the American people have joined us, not because they were finally getting to know gay men and women and found us sweet—we have been their brothers and sisters and their sons and daughters and their fathers and their mothers and their husbands and their wives for the last several hundred years—but because what they began to know about us was that we were fighters and that we wouldn’t give up. We will never give up. Being nice and unthreatening had no part of it. We had a better goal, a clearer goal, and we had better lawyers, and, as the Times said of the New York victory, bigger donors. 

In the years since Stonewall, if we have come out, I suspect it was to find a more comfortable and safe place for ourselves. My own motivation for divorcing my wife and moving to Boston didn’t have anything to do with the gay community’s needing me in the fight against the straight world.  And that is right. But that made me fight harder and more effectively for my causes. And none of this had anything to do with straight people. The fight, the parameters of the fight, the definition of all the terms, the way we were going to fight, and the people we were going to fight with, had long been defined before the gay community had accumulated a significant number of straight allies. We did this for ourselves. 
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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

The Supreme Court, Tuesday Morning

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On Towleroad, you can read Ari Ezra Waldman, their resident legal expert, about whom they say, Ari Ezra Waldman teaches at Brooklyn Law School and is concurrently getting his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College and a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School. His research focuses on technology, privacy, speech, and gay rights. Ari will be writing weekly posts on law and various LGBT issues. You can follow him on Twitter at @ariezrawaldman.

Ari has been writing for Towleroad for several years, giving commentary on the legal issues and the court cases the LGBT communities have been going through during the past several years. I recommend him.

You can now (at 3:51, Mar 26, 2013) read his entire two-part analysis of the questioning this morning in the Supreme Court. It’s wonderful, and it’s very reassuring. Read this.

And if, like many people, you get a little overwhelmed by lawyers arguing with one another, you might remember what Frederick Douglas said:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
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Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Criticisms of Will Portman

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Will Portman came out to his father, Senator Portman, Republican of Ohio, in 2011, which caused his father to announce this week that he had changed his beliefs on marriage equality. Since then we have had a heated debate over coming out and over whether Senator Portman should be admired for changing his views. The culture’s confusions over these issues obscure the debate, which isn’t leading us anywhere.

Many people say that any recruit to our side in the marriage equality debate is always a good thing. Others add that the Senator should have changed his mind about marriage equality based on legal or constitutional arguments, not his emotional closeness to his son, or that he should have done it years before. Many Republicans seem to believe that there is no good reason for changing your mind about marriage equality. 

Today, Josh Barro, the chief writer for the blog The Ticker, on Bloomberg News, puts up a post in which he argues that Will Portman is not to be thanked or admired for coming out because he had in fact done his duty. Listen to this:

This is why coming out is a duty: Every time a gay or lesbian person demands acceptance, they make it easier for others to do the same. We have the power to change people's political and personal attitudes toward gays simply by being present and known to be gay; we can only exercise that power if we come out.

This is an argument that Harvey Milk gave powerful expression to before he was assassinated. Milk said, 

Gay brothers and sisters, you must come out. Come out to your parents ... Come out to your relatives. Come out to your friends, if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors, to your fellow workers, to the people who work where you eat and shop. Come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake.

This is an argument that has been put forward by leaders in the LGBT community for the last forty years. But there is something wrong with this. Both Barro and Milk understand that the burdens of coming out don’t fall on everybody equally. Barro when he came out:

Announcing that you’re gay in a wealthy family in a progressive suburb of Boston as you’re about to enter Harvard University is a pretty easy hand to play.

People are different and they are in different circumstances, and the gay community should not set up any general rules that condemn men and women who are different. There are many different ways of not coming out, just as there are many different reasons. If you can come out, fine. If you can’t, or don’t want to, that’s fine too. We’ll still love you. And for god’s sake, stop accusing people who don’t come out of not being honest with themselves, or of lying.   

I think we have a pretty good thing going here in the GLBT community. We don’t need to force  people to join us (if you don’t come out, we’ll say you’re lying). You’re going to be welcome here when you do decide to join us.
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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Melville, Faulkner, Shakespeare, me

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Reading Moby Dick when I was seventeen made me want to write novels. Absalom, Absalom! had the same effect. I majored in English literature in college, and I went to New York and wrote for a year. A friend said, “The trouble is, you don’t know anything about what you’re writing about.” Bingo.

I didn’t know how to learn how to do what I wanted to do. I went to graduate school, concentrated in the English Renaissance Lyric and wrote a dissertation on John Donne. This was the early sixties.

I got married—it was a way of resolving the conflict in my life—had children, was teaching in a university, and finally decided I had to start over on everything but the children. After a long time, I left the university and left my marriage, and in my last summer before moving to Boston, a young friend of mine was murdered by homophobes. His name was Charles Howard.

During the summer after Charles Howard’s death in 1984, we all were coming out and organizing politically, and experiencing grief at Charles Howard’s death, and we knew all of this was important. We were doing on a local level what writers were writing about on a national level, creating a gay community. I had read enough to know that our history was important to gay people. A major effort of the women’s movement and the black civil rights movement had been to recover their history, and I thought we should write this down, the events of that summer of 1984, to prevent them from being lost.

When I started I found I was writing a Faulkner novel. I was a southerner, and most novels by southerners since Faulkner sounded something like Faulkner. A friend said, “Please don’t go on this way.” I kept at it for a year, then quit, unable to go on. Finally, one night I was in a meeting, and I heard a man talking about himself and his experiences, and the hurt his experience had caused him, and I realized, that’s the voice I need in my novel. I went home and started to write again. I wrote, This is what happened on Saturday, the day of the dance. And after that, I never stopped. I kept writing, hearing that voice in my head talking of the pain he had experienced. I knew about this. This became Ceremonies.

This is what had happened. Without knowing I was doing it, I had taught myself how to write. The years in college, in graduate school, teaching Shakespeare every year, and all the books I had read. I had completed my apprenticeship and when the time was right, when I witnessed an event to write about—the murder of Charles Howard—I was ready to write about it.  And I could do it my way. I knew how to do it because I had read all those books and taught all those classes and had all that experience. I never thought about how Faulkner did it. I didn’t think ever about the New York publishing industry. I thought, nobody else has ever written a book like this, and I’ll write it first, and after I’ve finished it, I’ll show it to the publishers.

There must be other ways to get to where a person has to be to be able to write. I think I had to spend a very long time in my apprenticeship before actually beginning to write. I suspect that other writers can pick up what they need to know sooner, earlier, maybe better. But one of the effects of a long apprenticeship is that I learned the things that are necessary. Shakespeare taught me how to start a scene and to tell a story with a lot of characters. Melville and Faulkner taught me how to tell a story characterized by high moral seriousness. I don’t think I know it all even now, but I’m on my way.

As it happened, the publishers didn’t want to see my books. My subject—gay men and women fighting back—was one they were not accustomed to dealing with. Even some gay readers were not accustomed to such stories. But it was a good subject, a necessary one, and my book was needed, so I kept on. After Ceremonies, I wrote two subsequent novels, Race Point Light, about a man fighting back during his whole life, and Adam in the Morning, about the Stonewall riots. All three of these books were about their times. What it was like to be gay in 1984 in a small town in Maine, or gay in the West Village in New York in late June 1969, or a nomad and gay between about 1950 and 2005 determined to find a place in America. I ended up publishing these novels on the web as ebooks, unencumbered by the power of the publishing industry to limit our freedom to read the subjects powerful and true to us. I learned in my long apprenticeship how critically important a literature is to a community—serious books apprehended seriously that reflect back to a community its facts, its history, its concerns, attitudes, myths and legends, and so become what they imagined. 
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Wednesday, March 6, 2013

It's not that they were so nice, it was that we were such good fighters

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At every step forward in this long process, we should stop and consider how we got here. We didn’t get here because we were polite and our opponents were kind. We got here because we were tough, relentless, and fierce. We got here because we knew our stuff and our opponents were merely driven by hatred. We had tough lawyers—all of them—and we mastered whole libraries of studies of various kinds proving that we’re OK. And, as the New York Times said after the NY legislature voted in marriage equality for that state, “it was clear the church had been outmaneuvered by the highly organized same-sex marriage coalition, with its sprawling field team, and, especially, it’s Wall Street donors.”

In my last posting, “The gifts of time,” I wrote about that day’s Boston Globe, whose lead article’s headline was “Firms call Defense of Marriage Act unfair.” This did not happen because corporate America suddenly decided gay people were wonderful employees and it didn’t want to be mean to its gay employees. Gay people have always been good employees. Those employees have been letting their employers know for years that they wanted to be treated like all the other employees. Instead corporate America has read the future, which was decades of lawsuits from employees demanding to be treated like other employees. We got to this point after suing successfully to have sodomy laws overturned and to have Colorado’s Prop 2 overturned. We got to this point after suing for equal marriage rights in courts at all levels on both coasts and the middle of America, and winning. Even soldiers are marrying each other, and kissing each other on the mouth on the front pages of the national press, and the republic hasn’t fallen and everybody is pretty much over being shocked or even amazed. Every poll says the people are speaking on this issue moment by moment, and the majorities in favor are getting larger and larger with every poll. Corporate America has suddenly realized it had better get in step and catch up. The amicus brief that prompted the Boston Globe’s article was an act of self-defense on the part of corporate America. The last thing corporate America wants is to be separated from its customers. I think corporate America can see the future: When gay people get finished with the courts and the legislatures, they will start with individual companies and organizations—the recent history of gay people and Chic-Fil-A and Boy Scouts of America springs to mind—and I would think that no American organization wants that. The BSA have ended up on the other side of the argument from the Army, for God’s sake. 

It didn’t happen because any of those corporations who signed that amicus brief were nice people who had reverence for the Constitution of the United States. They are still driven principally by greed. These victories we are experiencing right now are coming out that way because we are tough and we’re good fighters and we don’t give up. Ever. We have good lawyers, and we have big donors, and we know how to get organized. It’s a winning combination.
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