by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

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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