by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Sunday, March 30, 2014

What is uniquely ours

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My classmate from the school in Tennessee and I exchanged letters recently. We’ve been writing occasionally about relationships—gay, straight, and otherwise—and looking to understand differences.  (For a straight therapist’s take on all this, see here.) I had written at one point, several months ago, “If all gay people were to get access to marriage, what kind of marriage would it be? I answered my own question, What kind of marriage do straight people have?” Actually, what I should have said was, “What kind of marriage do we already have?” Look at ourselves, because, along with every other kind of relationship, gay people have always had long-term committed relationships. And those, like C’s and mine, were relationships between committed, I suppose intelligent, experienced men and women who were not bound by the marriages straight people have. Since these committed, intelligent, experienced men and women were outside the bounds of legal marriage for most of the last one hundred and fifty years, they have been free, over decades, to develop the rules and customs of their own relationships. It is as if a Constitutional Convention had been called which was free to write the constitution for the best government that man had ever conceived, without regard to any of the ways men had actually been governed in the past. For it’s true, gay men and women have done what everybody has said we ought to do but have never been able to do because there have simply been too many people who liked it the way it has always been: we have been able to rethink marriage from its roots and, from an experiential basis, have been able to create something entirely new. C and I have a marriage totally different from the marriages of any other person in either of our families, and yet our marriage is not different from the marriages of scores of our friends in the gay (male) community. 

The point of similarity is that our marriage, like many marriages outside the gay community, is characterized by deep love, but also, and this is where we differ from other kinds of marriage, a sense of freedom for both parties. Gay people have discovered some things from their time in the wilderness that straight people appear not to know. The two of us don’t own each other. Love and lust are different things. A man can be deeply in love with one man, and at the same time experience lust for another. The basic agreement that is a marriage can be talked out between the two people involved. The two people involved can talk out how they are going to handle it when the man has a transient fuck with someone he met on a train. Some guys don’t want to know. Some want to know every time, all about it. Each couple can be different. These two men give up betrayal as a tool of relationships, and they conduct their relationship from positions of equality. These are not the ideas of sex-crazed hedonists. They work, they can result in long-term, loving relationships which are not characterized by internal conflict or by a struggle for dominance. They are characterized by a sense of physical and intellectual freedom. 


The trouble is, gay people have already—they’ve been doing it for years—begun to adopt the concepts of straight marriage, abandoning their own history and experience. That’s a tragedy. We already know how to have better marriages than straight people, yet we’re giving that up in favor of the lesser, older, flawed version. Gay people ought to look at our own experience and hang on to it when entering legal marriage. We know what works. It’s been all around us for most of our lives. We may already be in a good gay marriage.  Our task is merely to get married legally and at the same time not let the piece of paper change the way we relate to each other. Let’s honor what is uniquely ours.
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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Influencing the way we are seen

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Last night I was going to write a post to this blog, when I found that the whole blog had been erased. Simply not there. This morning, after a tense night, I went to Blogger, and to the help forums. A half-hour later, after one query from another user of the help forum, the whole blog—three and a half year’s worth of entries—was restored. I was deeply grateful.

In this blog, I usually write about what’s happening in national events—Supreme Court decisions, and about the President, Barack Obama—and what I read in the gay press, and about our visits to the houses of relatives, friends, and, once, my partner’s and my marriage last September on Race Point beach in Provincetown, events that affect gay people. I also write sometimes about movies and about books I’m reading that affect gay people. I also write about the books I’ve written. This blog is a casual record of my intellectual life, and of my contributions to the dialogue going on around all of us about us as gay people and about our place in this thing called America.  It felt like a disaster when it was deleted.

What drove me to look at my blog last night was that I read an article on Towleroad by David Mixner. He says that the gay community is in danger of losing its past, as the older generation, the activists during the seventies and eighties, reaches advanced age and die. Records are being lost and oral histories go past retrieval. The history of the gay community is being lost.

What’s to be done? Publicize the need for gay men and women to give their records and papers to libraries and organizations. Make them available to the next generation of gay people. It is unnecessary for a person to decide whether he or she had an important role to play in fighting AIDS or in achieving marriage equality. It is unnecessary for him or her to say “I was important enough to preserve my papers.” Let the next person down the line make that decision.

Think of your “stuff”—whatever you’ve been saving since you came out and moved to Boston and now is in the basement or the attic or in the back of your closet—as the raw material of history, the data the historian will use to write the story of who we were and what we did.

We can’t control the future. But we’re a community that has regularly been lied about through most of the decades of the twentieth century, and we owe it to ourselves to save the material that can at least influence the men and women who tell the story of our generation’s time on this planet.
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Thursday, March 6, 2014

Some things we can know about the future

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The last few days I have been reading a book that clarifies where we are. David Brion Davis, writing on slavery in the west, says “dehumanization was absolutely central to the slave experience.” The New York Review of Books says Davis’ book, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (Knopf, 2014), and the two that preceded it, have “shaped history,” by which they mean shaped the way we view our past and its effect on the present. Davis’ book studies the dehumanization of the enslaved person and the implications for the slave coming into freedom.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation reminds me that, two hundred and thirty-eight years after the founding of this nation, we—historians, politicians, artists, writers and novelists, black people and white—are still finding the problem of slavery unresolved and are still searching for ways of understanding our past and are still dealing with the consequences of slavery. It is not likely that the problem of queers is going to be resolved any sooner, and that, even if we get marriage equality throughout the United States in the immediate future, or complete legal equality, we will still be researching and talking about and finding new facts and new approaches to the dehumanization to which queers have been subjected all of the years of the history of the United States.

I assume that one of the things that we—lesbians and gays and bisexual and transgender and queer—will come to understand about ourselves is that, for two hundred and thirty-eight years we were dehumanized, that to some extent that is continuing even today from some quarters. This dehumanization has been a psychological exploitation that had implications for individuals and for the community as a whole. Those implications were both destructive and but also the occasion for creative and effective resistance. 

Davis’s book instructs us that legal equality and freedom will not bring with them an instant end to suffering. We will still have with us the walking wounded, survivors of the long years in the wilderness, who exhibit the effects of wounds received thirty or forty or fifty years ago. We count in our ranks men and women, the recently wounded, who fight in the current wars. Davis’s book, published this year but about events in the first half of the nineteenth century, predicts a long, hard, twilight struggle for queers, whatever happens this year with marriage. 
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