by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Monday, November 18, 2013

The man on stilts in a kilt in the wind

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I wrote about this briefly the other day. The point was that as we assimilate into the heterosexual world, the gay community seems to pull in its horns, so it speak. It seems to become less flamboyant, less “out there,” less extravagant in the way it presents itself. Some might say, the more the gay community is accepted by the heterosexual community, the less fabulous we become.

On this particular day, during Gay Pride, there was a man on stilts wearing a kilt. And of course the wind blew and showed to the 150,000 people who had come to watch the parade that the man was wearing nothing under his kilt. This was wonderful, I thought. Many people thought differently, including Jeff Epperly, the editor at that time of the Boston gay weekly, Bay Windows. Epperly surmised that the man on stilts had no taste. Many people weighed in about the man on stilts—no one seemed to know who he was—and most people seemed to agree that the man on stilts had no taste. 

I was pissed. I thought the gay community was certainly less a place I wanted to join if there was no room for the man on stilts with the wind blowing his kilt, so I responded the way I usually do, I sat down to the computer and pounded out a response. I thought it was exactly the right thing to say at that point, but I couldn’t get it published anywhere. So here it is:

I am the naked man on stilts
by Dwight Cathcart

Jeff Epperly wanted to know who the naked man on stilts was, and I am writing this to let him know that it was me.  My name is Dwight Cathcart, and I am a gay man who has been practicing on stilts for a number of years so I could pull off this stunt, as all of my friends know, and, as Jeff and all of your writers have said, I have no taste.   I do have a good tight butt, however, and my dick is a greater than average length and girth, as all 150,000 people at Gay Pride 1996 will attest.

I haven’t had any taste for a long time.  Probably not since I came out.   Before I came out, I had a lot of taste.  I wore the right clothes from the right stores and married the right woman and had the right children and went to the right schools and had the right kind of house, all filled with 18th century antiques, which are very tasteful.  And I liked Sargent’s paintings, which, in Boston, are very tasteful, except when they are very obscene and the MFA hides them for years.  I moved among people who also had taste. They were miserable, of course, in their tasteful houses, doing their tasteful things, but they didn’t rock any boats or offend anybody, and everybody said of all of us, They are people of taste, even in their misery.  None of us ever wrote a novel or painted a painting, of course, because people who do those things can’t be thinking very hard about taste.

But one day, I decided that taste was not what a life should be based on, because I was miserable in my good taste, all locked inside of a narrow little cage, trying to follow all these piddling little rules, and wondering all the time if I was still tasteful.  Taste is such a trivial little way to judge people and things.  Am I tasteful?  What a waste of energy even to consider the question.  Even to think about taste makes your lips purse up as if you were sucking lemons.   What I needed, I discovered, was a little honesty in my life, and a little sense of humor, and a little courage.   So I bought some stilts and worked on erasing my tan line.   And you all see the results.   Freedom.

What I achieved, of course, was vulgarity, which was what I had been missing all my life.   After I quit being a person of taste, I discovered how many things my dick would do that tasteful people never dream of.  And my mouth.   And where I could put them!   I discovered the energy there is in questioning these leaden values people have which they subsume under the tight nasty little word taste.   Vulgar.   The word’s roots have to do with the common people, and I discovered the energy, the vitality, there is in the common people, the honesty there is in the common people, that people who purse their lips and say taste never dream of.  Vulgar.   It is impossible even to say the word without coming on strong.  Vulgar.   God, it sounds like the bass pipes in an organ, doesn’t it?   Name me one leader in any field of human endeavor anywhere in the world whose primary concern was being tasteful.   

When I got up on my stilts in my vulgar manner, showing my dick and my ass, what I was doing was coming on strong.  Coming on against the limits which our society has always placed—and continues to place—on gay sex and style and fetish.  I was coming on strong against people in our own community who have lost a sense of themselves as common people, who are striving to rid themselves of the dirt of their humanity and bleach out all their quirky, amazing sexiness.  I was coming on strong against Arline Isaacson, who thought that everybody at the parade but me was normal, whatever the fuck that means in this context.  And of course, up there on my stilts, showing my ass and waving my cock, I was remembering how gay people have always had tasteless thrown against them and their behavior.  I was remembering how lewd and indecent  is still thrown against them.  Well, here I am, folks, tasteless, lewd and indecent, having my good time.  In your face.   But my lips aren’t pursed.

I saw Stonewall, the movie, last night at the MFA.   The most painful parts had to do with the men and women in the fifties, who thought that wearing a coat and tie and hats and gloves and stockings and walking around in a neat little circle in front of Independence Hall would gain them freedom.   So tasteful.  So ineffective.  Nobody ever got freedom by being tasteful. 

I scorn to be tasteful.   I revel in being vulgar, a man of the people, aware of where my cock hangs, and proud to call it by its right name, its ancient name.  You can take your taste and shove it.  And I think any man, seeing a naked guy on stilts at Gay Pride, doing our job, ought to be proud to say, Hey, that’s me up there.

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Thursday, November 14, 2013

It could be a bum trade-off

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Gay people have recognized for a long time that learning how to live in a largely straight society presents the possibility of assimilation, and assimilation presents problems, different ones at different times. Over the weekend, I was reading Gay Men at the Millennium: Sex, Spirit, Community, a collection of essays loosely organized around the questions Where have we been? How far have we come? Where are we headed? Thirteen years ago, these writers were looking around them and trying to figure out where we are. The editor, Michael Lowenthal, collected essays or chapters from various books to look at these questions. 

The writers of some of the essays bring up the concept of assimilation a number of times, and usually the dangers of assimilation are spelled out. The danger of assimilation differs from decade to decade. In one decade gay people may fear that they will lose their “edge and their sense of style, their fabulousness.” In another decade, they may fear that they will lose their willingness and ability to experiment sexually. And in a third, the fear is that they will lose their relative freedom from class. Almost no one thinks assimilation is a good thing. What this means is that, depending on his age, a gay man may be indifferent to one danger and sensitive to another, and his lover, ten years younger, has a different set of responses. It also may mean that a person’s fear of assimilation in the deep South may be significantly different from the fears held by someone in the Northeast.  

The fear that we feel in the second decade of the twenty-first century is a consequence of the great social movements brought about by the Obama administration: the coming out of large numbers of gay military personnel and the movement of large numbers of gay men and women into the county clerk’s offices to get marriage licenses. Some significant numbers of us wanted these things to happen—the repeal of DADT and the overturning of DOMA—but the anxiety many of us feel is brought about by changes in the gay community whose effect on all of us we don’t know. We fear that we are going to lose something that’s important. We don’t know what we are willing to give up to get something important.

Years ago, in 1996 actually, Gay Pride in Boston began to get boring. It started that year when a man wearing a kilt got up on stilts, and played around in the street, between and among the groups and the floats of the parade. The wind came too, of course, and played around with the man’s kilt, blowing it up like Marilyn Monroe’s white skirt over the subway grate, revealing that he didn’t have anything on underneath. Just his tight ass and his cock. There were other things in that parade that year. There was a bed being pushed through the street with two women making love. The resultant uproar attacked the man on stilts and the women in the bed. The editor of Bay Windows said none of them had any taste. Apparently the mayor said he wasn’t going to take part in Gay Pride in the future if it didn’t clean up its act. What we should have done is thank the mayor for his participation in the past, and tell him that we could do without his services in the future. Then we should have had our parade. But instead, we cleaned up our act, and we lost something major as a result. Pride got boring, and people stopped coming. Except the banks, who come in droves.

Gay Men at the Millennium: Sex, Spirit, Community, edited by Michael Lowenthal, and published by Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York.  Sorry, no digital version apparently.
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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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