by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, April 28, 2013

And, for those interested in building things

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Three days after the bombing at the finish line, something happened of a very different kind, but which got little attention in the press. The Digital Public Library of America opened online and is now available—even if in a limited way—at URL dp.la. Type in those four letters in the address line of your browser, hit return, and you’re there. This is important to us because, like epub, it’s going to give gay people—and other minorities—access to documents about their communities which currently reside in research libraries and institutions and museums around the country. On the Digital Public Library of America, gay people will have access that is direct and unencumbered by gate-keepers, and free. To a community whose past has been expurgated and censored by others, and poisoned by the concept of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the opening of the Digital Public Library of America is a step toward freedom.

According to Robert Darnton, the University Librarian at Harvard, in an article titled, “The National Digital Public Library is Launched!” in The New York Review of Books, the DPLA has been in the works since October 1, 2010. A small group of representatives from foundations and libraries met at Harvard to discuss making “the bulk of world literature available to all citizens free of charge” by creating a “grand coalition of foundations and research libraries.” Since then, a mission statement has been written in somewhat more technical language. “The DPLA would be an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”

They have started with the libraries, and the libraries’ holdings, which are already digitized, but by degrees the DPLA will be able to offer increasingly comprehensive collections from its participating libraries and foundations. I expect that gay people are going to have to wait for a while for useful documents to be available through DPLA. But this is going in the right direction, free to all, and comprehensive. Imagine what that means to us. Even if what DPLA achieves is only to make it easier for someone on the East Coast to get documents from the Huntington Library on the West Coast, that is going to make a difference in our ability to access our past. 

Check out dp.la. Explore a little. You’ll see what possibilities this has. Then keep coming back, as this thing grows. And read about it, here, here, and here, among scores of other places. This is going to make our lives—including the lives of gay writers and readers—better.
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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

The winning tactic in these wars

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Violence—bombs, guns, ethnic slurs—has been so close to us in Boston this week that it’s been difficult to think. One of the threads of this blog has been the need for us to fight back, and various people have asked me what my books are about, and I’ve said, They’re about gay people fighting back. That has been a central fact about gay life—the need to fight back, to create a safe space for ourselves—since the Stonewall Riots, and it underlies all of our advances today. Every year our great community celebration, Gay Pride, commemorates our fighting back in those riots. 

The whole history of the gay community since 1969 has been a history of us forcing ourselves into the public space—that is, fighting back. It is clear to many of us that we would not have had the recent victories in the Supreme Court, in the Congress, and. preeminently, in the polls, if we had not created our activist organizations,  developed a generation of leaders, contributed money to our activist causes, demonstrated, rebelled, been rude, refused to accept the status quo, said over and over, no matter how many people were tired of us saying it, I will be safe in my world, I will not be battered, I will have space to live my life in freedom, I will hurt you if you try to take my safety from me, and, of course, most of all, I will have freedom to respond to the beauty of members of our own sex.

It is difficult to talk about violence when a central street in Boston is still closed seven days after the Marathon bombing, but when gay people fight for their space, it is nothing like a person placing disguised bombs on a crowded pavement of a city street. It has almost always been true that gay people, driven to fight against those who would restrict their freedom—who would restrict their lives—make publicly clear what they do and why they do it. They claim credit. There is nothing silent or secretive about violence directed by gay people against the actions of homophobes. I’m here, I’m queer, I’m fabulous, Get used to it. Queer Nation did not say, Please. They told who they were and why they did what they did. The Gay Liberation Front, on May 3, 1971, disrupted a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington, DC. Frank Kameny, a member of GLF, as described in The Advocate, “denounced the right of psychiatrists to discuss the question of homosexuality. ‘Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate. Psychiatry has waged relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you!’” As a consequence, the APA, on December 15, 1973, removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. Don’t believe for a minute that they would have changed that determination if the gay people hadn’t been rude and threatened to disrupt every meeting the APA had until they changed it.

The winning tactic, then, is be rude and promise to keep being rude until they change. We’ll fight ya, if you try to do that again. 
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Friday, April 19, 2013

Making it cost 'em

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My last post was called “How things work,” published April 7, in which I wrote about my encounter with a young man doing missionary work for the Mormon church, as I walked home after picking up something at Home Depot. The young man was polite and friendly, and I pointed out that the Mormon Church, for forty years, has been in the forefront of the fight against gay people, in making my world unsafe for me. My partner, C, told me I was “confrontational.” OK. Yes. And then I pointed to the Stonewall Riots, where men and women fought back against the New York cops who had made their world unsafe for them. I wrote: It is necessary for us to fight back, all the time, without ceasing, even when we are tired of it. Polite people never get anywhere.

But other people felt that the confrontational mode is not appropriate to them. Or is difficult. Or wrong. An old friend writes that she struggles with it. Her default mode is civility, and confrontation doesn’t come naturally to her, even when she understands the point of it. Today, in Boston, we are experiencing what seems to be a civic moment where people on both sides are in the confrontational mode.

The point, I think, in my blog, is that I am fighting back is a truth that ought to be said but isn't said often enough, even in the gay press. We are weakened by not hearing this regularly. We need somebody--I need somebody--to say fight, stop being polite, stop trying to get along, stop being afraid. Gay people have a right to a safe place. I've learned (intellectually) that not fighting, being polite, trying to get along, being afraid, are corrosive of my character and are bad tactics. I need to stop living my life by the easy-way-out. I know I will take the easy way out, if one is offered to me, so I need to pump myself up by saying over and over (this is my way of giving myself courage) stop being afraid. 

This is what happens to me. I seek safety. I seek comfort. That is my default fallback. So I resort to civility. For years, the ruder, cruder, more appallingly brutal you were to me, the more civil and polite I became. And then one day I realized that being polite was not stopping any of this brutal behavior. My tormentors took my civility as permission to continue to torment me. It was then that I came to understand that polite people never get anywhere.  

To truly engage with the people in our culture who are conveying hatred and ignorance against me and the people I care about, I have to get down and dirty. I have to make it cost ‘em.
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Sunday, April 7, 2013

How things work

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I was walking back from Home Depot, when I found myself walking almost parallel with a young man in a pin-stripe suit and tie. He wasn’t dressed for Home Deport. We nodded. He smiled. I smiled. We walked on, and then I asked him if he was a Mormon. I pointed out that people in our neighborhood don’t generally dress like that on Sunday. So, I found myself walking across the parking lot of Assembly Square Mall with a Mormon. 

I said, “I don’t see how you can stand to be doing what you’re doing.” I pointed out that the Mormon church had been one of the largest donors to those who brought Proposition 8 to California. The Mormon church has fought against every advance by the LGBT community in the last fifty years. I pointed out that the men and women who opposed integration in the sixties have been forgotten, because the history of the United States has been toward greater equality and greater democracy since its founding. It was important to see the conflicts around us, and it is necessary to choose a side in these conflicts, and it is necessary to get it right. It is necessary to know what you are doing when you set about trying to control the future, as these churches are doing. I told the young man in the pin-stripped suit that when his church speaks of religious freedom, it causes real pain and real damage to real people. 

“What are you doing?”  I asked him. 

My partner, C, laughed when I got home after my trip to Home Depot and told me, I was  “confrontational.” Well, so were the men and women on Christopher Street in June 1969. Look what came from their confrontations. It is necessary for us to fight back, all the time, without ceasing, even when we are tired of it. Polite people never get anywhere.
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