by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Friday, July 26, 2013

Chris Matthews, Anthony Weiner, sex, and language

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I had the TV on to MSNBC, listening to the progressive cable channel chew over Anthony Weiner. Chris Matthews was sputtering with (I suppose) astonishment and dismay, talking to two psychologists, trying to understand why Weiner did what he did. In a very brief exchange, he said, “I just don’t get it. I think, I get, I get sex—.” By which he meant that he understood sex, but didn’t understand the motivation of a man like Weiner. He went on, “—like we all do. We get sex. Male and female. Gay and straight—” By this point I am sitting up and listening hard. He is going on, and then he begins that characteristic thing he does. He stutters, searching for his next word. He can’t immediately come up with it so he says, “—and—other possibilities.” He didn’t mean to say that. His stuttering displayed his ignorance. Don’t start with gay, unless you know what you’re going to say after you’ve said straight. 

 Chris was exploring how and why the sex drives of all of us end up making damned fools of a lot of us, even making some of us call ourselves names like Carlos Danger. But people have never been able to control their sex to any great degree since the beginning of the earth, and what is astonishing is that Chris Matthews was acting astonished and dismayed by that fact. 

 If Chris had started with gay and ended with straight, he would have painted himself as even more offensive than he did when he ended it with “—and—other possibilities.” At least Chris recognizes that there are others—all the rest of us, men and women who are neither gay nor straight—who have to be acknowledged, even if we are not named. This brief exchange puts his ignorance, and the poverty of our language, on display. He didn’t know what to call them, those other possibilities, so it is a pretty fair bet that he didn’t know how to think about them, either.

 Chris’s real mistake was in starting his analysis of sex by thinking of sex as if it were a binary construct. “I get sex, like we all do. We get sex. Male and female.” The way he edged into his little discussion is to introduce male and female and sex and the idea of straight, an understandable if parochial mental knee-jerk. He took what he knew best, introduced that into the discussion, and then used gay and straight to start a progression. But the trouble with such a progression—gay, straight, and other possibilities—is that you can’t wimp out like that. You have to name the genders, one by one, once you name the first one. Unfortunately, the human race is built so you can’t ever name them all.

 What Chris Matthews should have done on his program tonight was open his line of inquiry by asking his two psychologists, “Can you talk about what drives us when we want to have sex with another person?” And then, “What is it about sex that often makes us lose ourselves in it?” And, in that rapid-fire way he has, he should have asked another question, before the psychologists had had a chance to answer his first two, “Why does sex so often make us make fools of ourselves?”

 What we need are new words, new ways of talking about these matters, and so new ways of thinking.
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Saturday, July 6, 2013

People who were careless and malicious and ignorant

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It’s satisfying, having access to a right that everybody else has access to, and to have that right unencumbered by any factor. These rights are inherent and do not come from the Constitution. Justice Kennedy recognized that. We can get married. Our marriages are recognized by the federal government, and nobody can limit those rights, including the US government. The people who try, like the various conservative churches and religions and the Republican Party, will, I suspect, lose adherents of their own rather than change our behavior. That’s already happening. 

The recognition of these inherent rights is affecting the gay community in a variety of ways, depending on generation. A young friend, when the marriage cases were being debated before the Supreme Court, said he found it hard to believe that this debate was taking place. This should have been dealt with decades ago, he said, with a noticeable strain of impatience. Others, in the middle generations, see that these victories are the result of decades of work by thousands of activists. Now that we have arrived at the resolution we should have arrived at decades ago, we can move on. For myself, I don’t trust it. Our opponents fought too hard to prevent this from happening for us now to arrive on the scene and greet everyone present with good will.  I think of all those in my generation who never had the option to marry—decent men and women who lived their whole lives without basic rights, without marriage and without the right to serve openly in the Armed Services, and without ever being able to be  public about their feelings for their own gender. It is hard for me to turn around and to accept as my comrades the people who caused all this, people who were careless and malicious and ignorant of the lives of gay people. I remember the damage that has been done—people robbed of a portion of their lives—and I won’t forgive and can’t forget. 

Two days ago, I read a brief piece on Huffington Post by a mother whose son came out to her in 2001, when he was twelve. This mother reacted badly,—she was a religious person—and the son grew up into an alcoholic and a drug addict and ultimately died of a drug overdose. The mother is pictured kissing the face of this son while he is in a coma, apparently before he died. I read this piece, and was almost incapacitated for days afterward, the thing was so painful. 

I remember the people who didn’t get their rights during their lifetimes, who died before they were fully recognized. Now that we are getting our rights recognized, we have to remember the people who went before us. We can’t be the kind of people who forget.
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

A demonstration of happy people, the 54th Regiment Memorial, rain, Bromfield Camera

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I went into town to find a demonstration of happy gay people, but the only demonstration I could find was in front of the State House around a man running as a Democrat for Congress. Everybody seemed happy, but they didn’t seem gay. I crossed the street. There were tourists with cameras around the 54th Regiment Memorial. Several listened to a guide telling about the memorial. Not disappointed, I thought the 54th Regiment Memorial was perhaps exactly the right place for me to be after the Supreme Court decisions this morning, even standing alone. Both celebrated moments of changing American democracy, the inclusion of the African-American soldiers among the troops fighting in the Civil War, and the inclusion of same-sex couples among those who must be given their rights under Article 5 of the Constitution, liberty and due process. The soldiers in the Memorial seemed so brave, marching off to war, carrying their rifles, so entirely admirable, and even though most of them died at Ft Wagner, still they were victorious, like all the generations of gay men and women have been victorious in their long march.

It began to rain, and I considered the danger to my camera. I turned my camera off and took out the battery. Bromfield Camera was nearby, and I ran, crossing streets and dodging pedestrians. There were three gentlemen behind the counters in Bromfield Camera, good friends, two up at my end of the age scale, and one way down at the other end of the scale, and we joked. “I’m in danger of getting wet.” Being New Englanders, they said that was impossible, that it wasn’t really raining hard enough, you know, to actually wet someone. I told them I needed a plastic bag to protect my camera. We talked about the Supreme Court.

The younger one said, “Now that we have gay marriage with all the federal benefits—” He paused. “Will you marry me?”

Everybody laughed. I said, “Sure. If this doesn’t work out with C, then I’ll marry you.”  C and I have been testing this out for the last 23 years, so I think this may last. But it was nice to be asked. 
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Gay men, gay women, the truth, and the Supreme Court (3)

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What we are looking at here is a developing definition of gay man that is very porous. There isn’t really such a thing. Alfred Kinsey collected data on sexual histories that resulted in his creation of a seven point scale in which he said everyone could be placed. Most men in the population can be placed in the 0 column “if they make no physical contacts which result in [homosexual] erotic arousal [...].” On the other hand, men can be placed in the 6 column “if they are exclusively homosexual, both in regard to their overt experience and in regard to their psychic reactions.” [p. 639-641]  A man can be placed in 4 column “if they have more overt activity and/or psychic reactions in the homosexual, while still maintaining a fair amount of heterosexual arousal activity [...].” Other more recent scientists have created vastly expanded scales by which to measure human sexual activity, and there are scales that attempt to measure psychic activity of a person engaging in sex, but they have not created anything that successfully attacked Kinsey’s work. [See Kinsey, The Measure of All Things, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1998, p.450-452 ]

Today, we are in a peculiar situation. Our science comes from Kinsey and his heirs, and our politics comes from the Sixties, the Stonewall Riots, and the Gay Liberation Front’s cry, Come out! The cry has nothing to do with the accumulation of accurate data. If you are a Republican Member of Congress and are caught having sex with a man in some restroom somewhere, it may be because you are generally always wanting a man but haven’t ever told anybody, or it may be that you have never wanted a man before now. What is clear is that the self-definition “I am gay” or “I am straight” are independent of the specifics of your sexual history—that is, independent of the data drawn from you. Either “I am gay” or “I am straight” may be true without regard to the data drawn from you that may define you as a Kinsey 1 or a Kinsey 3 or a Kinsey 5 or some other designation. 

And now, tomorrow the Supreme Court is going to rule on the marriage cases, and somewhere in the Court’s decision may be a reference to the phrase “gay people,” and the Justices will not be referring to the science of the incidence of sex. The Justices will not make reference to the percentage of gay people in the culture or they will make reference to “ten percent” of us who are gay, but this will be thrown into the opinion without much regard for where it comes from. As far as gay people are concerned, the justices might as well be making up their opinions out of whole cloth. We will be able to get married, or we won’t be able to get married, depending on factors that don’t have much or anything to do with us. We will enter into relationships which are monogamous—or not—based on factors that don’t have anything to do with the Supreme Court. They don’t know us. Only occasionally, when one or some of us drift into the same petri dish as something they are familiar with are they able to get us partly right. Biologically male. Well yey. But most of the time, they don’t know much about what is valuable to us or what drives us. And when the lawyer in Massachusetts said, “Gay people just want the same thing straight people want,” the lawyer said something that was manifestly untrue. 

I’ve written about all this before, when there was a run of court cases at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. Follow this link. Things have not gotten better since then, and the danger is greater, because this time the court is the Supreme Court. I wrote then, “We can now see that the intellectual foundations of the future are being constructed. I don’t just mean the legal constitutional structures that are going to control how we are going to fit into the body of the republic, but also the emotional and psychological structures that will control the way we think about ourselves. The concept of “gay people” is congealing and solidifying.” And it is almost certain that they are getting it wrong. We are not like that. We are not like straight people. We don’t divide our sexuality among three options.

Why do it, then? It’s fun, it’s heart-warming, it makes it easier to live together in our culture, it’s great to feel the warmth and approval—and love—of friends and family, which is sustaining during hard times, and it is a public expression of what I feel for C, my partner. Gay people, even those who get married, should remind themselves and each other that their relationships were just fine before they decided to get married, that marriage brings financial advantages and the approval of the community but does not make their relationship better, and that marriage does not make those who undergo it better in any way than those who don’t. Nor are those who have children. And they don’t conduct their relationships better than those who don’t. 

In a moment when “marriage” may be vastly expanded, it is essential to remember all those during all those years who were in love but who were never married.
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Gay men, gay women, the truth, and the Supreme Court (2)

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When I was growing up, everybody around me—my parents, my grandparents, my sister and brother, my cousins, my scoutmaster, my teachers, the priest, politicians—thought the same way about how I was feeling. I was definitely aroused by men and by particular aspects of men’s bodies, and when I started becoming aware of this, I was aware that I should absolutely not tell anybody else what I knew. My whole culture condemned me for feeling the way I felt. Today I remember how it felt to feel something and to know that everybody thought I was feeling the wrong thing or that I was wrong to feel the way I felt. Part of what I wanted, after I divorced my wife and moved to Boston, was the right to feel without being condemned. It was years after I moved to Boston before I first began to know what it felt like to have my own feelings and to know that other people around me felt those same feelings or respected those feelings. 

What was needed—and I didn’t know this when I was in my twenties—was some change in the culture that allowed it to accept and to reinforce the feelings I had. At the time, I thought we needed to address the places in the law that prevented me from serving in the Armed Forces or, later, that prevented me from getting married, or that taxed me differently from straight people,  or that prevented me from getting into bed with a man without being afraid that I was going to end up in jail. But as we have moved toward success in those areas, we also have had to address the fact that our culture for years has refused to give me and others like me the elemental acceptance of our feelings. This was much more complex than my need for my culture to accept the way I felt about men’s arms. It was a need for the culture to accept my sense of the impermanence of feelings—what I both felt and learned—and my sense that love was not the same thing as sex, and that much of the impermanence of heterosexual marriages and the cause of the high divorce rate among straight people was the consequence of the heterosexual culture always seeming to think that sex was love. What was needed was for us to tell the larger culture what our life was like, to say it over and over again and then to expect the straight world to take seriously everything we said. Taking the Stonewall Riots as a plan, we needed to demand respect.

What makes a gay man is a serious question, and the four men, and two women (one adult woman and one fifteen-year-old girl) in Adam in the Morning don’t agree on an answer. They don’t argue about it—they love one another and respect one another and so don’t argue about most things—but they do discuss. Belle, for example, backs away from her proposal:

‘I think I may get pregnant without asking any of you for help. I don’t want to be in a position of asking any of you men to give up being gay, even for a minute, so I can get pregnant.’
[Bo answers] ‘Belle, there is no brick wall between gay and straight. Being gay is not something you can give up, no matter what you do, but it’s also not something that governs every single sex act and thought you engage in.’ [Belle and Bo in conversation, Tuesday afternoon, on the roof, Adam in the Morning, Adriana Books, 2010]

If the affection among these folks is strong enough, he may do it, on the other hand he may not, and he’ll tell us what he’ll do and what he won’t, which is the way it should be, and we will respect him.

The courts don’t want to allow this. Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which declared that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, also declared marriage in the Commonwealth to be “a voluntary union of two persons, as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.” But we, not so committed to the identity of sex and love, know that we can have commitment and  love without monogamy, and so even though we can now have marriage in the Commonwealth, it is marriage defined by the Justices of the Supreme Judicial Court and is not ours, not defined by us or by our experience.

In the Commonwealth, the Chief Justice defined marriage in a way that conflicts with the feelings and the actions of a significant number of gay people. We’ve been here before. We’re being told, “We’re going to let you do this. These are the rules.” I expect what will happen is that we will vote with our feet, gradually changing in new and unexpected ways the institutions we now are getting legal access to. Until we change marriage, we will have to live with another version of what we lived under from my birth in 1940 to my heterosexual marriage in 1964, a dishonest contract, imposed from outside.
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