by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, May 26, 2014

The Normal Heart, again

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Before I arrived in Boston in 1984, I didn’t know anything about AIDS, or, as it was called, Gay Cancer, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), before AIDS was settled on in 1985. Nobody else did either. We knew that it was fatal. And we knew that they didn’t know how long a person had from infection to dying.

The first years in Boston, I was writing about the summer of 1984 in Maine and the consequences of the murder of my friend. People here didn’t know what was making people sick. It could be passed sexually, but they didn’t know what virus caused it, and there was no test for infection. People understood about “bodily fluids,” but they didn’t know for certain which bodily fluids. Could you get it from a man’s tears? His saliva? And when the test was developed, people didn’t know what a “positive” meant. Did that mean a person was infected? Or did it just mean that a person had been exposed? The New York Native said on its front page, DON’T TAKE THE TEST. 

I volunteered on the AIDS Hotline for the AIDS Action Committee in the Spring of 1985, and part of my motivation was the hope that I would learn better information about all the questions that were plaguing everybody. The thing I remember most about that period was how confusing it was. Our friends were dying, but we didn’t know anything about the disease that was killing them or about what was causing it. People were terrified. But they were also extremely angry. We knew it had something to do with sex, but didn’t know what. We were told about condoms, but everybody wanted to know how much you could trust a condom. Was it absolutely trustworthy to be a barrier to an exchange of body fluids? People called in to the Hotline wanting to know. And of course we didn’t know. We knew only partial answers. Aside from the fact that nobody had a very clear understanding of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, we—the gay men in Boston that I knew—were too much in the center of the disaster to understand how all the pieces of the national catastrophe came together. Our concentration was on ourselves. When there were just two of us, and the moment was quiet, the question was always, “What are you doing?” by which the other man meant, what are you doing to keep yourself safe? And our concentration was on our friends, who were suffering and dying.

The Normal Heart, which was produced on HBO last night, has the great gift of taking a chaotic, terrifying period and of giving it some order, even to giving it villains when, at the time, it had been very difficult to figure out who or what was causing this tragedy if it wasn’t ourselves. The Normal Heart organizes the history of the period and makes it comprehensible. Who were the villains? Who were the victims? What could be done? Larry Kramer understands what’s going on in the minds of people who are terrorized by their lives. The cast is led by Mark Ruffalo as Ned, Matt Bomer as Felix, Taylor Kitch as Bruce, and Julia Roberts as Emma. Superb, all of them.

Three books are worth mentioning: Randy Shilts’ And the Band Plays On—an attempt to pull together and make sensible a hugely important AIDS narrative; Steven Epstein’s Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge—the changes in medicine effected by the AIDS activists like Larry Kramer and ACT UP; and John-Manuel Andriote’s Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America—a comprehensive history of the epidemic and its effect on the way medicine is practiced and the way gay people practice politics.

Other people may write more comprehensive histories, and Tony Kushner may have written a better play, but no one gets as well the fire in the belly of the people who were there in  the beginning, in 1984. I’ve seen this production twice. It makes me weep each time. 

So here it is: Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, premiered June 25, HBO, playing now in encore on HBO. The play is essential to a knowledge of the period 1981-1984, the beginning of AIDS.
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Saturday, May 24, 2014

The Normal Heart

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Tomorrow night, at nine, HBO will carry The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about the first years of the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1984. It was originally produced in New York by Joseph Papp. Kramer’s play is about one of those times in the lives of men when there is a great struggle, and the stakes are as high as they ever get, when the conflicts that people faced in their own lives were reduced to elemental struggles of good and evil—or, even more primary, of life and death. The play is absorbing and exhausting.


I haven’t yet seen the production that will be carried by HBO tomorrow night, but the cast is great, and I recommend this. Please see it if you can.
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The judges, our sexuality, one giant classroom, Gallup

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Tuesday was Pennsylvania’s, Monday was Oregon’s. I understand that Wisconsin and Florida and other states are in the near future. 

I went to a sandwich shop when I left the Y on Tuesday, and I found a copy of the decision from Judge John E. Jones III declaring Pennsylvania’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional, and read the first half of it. I enjoy these decisions every time I stop my life long enough to read one, which should teach me to read all of them as they come out, but I don’t, because I’m busy and I think I have things to do that are more important but I don’t. I get two or three major things from one of these opinions. Good things to read on this sequence of judgments are Jay Michaelson  in  The Daily Beast, and Greg Botelho, of CNN Justice. 

This decision by Judge Jones was lovely. (I finished reading it Tuesday night.) Short—39 pages—and well written, and very clear as it led the rest of us, non-lawyers, through the steps Judge Jones took to get to his decision. He was telling us why he decided this case this way. It was not poetic, and it was not philosophical, except at the end, when he wrote,  “We are a better people than what these laws represent and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.” The great middle of his opinion is clear and reasonable and very persuasive. These matters are way too important to be left to lawyers. As I have said, these court cases, the best of them, contribute to an unexpected consequence whose importance we probably won’t recognize for years. They are constructing a definition of sexuality out of the Constitution and Windsor and these district court cases, which we are going to have to live with for generations, when all of us would over the long run be more comfortable with a description of our sexuality constructed, like Kinsey’s great studies, out of thousands and thousands of interviews of the people. For the danger in this, see Stonewall Triptych, It ain’t necessarily so, [February 29, 2012] and It still ain’t necessarily so [June 7, 2013].

Aside from the particulars of Judge Jones declaring Pennsylvania’s Marriage Laws to be unconstitutional, which have been fully discussed by Ari Ezra Waldman, who writes for Towleroad, here, and here, I was struck by what all these judges are doing for our perception of our nation. Just about everybody is aware of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s belief that the decision of the Supreme Court which recognized the right to abortion for American women, Roe v. Wade, in 1972, was correctly decided in its conclusion, but it got there by the wrong path and it was wrongly applied, by which she means apparently, it would have been better for women and the country if the Court had limited its decision in some way, sent it back to the states for them to work with for a while, and allowed the idea of a right to abortion time to find an audience and a population of supporters. (See Sahil Kapur in Talking Points Memo on this matter.) Many people believe that this is behind the Court’s reasoning in not going the extra step when Justice Kennedy wrote the decision in United States v. Windsor. Justice Kennedy may have limited the application of his decision in order to allow time and space for his decision to percolate through the states and to develop adherents and a committed population of supporters. This  is exactly what has happened, in the eleven months since Kennedy passed up the opportunity to make a sweeping national decision on marriage equality in United States v. Windsor. 
At the invitation of the Supreme Court, the district judges around the country have been conducting a grand class for the rest of us—a distributed classroom, to be sure— in which, a judge in each state, a native of that state, even in states we would never have thought were receptive to it, announces that he or she has heard the best of the local arguments against marriage equality and have found them inadequate to satisfy the Constitution. First, it was Utah, then Oklahoma, then Kentucky, then Virginia, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, Arkansas, Idaho, then Oregon, and onTuesday of this week, it was Pennsylvania, and the cumulative effect of these decisions in the various states around the country—12 federal district courts in all—is that the whole country seems to be beginning to move in that direction. Gallup announced Wednesday that polling May 8-11 now finds 55% in favor of marriage equality. The court cases are riding the tide of public approval. This is what Justice Bader Ginsberg may have had in mind. Give them time and space to teach themselves, to learn what they need to know, for the next great experiment in democracy. It’s an idea whose time has come, finding expression in the opinions of district courts and in the results of the Gallup organization. This movement can’t be reversed.
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Monday, May 19, 2014

Anger, its use and abuse

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I said, “Of course I’m angry. My generation of gay men tends to be angry. We experienced abuse, and we were treated like shit for much of our lives—by the government, by the churches, the State Department, the military, the courts, by our families and by the people we loved the most, by our schools and teachers, and by the American Psychiatric Association, among others—and we were angry at being treated like shit. So we fought. We fought back at Stonewall, and the years since then. We were treated terribly, and we suffered, and we were angry. We are different from your generation.” I was talking to a man half my age. He readily agreed that the experience of our generations differs, and he agreed that he had not experienced what I have experienced and that I had reason to be angry. I didn't point out to him that I had written my novels, fueled with my anger. The problem in front of us was finding an effective way for me to deal with my anger so that it doesn't cripple me.

There was another problem in front of us. We represented a big chunk of the gay community—a young physician and a man approaching old age—and we faced a divide between us that was also in the gay community, and it is not much talked about. It has been forty years now since Stonewall, and men forty years old have never known a time when the American Psychiatric Association abused them like Christians abuse gay people today. I have a bone-deep suspicion of the APA and its members. This man and I were able to talk across this divide, but can we—all the various generations in the gay community—talk across this generational divide? Do we talk across it? This divide in the gay community will continue until the older generation dies off.

When that happens, when we die, what my generation knows—our experience of pre-Stonewall America and how that has made us what we are—will be lost to the communal memory. Over the weekend I talked to my daughter. She is young, straight, just over forty, and she said, “It’s happening in other places too, Dad. In the women’s movement, we are aware of the loss of the older generation of feminists, and among African Americans and the loss of the civil rights generation.” Its a question of the loss to the communal memory of important times—the first generation of feminists, the civil rights generation of the forties, fifties and sixties, and those who survived the time before the Stonewall riots—an important part of our communal history. John Mitzel of Gay Community News and of Calamus Bookstore died several months ago and a host of others recently. What Mitzel knew is now lost. The number of people who are still alive who knew what Mitzel knew is dwindling. And what Mitzel knew is a principal part of what made us what we are.

As I told the doctor, I have to deal with my anger, and tonight, I listen to Jessye Norman singing Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs). I listen to Norman singing the German and study English translations by way of Wikipedia, and I think, Strauss was eighty-four when he composed those songs. I have work to do. I can't give in yet. 
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Sunday, May 11, 2014

Why are bookstores closing? It's the books.

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Recently in Salon, Steve Berman commented movingly on the closing of Giovanni’s Room, the LGBT bookstore in Philadelphia and the loss to Philadelphia. In his lament, he looks for the cause of these closings—lack of community support, competition from amazon.com, assimilation of all of us into the straight world. What he doesn’t bring up is that it might have been caused by the lgbt publishing industry itself.

Our local bookseller here in Boston said last year that LGBT readers no longer buy gay books. This matches what I was told three years ago in an email from a finder for a literary agent, that the market for gay novels has “vanished,” and in another email in the same year, in which I was told that it had “collapsed.”

The question is, Why? What happened to it? I suspect that at least part of it is the changing nature of the novels being published. The publishing industry has changed the description of the kind of book it wants to publish.

We are told by Daniel D’Addario, in Salon, that LGBT publishers want to stay away from anything controversial, and readers “have gotten used to a certain kind of white gay [writer] who does not have very overt sexual content in his work, who fits paradigms they’re comfortable with.” The result is literary characters who “must not experience homophobia from middle-class white people. He can experience it from rednecks, but not from people like the reader. He is not allowed to be angry about his life.”

And yet, many LGBT persons are angry—angry about years of government discrimination, savage abuse from the churches, and he is angry about personal rejection from the heart of his family and from the society we are a part of. Many of us think anger is what drove Stonewall and what has driven the successes of our major civil rights organizations the last fifty years. We live with the consequence of decades of abuse, yet the publishing industry says we must not write about a character who is “angry about his life.”

In short, we’re told that publishers think “the reader” doesn’t want reality. The result is that the reader stops reading because novels don’t have anything to do with his life. And when he stops reading, he stops buying, and then bookstores, like Giovanni’s Room, close. It is a dangerous thing, not to tell the truth.

In February 2011, I wrote this:

We are serious people. We confronted AIDS. We survived Reagan and Bush (I) and Clinton and Bush (2), we have learned to work the political system, we have gotten gay marriage in some places, and we have fought against DADT and are fighting against DOMA. We are transforming what marriage means in this country and what this country considers a family. As gay people, we have fought in the great battles of our time. We have been heroic and successful. We have been fighters. We have preserved those aspects of ourselves which were unique. But our literature does not reflect these things.
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Designed by Edward Wharton.