by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

When it's the government that commits crimes

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On Saturday, December 28, the Boston Globe ran an editorial comment about the British Government’s pardoning Alan Turing. The comment is entitled Britain: Reclaiming the Hero it Maligned. I wrote about Alan Turing here. In that blog post, I said, “This posting isn’t about quantum computing, and it isn’t about Alan Turing and his contribution to the effort to win World War II, but it is about gay people and our tendency to forget the past. Alan Turing was a homosexual.” 

Well, this posting isn’t about any of those things, but it is about the things that a pardon does. Once Alan Turing was dead, there was nothing that any of the survivors around him could do to change the fact that the man had killed himself as the result of appalling treatment by the British government. And the Globe this morning is wrong when it says, “Alan Turing deserves an untainted place in the history books, and now he has one.” Actually, because of government action, Alan Turing was dragged out of the closet into the harsh light of day, then charged with crimes which were not crimes and sentenced to chemical castration. He then committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple, and all of this is permanently hung on the name and reputation of a brilliant man who helped the Brits win the war and helped create computers for the rest of us. None of that is going to be removed by this pardon. The British Government caused Turing untold suffering and changed the things that are said and will be said about him, and none of that will ever be changed. Turing does not need a pardon. He did nothing wrong. I assume the British Government has issued this pardon to put the focus on Turing’s life instead of the government’s own appalling crimes.

What to do?  Leave poor Alan Turing alone. He has suffered enough. What the British Government should do is to get down on it s knees and cry, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa and do this continually until every one knows exactly how much suffering the government has caused in the name of morality. The Globe is correct in raising the question of the 50,000 other men who were convicted under the same law that persecuted Turing. Those that are still alive should be asked, person to person, how they would like the government to respond to its own culpability. I expect a goodly percentage of those who have suffered under this law will say, Go fuck yourself.  The point is to remove the government from the ranks of those who may assume virtue. 

And, next step, What about the US? We learned this same lesson about our government when it became clear what had happened at the Tuskegee Institute in the thirties, and, of course, the massive persecution of gay people in the last century. Now we know about the hundreds of thousands who have suffered at the hands of government. What to do? First, don’t forget them. Know where their suffering came from. Try to make their lives better now. Think reparations. Don’t ever believe that there is anything the government can do to make itself virtuous again. It can’t.  The government is successful at building highways and maintaining the safety net. When the government tries to impose morality on citizens or allows itself to be used as the instrument of certain religious points of view, it fucks it up, every time, and then it ends up, not with egg on its face, with blood on its hands. The pardon that the British government this week extended to Alan Turning gets it backwards. The government should ask us for a pardon for its crimes.

Read The Rebel, by Albert Camus, about assassins in judges robes.

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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The gay protest novel (1)

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First New Mexico last Thursday and Utah Friday, making eighteen. Life is good right now for LGBT people, but I am reminded of the long years during which we experienced no victories. I remember what those days were like, and the people who didn’t make it to see these current victories, and I take a moment to honor them.

I’ve been reading Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America, by Jaime Harker, the University of Minnesota Press, 2013. I’ve been interested in Isherwood since I was in graduate school in the sixties. Isherwood wrote Goodbye to Berlin, The Berlin Stories, the play and musical made from them, I am a Camera and Caberet with the stories of Sally Bowles and Christopher in Berlin just before Hitler came to power, and also A Single Man, which I read in 1964 and then rediscovered in 2011, and many other novels. I’ve written about him here and here.

Jaime Harker says that during the Cold War—the period 1945 to 1989—ideas of gender construction and a paranoid defense of heterosexuality got mixed up with national policy and with the struggle against the Soviets.  She says this:

During the 1940s and 1950s, Cold War intellectuals sought to establish the United States culturally as well as politically (and many did so with covert CIA support for key literary journals). The discipline of American studies—established in books by Leo  Marx, F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler—sought to establish a mythic American spirit; critics in the Partison Review contrasted the freedom of highbrow aesthetics with the niggardly realism of totalitarian regimes. These cultural interventions were marked by an aggressive masculinity, any deviance was denounced as aesthetically compromised and un-American. Literary criticism implicitly enforced conservative gender roles and betrayed anxiety about inordinate cultural influence of women and gay men in the United States, an anxiety alleviated through prescriptive and narrow literary norms. (p. 5)

A paragraph later, Harker says, “Michael Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture points  out that gay visibility was high in the late forties and early fifties: critics warned  of a nefarious lavender menace undermining the masculinity and virility of American culture.” (pp. 5-6) The ‘masculinity and virility’ of American culture were assumed to be critical to fighting the war against totalitarian regimes. Consequently, Harker says, gay novels represented a corrupting force in American culture, and we were subjected to constantly repeated charges leveled against gay men by Senator McCarthy, by many politicians, and by the editor of The State, the daily paper I read as a boy in Columbia, South Carolina. There were two stigmas attached to gay men in 1950. One was this charge of corrupting the culture, and the other was the charge leveled against homosexuals by the American Psychiatric Association, that we were “sick.” Harker points out that “Cold War intellectuals lumped together and pathologized all novels that touched on gay themes” (p. 14). 

To “pathologize" all novels with a gay theme means that it was going to be difficult to justify writing a novel about such a theme. Critics could say that no novel on such a subject can be a good novel. It may be  that this is the source of the critical condemnation of gay political novels,  that they are propaganda for being a corrupting force in the culture..

Christopher Isherwood sought to establish himself as an American writer during this period, a difficult attempt, given that Isherwood was already known as a gay man from his earlier work before he came to America. Isherwood, however, achieved the impossible and wrote major gay novels during this period all of which were attacked for being a corrupting influence on the culture. Harker quotes Isherwood himself in his own defense: “‘There are certain subjects—including Jewish, Negro and homosexual questions—which involve social and political issues. There are laws which could be changed. There are public prejudices which could be removed. Anything an author writes on these subjects is bound, therefore, to have certain propaganda value, whether he likes it or not.’ So despite the considerable differences in style and content, I believe it makes sense to talk about this group of gay novels in the late forties and early fifties as the gay protest novel.” 

To anyone trying to determine his own motivations for his actions during that period—I’ve done this myself—it is a relief to be reminded that the writers I was reading, these Cold War intellectuals, were feeding me bitter bigotry, and I thought they were wise. And, considering the actions in the last week in New Mexico and Utah, I find that my joy is easily restrained when I calculate that it has taken some sixty-three years for this progress to be effectuated. Observe the damage these “Cold War intellectuals” did in the late forties and fifties: a generation or two of gay people savaged by people they thought they could trust, a generation of gay writers whose works were savaged, but most of all, a critical principle repeated so widely that it became everywhere accepted, that gay novels on serious political subjects can be no more than mere propaganda and not in themselves capable of being interesting and compelling literature. We were told, gay art cannot be high art. That’s a crime, to have told us that. We’ll never know what literature has been lost to us in the last sixty years because of these “Cold War intellectuals.”
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Thursday, December 12, 2013

...and who they love.

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Barack Obama, speaking in a stadium filled with South African people and representatives of the world’s nations, said Nelson Mandela emerged “as the last great liberator of the 20th century. Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement — a movement that at its start had little prospect for success. Like Dr. King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral necessity of racial justice.” It was a powerful way to organize our awareness of the history of the twentieth century. In his second inaugural address, he did the same thing for the history of the United States when he referred to the places of the civil rights movements in the United States: “Seneca and Selma and Stonewall.” By adding Stonewall to the other, established civil rights movements, he elevated us and implicitly made a promise to us.

He’s done this several times, a practice I am not accustomed to yet. (I am just not familiar enough with being given that level of respect from an unimpeachable source at the very pinnacle of respect in our culture and delivered on the world stage to know how it makes me feel. I think I worry about it a little.) 

Now the president has done it again. Toward the end of his eulogy for Mr. Mandela, he said this:

The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality or universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before, but they are no less important. For around the world today, we still see children suffering from hunger and disease. We still see run-down schools. We still see young people without prospects for the future. Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs, and are still persecuted for what they look like, and how they worship, and who they love. That is happening today.
Apparently he is going to do this regularly, give us respect and demonstrate that he understands our situation in America, and it is not going to take a major gay crisis to get him to do so. This is happening today, he says. I don’t know about you, but this has been so long in coming that it’s going to take a little time for me to adapt to this new world.


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Monday, December 2, 2013

Tim, Prior, Lt Choi—they present a problem

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I was on the Red Line here in Boston, going to Cambridge to attend a concert in Paine Hall at Harvard. My husband was playing the harp in the orchestra. The train was crowded because it was rush hour—six o’clock—and when I pushed onto the car and grabbed a strap, there was still a stream of people coming onto the car from the next door down. Just before the door closed, a few more people pushed into the car and stood next to me. I glanced at them, and then I saw a man two people from me. He was Tim DeChristopher, about whom I have written here. He is the environmental activist who disrupted the auction of federal oil lands in Utah and who went to federal penitentiary for two years. He had said, in his sentencing statement, “This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this [i.e. my going to prison] is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.”
The car was too crowded for me to move, and I didn’t feel I could speak to him over the heads and shoulders of the several people between us. And yet, I knew he might get off, and I would lose this opportunity to speak to a man I very much admired. I was also thinking that every person who gets on a subway train deserves—and has a right—to be left alone.

Finally I spoke. “Tim?” His head jerked around to look for the source of the voice. It was apparent that he really was Tim DeChristopher. He looked exactly like the pictures of him on the DVD “Bidder 70.” He located me and smiled. I smiled. Then I said, “Thank you.” He grinned and shrugged, and that was all of it. The car was too crowded for anything more. He got off at Harvard Square and went up the Church Street exit, and I went up the main exit into Harvard Square. 

Tim DeChristopher had found a way to act in our culture, when action by single people is rare, and most civil action has been taken over by professionals and large organizations. Tim DeChristopher had the courage to accept the culture’s punishment for his civil disobedience and has been able to turn it to his own advancement with his sentencing statement and then has been able to use it in political organizing since that time once he was released.

Tonight, I finished supper and sat down to the computer to begin work on this posting when I found that HBO was showing Angels in America: the Millennium Begins and Peristroika, and, before I could turn off the tube I was sucked into the tragedy of Prior and Louis. The cat came in and lay beside me, his head resting on my thigh. I ended up watching the whole drama, finished after one, this whole stupendous work by Tony Kushner, ending with Prior’s famous words, The Great Work Begins.

This is hard for many of us, because the “great work” that Prior suggests—the work which will bring full citizenship to gay people, the work of renewal, of living fully, of loving ourselves and others, of “more life” as Prior puts it—seems largely to be over for many people. We don’t fear the deaths of all of us from AIDS, and the struggle for our rights has been co-opted by mainstream America. Even our opposition seems to be giving up. Cardinal Dolan said on Sixty Minutes yesterday, that the forces for same-sex marriage seem to have won. 

The Great Work Begins. Work means Life, and that’s what Prior wanted. More Life. But what does this mean? A person can write a check or put a gift on a credit card, but there is not much one can do comparable to disrupting a federal auction of oil rich land. Or is it that we haven’t thought creatively enough about this new phase of our lives? Exactly what can each one of us do to make life better for all of us? Tim DeChristopher found it. Lt Choi found a way to do it, which only he could do—he chained himself to the White House fence, and then did it over and over and over again until DADT was repealed. Well, then, what for the rest of us? 
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