Stonewall Triptych

The Stonewall Triptych

by

Dwight Cathcart

formerly at

Stonewall Triptych on Blogger

has moved

to

the blog

on

www.dwightcathcart.net

“[Wilfred]’s death was an unhealed wound, & the ache of it has been with me ever since. I wanted him back—not his poems.” 

The man who writes these words is Siegfried Sassoon, and he is writing about Wilfred Owen. They loved one another. They met in the fall of 1917, and Owen died in the trenches in France in November 1918. Owen wrote to Sassoon in November 1917, “I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least….You have fixed my life—however short. You did not light me. I was always made a comet, but you have fixed me. I spun around you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.”

Three or four weeks ago, I wrote of Wilfred Owen and of his love for Siegfried Sassoon, the two of them being the two great war poets of the Great War.  Here are three by Sassoon to go with the two from Owen a couple of weeks ago:

“In the Pink.”

So Davies wrote: “This leaves me in the pink.”

Then scrawled his name: “Your loving sweetheart, Willie.”

With crosses for a hug. He’d had a drink

Of rum and tea; and though the barn was chilly,

For once his blood ran warm; he had pay to spend.

Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.

He couldn’t sleep that night. Stiff in the dark

He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,

When he’s go out as cheerful as a lark

In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm

With brown-eyed Gwen, and whisper in her ear

The simple, silly things she liked to hear.

And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge

Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.

Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,

And everything but wretchedness forgotten.

To-night he’s in the pink: but soon he’ll die. 

And still the war goes on: he don’t know why.

“They”

The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back

“They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought

“In a just cause: they lead the last attack

“On Anti-Christ; their comrade’s blood has bought

“New right to breed an honourable race.

“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply.

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;

“Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;

“And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find

“A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.”

And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange!”

“The Kiss”

To these I turn, in these I trust;

Brother Lead and Sister Steel.

To his blind power I make appeal;

I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He pins and burns and loves the air,

And splits a skull to win my praise;

But up the nobly marching days

She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this:

That in good fury he may feel

The body where he sets his heel

Quail from your downward darting kiss.

This week the web is full of news of the latest movie about Alan Turing, The Imitation Game, presenting recent analyses about the life of one of the inventors of the computer and who defeated the German Enigma Code during World War II, who was gay. In a century when LGBTQ were subject, for seventeen years, to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” queers almost lost our history. The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen puts us, intimately, back in touch.

NOTE:  The two poems are from War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Dover Publications, 2004. 

On November 18, 2003 the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts released its decision in the case Goodridge v Department of Public Health, which brought marriage equality to the United States. Mary Bonauto had assembled this case and argued it before the court. She was GLAD’s first civil rights lawyer and knew what happens to a gay couple when one of them dies, and their shared home is stripped by blood relatives who are “next of kin” and therefore “heirs.” Bonauto knew why marriage was important to gay people. She had been working on civil rights cases for the gay community for ten years. One of the most powerful descriptions from this period is of Bonauto reading the court decision on November 18. There is also a photograph—a snapshot—of her reading that she—and we—had won.

This information and the picture are drawn from a new book, Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-Sex couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits—And Won, by Marc Solomon, ForeEdge, 2014, There is a Foreword by Deval Patrick, which is interesting in its own right. The print book is $20.93 and is available everywhere and the Kindle edition is $10.99. No editions in ePub for Ipads. Marc Solomon has been tilling these fields almost as long as Mary Bonauto. Governor Patrick says that “Marc led the effort to save marriage equality in the wake of the court’s decision and efforts to undo it.” Anybody who was in Boston during that time will appreciate what a central and critical role Marc Solomon played in this struggle.

I bought Solomon’s book yesterday, and when it arrived on my Kindle, I started reading it immediately. My husband, C, said a couple of hours later, when he got home from work, “I don’t know. You must be reading an interesting book. You haven’t put that thing down since I got home.” I told him what it was. I didn’t stop reading until I had finished Chapter 6, and all of the “Massachusetts” pages. It was riveting.

Winning Marriage is divided into several sections—Massachusetts, New York, California, Barack Obama, and then a final section “Courting Justice,” on the Supreme Court—so it’s clear that this book is not the whole story of marriage equality, but it does seem to be the story of the most significant bits. This book introduces us to the main characters—Mary Bonauto, Evan Wolfson are the ones Solomon dedicates the book to—and to the main events, and, most importantly, it introduces us to the way it was done. When I hear people speak of the how it was done, I think of all the people in this book, who were very very good at what they did, and who were energetic and determined and who never gave up. In other words, they fought hard. I have read only “Massachusetts” before I had to stop to pack for the weekend. But this story in Winning Marriage is inspiring and hugely informative. No where else have I been given an idea of how hard these people fought to bring us marriage equality.

When I was eighteen, in 1957, attending the school in Tennessee, and, of course, not dealing well with my sexuality. I took a course in poetry that included poems that have stayed with me during the fifty years since. One, called “Greater Love,” began, Red lips are not so red, as the stained stones kissed by the English dead. It was by an English poet, Wilfred Owen, and was written in 1917, during the Great War. Kindness of wooed and wooer seems shame to their love pure. Oh love, your eyes lose lure, when I behold eyes blinded in my stead…..Owens proceeds through four stanzas, investigating the love he feels for his love, comparing it directly to the love expressed by men who are now dead in the trenches in France. 

Your slender attitude 

Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed, 

Rolling and rolling there 

Where God seems not to care; 

Till the fierce Love they bear 

Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude. 

Your voice sings not so soft, -- 

Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft, -- 

Your dear voice is not dear, 

Gentle, and evening clear, 

As theirs whom none now hear 

Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed. 

Wilfred Owen loved Siegfried Sassoon, who was the other great war poet from the First World War. The other great war poet. 

Heart, you were never hot, 

Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot; 

And though your hand be pale, 

Paler are all which trail 

Your cross through flame and hail: 

Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not. 

The article is by Liam Hoare. It is a review of a novel, Rejuvenation, by Pat Barker, about the soldier’s rehabilitation hospital in which Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were examined by doctors treating soldiers shell-shocked from their experience in the trenches in France. Wilfred Owen died in France in 1918, one week before the Armistice was signed. Siegfried Sassoon lived until the late nineteen-sixties.  

Also by Wilfred Owen is “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Both poems are from this edition: Complete Poems by Wilfred Owen, with an Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon, Blackthorn Press,

It is Thursday night, at 10:24, and I am watching Lawrence O’Donnell. He and his guests are discovering the one responsible for the disaster on Tuesday night. It was, he says, the Democrats!, and specifically the Democratic leadership,  who set the strategy for the party in the Congress. Simply put, the Democrats ran from Obama, and that meant, they ran from all the successes of the last six years, and so a voter, looking for a reason to choose between this Democratic candidate and that Republican candidate, couldn’t think of a reason to make his choice but speeches by the candidate! I wonder if they can be serious, here. Make your choice of where to vote on the basis of political speeches?

I don’t think I have ever listened to a political speech in my entire life and then made up my mind to vote for that person on the basis of that speech. 

I read. I watch TV. I know the histories of the two political parties. By the time I actually am close enough to see and hear a candidate, I am months past the time when hearing him was going to affect my choice of candidate. 

But then I realize I am different from a lot of people. Before a single candidate has been chosen, I already know the parties’ philosophies on most issues. I don’t need to hear a candidate to think, “Hmmm. This one might be good.” I already know that if this one is a Republican, then his economic proposals are going to be a disaster for the country. And i know that the Democratic candidate is going to have a better plan for immigration. I also know that this country was built on immigration—all of us, except Native Americans, are immigrants—and so any proposal to seriously reduce immigration is a serious proposal to reject out nation’s history. What we are. So I don’t have to do much when the candidates begin to sort themselves out. He’s a Democrat—check. He accepts or pushes issues from the Democratic playbook—check. He speaks well—that’s a plus. Well, you see how this is going. 

Now, if a voter tries to make up his mind in the last weeks of the campaign on the basis of what the candidate is saying, he is very very likely to get it wrong. 

You have to educate yourself. You have to read books. You have to watch intelligent TV. You have to learn who lies to you and who doesn’t. You have to educate yourself on the policies of the two parties. Which ones are successful when adopted and which ones are dismal failures. And if, in 2014, you make the mistake of thinking that the Republicans are going to be better for the country than the Democrats, you are responsible for that mistake. 

Our voters, who didn’t educate themselves in recent weeks, screwed up on Tuesday.