A Conversation by Starlight, Race Point Beach

Dwight Cathcart Writes on 80+ Years of Being Gay

I am new to Substack, and Sam was kind enough to welcome me. Then, after I posted some pieces, he asked me to write something longer about being gay and about how things have changed since I was very young. What follows is my response.

-Dwight Cathcart

I would just add that this is a staggeringly great piece by Dwight and a privilege to run. It’s very long but I would strongly suggest reading all the way to the end — and exploring Dwight’s books.

-The Editor

A CONVERSATION BY STARLIGHT, RACE POINT BEACH

Race Point Light ends with two gay men on Commercial Street in the late afternoon in Provincetown. They have drinks, they tour galleries, they go to a leather store, they stop at Spiritus for ice cream, they buy carved silver rings for themselves, they go to tea dance and dance, have sandwiches and—one of them—drinks beer or vodka with something, and they pick up one friend at Spiritus and another at Bodybody. They talk about things, among them the pictures in the galleries. They are considering buying one, one that might be of an explosion, an abstract of dark colors and great turbulence. It could be a picture about the end of everything—or the beginning of everything. They talk about Benvenuto Cellini, who was convicted of sodomy for having sex with his studio assistant four hundred years ago and wonder if things are getting better for queers or is it just because they’re living under a different Pope. They listen to one of them recite a poem by John Donne, It’s about how difficult it is to know yourself. They go to the grocery store, buy food and go to Race Point beach, which is hard to get to and the most dangerous harbor on the coast, where they swim in the surf, watch the sun go down, and then come out and lie on the sand and talk. The oldest of these men is 72, the youngest is 24, another is in his forties, and the last is in his fifties. They talk about coming out, human slavery, Sweeney Todd, and the book the oldest of them is writing. This man is Fair Shaw. Race Point Light is about Fair Shaw, his life as a gay man since he was born just before World War II, to this date, June, 2004.

At lunch yesterday, in a restaurant by the sea—air-conditioned, because by Sunday none of us were willing to meet for lunch at all if the place was not air conditioned—there were four of us, at least two with AIDS. Our host tells us his doctor says he is going blind and will lose his sight in three years. I had difficulty keeping focused on the conversation going on around me—I was thinking about the beach, how many times I have been here, and the men I have come with who are now dead—and then, finally, our host said, “What are you thinking of?” I didn’t want to admit that I was thinking about the dead, here, in this beautiful place, on this beautiful day, so I said something else, which was also true. I said, “I was thinking about how curious it is at the beach. It is as if, when I am here, all the other people I have ever been on any beach with are also here with me, as if time does not exist. But the beach also makes me emphatically aware of how long I have been alive, how long it has been since I was here last, of the effects of time on the beach—erosion—of how we change and the conditions of our lives change. I don’t know of any other place that puts such an emphasis on time, both in erasing our awareness of it and in emphasizing how heavily it weighs on us.”

Our host started talking about The History Project, which I knew about but had forgotten—an oral history of some kind. I didn’t say that I had been talking to John, the twenty-year-old newbie, and I wondered what a man like me, who owned all his own memories, could say to a kid like that, who had just arrived on the scene, who hadn’t yet discovered what was his and what was implanted in him. Something about how hard it is to sort all that out.

(From Race Point Light, p. 5.)

Much of what they talk about is the difference in their perspectives on the condition of gay lives. At sunset, they’re on the beach.

Julio, the twenty-four-year-old spoke. He said, “I don’t think I have ever experienced homophobia.” Fair Shaw tells him that he is ringed about by rules and regulations and laws that limit his freedom. Then Julio is silent and finally says, “Can I read Eulogies?”

“I’ll get you a copy.”

“What about the other one?”

“I haven’t been able to sell it.”

“That’s bad.” He looked at me again. “And the one you’re working on. About a gay man and his times. What’s it called.?”

“It’s not named yet.”

“What do you think about where we are?”

“Where we are?” I wanted to say to him, Look, pay attention to the going sun, but by then it was gone, and the earth and sea seemed quiet, showing only the backs of the glory that had departed. Gradually our faces were losing the reflected glow from the departed sun.

“You know. Gay people.”

I watched the gold light coming across the sea. The sun was below the horizon, and its light still lit the sky in a narrow band just above the horizon. This narrow band reflected down onto the sea. “We have been living through something like the first eighteen or twenty months after the French Revolution, when there was a succession of revolutions—a succession of coups—as different gangs seized power, and the citizens were trying hard to keep up with who is in power today and to keep from being beheaded. It has been incredibly stressful, and I don’t think we recognize that fact.”

“Like what it was like in the first second after the Big Bang?”

“Yes—before or during the moment when things were getting sorted out. Do we know what we are supposed to be fighting for? Why is it that more of us aren’t paying attention to what has been happening in the universities for the last twenty-five years? And why haven’t the universities been paying more attention to what’s been happening on the street? Why is it that we’re not fighting for the freedom for everybody to suck cock?”

They smiled.

“Or crossdress. Anyway, that’s what I am writing about.” It was a moment of absolute clarity, and suddenly I wanted to think. “I think I’ll walk down to the water.” I got up, maneuvered around Chris.

“Are you OK?” He reached up and took my hand as I stepped over him.

“Oh, yeah. I’m OK.” Then I walked down the beach to the water. I took a step and stood in the water. You could see, in the periphery of things, twilight coming. Long gentle twilight.

(From Race Point Light, p. 517)

Race Point Light seems to be about the memory. Who we are, who we used to be when we were young. What we did, and to whom. What was done to us. Two men talking together now and realizing they are being driven by different banks of memory. I remember a very different life than what my parents remember. I was angry all the time, and my parents don’t remember that. But I remember also being very very happy at times, and they don’t have any memory of that either. And another thing it is about is Who do we have to fight?

The truth is, my parents’ only clear message to me was that they did not want to hear it. Whatever it was, they wanted me to keep it to myself. She once said to her sister, “My boys don’t know anything about that.” But the truth was, she didn’t know anything about that, and the reason we had never told her is that she had been so clear about telling us not to tell her. A relative once asked what the phrase gay leather bar meant. Since we had been going to gay leather bars for 25 years at that point, had met in a gay leather bar, and he had worked in a gay leather bar for 15 years, the reason she didn’t know the meaning of the phrase was that she had let us know, Don’t tell me, and she had shown no curiosity. Once I had to leave Boston late at night and to travel by train to a town on the Connecticut coast to deliver medications to a friend who had forgotten to pack them before he left. A friend of the family’s, driving me to the train the next morning, said, What is so important about those medications? I explained, but what her question meant was that she didn’t read the NY Times front pages, in which the discovery of protease inhibitors had occupied space for whole weeks at a time. The discovery of protease inhibitors meant that AIDS, which had been a fatal disease, was now going to be a chronic disease. People were going to live, and her question meant that she didn’t read gay stories in The Times. If she read gay stories at all, she would have known that those medications would work to keep him alive. By claiming ignorance, she was actually proclaiming her bigotry. I just didn’t know really means I tried to avoid learning what everybody knew.

The gay community—the LGBTQIA+ communities—demonstrated for years that we are not monolithic. I went from being an academic queer to being a street queer over Labor Day weekend 1984, and then never went back, and before that, from 1965 to 1984, a closeted married (to a woman) gay man. There are men and women, there are transsexuals, there are the varieties of socio-economic classes, there are vast numbers of different races and ethnicities, and there are religions, and a huge number of us who are without religion. And, like the gathering of the four men, Fair and Julio and David and Chris on Race Point beach in Race Point Light, our gatherings often seem to be ad hoc. They started out just the two of us, then added Julio and after that added David, picking up people as they went, like the giant first Stonewall March to the Sheep Meadow in June 1970. We gain courage by seeing how many of us there are.

We perform our sexuality differently, not defined by any one sexual profile. You do this, and this makes you queer. Everything we do, other people do also. Anal intercourse, cocksucking, blowjobs, S&M, and the rest of them, too many to name. Somebody did most of them, but few people did every one. Some don’t do any of them and are still queer. Women do it all differently. Faced with this variety, it is understandable that we are unable to create one great national organization—in this way we are like people of color who have had, on one end of the spectrum, Martin Luther King, Jr., and, on the other, Malcolm X, though we have a whole flock of associations that organize around different ones of us, or different things that we do. But this variety also means that there is no single agenda that we can gather around, except maybe freedom or leave our sex thing alone. It has never been solely about sex. We have said, treat us like everyone else, and if sex isn’t it, neither was anything else it. Tattoos, purple hair, earrings, sucking cock. At one point—for decades—for men, it was muscles and black leather, now it’s white beads up high on the neck. Nothing defines us. Except, of course, we are defined by all the smaller things that define some of us—tattoos, purple hair, earrings, sucking cock—and our body types. Emphatically not beautiful bodies, hair. There isn’t a single look when we go out. This is just to say that we are a multitude and contain multitudes and are more often Whitmanites than religious persons of other sects. What we don’t want is to be treated like everyone is treated now. We want all of us to be given more freedom.

But we do have our characteristics, at least when you divide us up into smaller groups. Queers in the US, in school, and during the latter half of the twentieth century, weren’t athletes, most of them. I don’t know why that is, and it may have gradually gotten better, but I remember that up until I was 20 or so, I used to be called sissy. This was all about the schoolyard and my side and your side and team sports. I think it had something to do with baseball and football being hyper male endeavors, and the other boys understood something that even I didn’t know then, there is something queer about Dwight. But then I quit college and went into the Army, and after that—the Army wasn’t into team sports either, unless the players carried hand grenades and M-1s—it was never an issue. Years later, when I took up lifting weights, I discovered that I did just fine in the masculinity department, but Jesus! Who could forget the third grade! Later, I found that my friends didn’t care whether I was into male team sports—we were studying or teaching Seventeenth Century Lyric Poetry, and I was making A’s every time. Nothing remained of the third grade but the humiliation I felt, which never went away. Our situation was one of bifurcation. As long as nobody mentioned homosexuality or being gay, then communication with my friends was easy and straightforward. If someone mentioned a boy who had been expelled for being gay, or a gay scandal in the newspapers, or in the john, then I had to shift into my be careful mode. Be watchful. I was able to pass as straight without much difficulty, but I was aware of how my culture was demanding things of me that it didn’t demand of other boys. This added stress to my life that was there all the time, and was a major factor when in 1959 I decided to quit school after two years and to go into the Army. College was a more difficult environment than high school because I lived on campus in a dormitory and being careful was therefore more difficult than high school, where I had only to be careful a certain number of hours a day. In college, my fear went on for 24 hours of the day. In the Army, I was aware of a lot of male/male contact going on—some ethnic cultures are just more open to it than others—but men in the Army live closer to their bodies, apparently, than men in other places. In 1960, when I was in the Army, there was more physical contact than there had been in the dorm at school. On the other hand, the Army had highly structured procedures for getting rid of men who presented a problem. I think the rule was, You can get away with a lot if you are popular and good at your job. I was those things—I was the company clerk—and I fought a big mechanic when he called me queer, and my first sergeant stood up for me, even though by that time it was probably obvious that I was queer. The discrimination was against unpopular men or effeminate men. I won the fight not by defeating the big mechanic but by being braver than he was.

The important things came in pairs. Straight and gay, male and female, good and bad. In and out. And even after we found out that “male” didn’t pair with anything, we still used it as if it did. Gay was not one thing, but a whole range of things, and we still acted as if it still was one thing. Gender indicated an area in which there was movement and restlessness. It was not like left and right. Still, today, the Supreme Court hasn’t gotten the message. Their great gay opinions from the aughts and the teens all written by Justice Kennedy still spoke in terms of “gay” as if gay could, by itself, delineate an absolute truth. A man can be gay, can be gay sometimes, can be gay a little bit, can be gay without meaning it, without feeling it, can be gay for pay, can be gay on Thursday. The hardcore gay men—I count myself in this group—never had a sexual encounter without their mind and their emotions being involved with their dicks. But I regularly had sex when only my dick was involved—this was when I was married to a woman—and it wasn’t all that difficult.

There are not two genders or two sexualities. To name one is to name the first of dozens. We say “gay” because we are lazy and don’t care about going to the trouble of making distinctions. I once had several long conversations with a relative who, when I was 24, tried to set me up with a prostitute in New York to turn me straight. At the time, I didn’t know what he was doing. His ploy was successful, I got an erection—my first with a woman—and on the strength of that, I went on and developed a relationship with a woman and eventually married her. Later I found out more about the way my sex worked—I could get an erection with just about anybody or any gender if the circumstances were right—but it was never satisfying for me unless my mind and emotions were fully engaged. My relative, who I realized was not very smart, thought that all that was necessary was that I be erect. And I was ignorant enough to believe so too. Of course, when I saw him again thirty years later, he wanted to tell me about myself. He wanted to say I was really bisexual, since I had been in a marriage with a women, and I had to say, No. I am gay. I have always been gay, every moment of my life, in every sex act I have ever engaged in, I have been gay. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t disengage my mind and function in different ways with different partners. He and I fought, but I had grown up and I was more knowledgeable than he was, and I just said, “No. You’re ignorant. You don’t know how sex works even though you screw women all the time. I do. You only know how to make your dick work.” I found, during those years—my twenties and thirties—that I was surrounded by a whole culture that was just as ignorant as I had been about the fundamentals of sex. I suspect that most straight people don’t ever bother to read a book about sex. They are not helped by our language, which is based on a binary nomenclature. I have experienced several occasions when men I have known to be straight and believed themselves to be straight—and were straight apparently—suggested they have sex with me. I presume it was because I answered some infrequent need they had which I wasn’t aware of and didn’t need to be aware of. These guys wanted me to fulfill some fantasy they had. And any chart laying out the way humans behave sexually has to, simply has to, include these guys.

I suspect that heterosexuals are light years behind the gay people when it comes to sex. We know that a lot of it is situational—take the same two people and put them in a different situation and very different things can happen. A lot of it is driven, too, by class, in this world with its strong class markers. But many gay people don’t seem to care so much about class or about the ages of the two people involved, or about money, and I think most gay people don’t have much time for monogamy, either. I read about a husband murdering his wife over her sleeping around or she murders him because he sleeps around, and I think what a waste all that is. Many many people I know—including my husband and I—love one another and know that love is different from lust, and the other one can see something he likes and chase it down and satisfy that for a few weeks or months or years, always coming back to him for something permanent, which is love. My husband has always been free since the day I met him, including being free to have sex with whomever he wishes. Just as I am.

The first Supreme Court case that confronted this bifurcation in my life was the disastrous Bowers v. Hardwick, decided in 1986, which criminalized men and women for our choice of sex object. It separated us from the rest of us and said our choice created a division that must be maintained. When I arrived at my college in 1957 for my Freshman year, the first thing I heard was that there had been a “purge” of gay students the year before. Gay students were expelled during my first year. Students were afraid. The second Supreme Court case that took up the legal predicament of the LGBTQIA+ communities was Romer v. Evans. Romer declared that no state could deny the equal protection of the laws to any group of citizens. It declared that there must be no divisions between us and the rest of us, yet all of us were aware that they divided the world in two. The world was unstable. So the four people sitting in the sand on Race Point beach in my novel acknowledged one of the defining characteristics of our communities: confusion. The cause of that confusion—straight people changing their minds on us—was, of course, blamed on us. The effect of this mind-changing in the Supreme Court was the first of a series of divisions in the community. If a person was Fair Shaw’s age, and counting only adult years, that person had spent 44 years living in a culture which told him that his sexual need was a sin. He spent 38 years being told he was a potential traitor. He spent another 38 years being told he was a psychological cripple—until it was removed from the DSM-IV in 1973. During my four characters’ time on Race Point beach sitting on the sand, they were considered to be disease carriers. The culture adopted one of these explanations for its dislike of gay people, gave it wide publicity for a few years, then abandoned it in favor of a newer reason for its dislike. This is what Fair Shaw said about it in Race Point Light:

The country suffers regular bouts of amnesia, forgetting that the current excuse for condemning homosexuality has not always been the excuse for condemning homosexuality, and that there have been others that have been tried and been abandoned. While the culture forgets and moves on, the generations of gay men and women wounded in these hit-and-run assaults still bear the scars of having been alive when it was thought, for example, that gay sex was a perversion and that gay men would sell out the country’s secrets.

(From Race Point Light, p. 438.)

Then we began the interminable, thrilling, court battles over marriage. In 1991, Hawaii began to toy around with the idea, the Governor of California made gestures, and then the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on November 19, 2003, got serious and declared that: “The marriage ban works a deep and scarring hardship on a very real segment of the community for no rational reason” (Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health, 2003). I watched the news every day and read everything I could find, and while intellectually I was pleased with the marriage arguments, the reality was that I knew the whole marriage fight would not result in any change for me. By the time it arrived, my partner and I had already been together for 23 years and a marriage license was going to make no difference to us. We loved each other. Our community respected us. Nothing else mattered. At a dinner party, eight men around the table were asked why they were considering marriage. The first man said, “For the money.” Marriage might eventually mean that the “marriage benefit” might benefit us. There are, throughout the state and federal levels of government, financial benefits that accrue to taxpayers who are married. The man who said, “For the money,” was giving the best and most rock-solid reason for an LGBTQIA+ to get married.

The Court followed their decision with changes to the legal definition of marriage in the Commonwealth:

We construe civil marriage to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others. [Goodridge, ibid]

Another consequence of the marriage wars was that afterwards, the condition of marriage declined. I suppose people will continue to get married in our culture, but it will be what ours was, secular and for the money. Another person said, It was a great party. The losers were the religious people and certain conservatives who thought marriage belonged only to them. But after marriage more and more people began to understand that our relationships had always been there and had always been meaningful, with or without the Commonwealth’s approval. The result was that the state’s approval became less and less important and necessary. People got married, and people recognized that nobody else’s marriage was affected, and none of the horrors that had been predicted came about, and as a consequence Massachusetts became a noticeably more secular place after than before, and we all remembered who caused the fracas.

When my husband and I married on the beach at Race Point in 2015, we married without any reference to God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit or to the church. This made for a short service. When we were talking about it several days before, I told him that, after the service was over, I wanted to speak to our guests. When the moment came, it was a cloudless, perfect New England beach day, late in the afternoon, and I said, “My husband and I spoke about this and agreed that we wanted to say something to you about what it is we’ve done here today. I think that all of us have known people—couples—who were in love and then their lives intervened and the death do us part got in the way, and they were never able to get married. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, all churches everywhere acted to prevent gay men and lesbians from getting married. AIDS got in the way and killed our friends before they had the idea that they wanted to marry. And, of course, the government under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush did nothing for many of them. These people were in love and might have at least been able to consider whether they wanted to get married. I would like to name four people who were in love but who died before they had the chance to consider it—Sarah, my cousin, and Bimmie, and Steve and Tim, our friends. They should have had the option.” When the small crowd on the beach was breaking up, a man I’ve known for fifty years came up and said, “We don’t do that to people any more.” But what that man had forgotten—or conveniently didn’t know or just never thought very seriously about the subject—was that it had been done to those I named, and it could not now be undone, and there were millions more that it had been done to, and that there were many people in the crowd on the beach at Race Point who have been treated that way. These people had been deliberately excluded from marriage, and that was unforgivable. And it had been done because of malice. And it continues today.

What this meant for the four characters on the sand at Race Point in the novel Race Point Light is that two of them, Fair and Tom, are going to carry the burden of their memories of being gay and the other two, Chris and Julio, the younger ones, are not—a condition of their ages. But because we are friends, and because we know what has happened and why, we all of us will try to learn about each other. And this is true even if Fair and Tom have long since gotten over their conscious memories of those years. And it is true even if Julio and Chris have never really known homophobia. They will learn about it. Experiencing the years of heightened bigotry is like being in a war—it is like the Iraqi war—where you were in a firefight and both your legs were shot off, and then you are brought back to the States, and learn to walk with prosthetics and then, because you are still young and strong and energetic and spirited, and you have no legs, you learn how to live with no legs, and you fall in love and marry and may have children and sometimes you may even forget for a moment that you don’t have legs or that your legs are made of plastic and vinyl and you can’t feel them, but whatever accommodation you may make to your condition without legs—and your life now is entirely successful because you have worked hard and made money and gained power and respect and are a really really good person—still the fact remains that you are living your life without legs. And that you lost your legs in a war declared by a bigot who required you to serve but who refused to give you respect in return. This is your condition now and will be your condition for the rest of your life and there is no way any person can change this. Without respect. And part of the effort you expend in living your life now is expended on acting like you haven’t lost your legs, like those years-when-you-had-legs didn’t happen or that those-years-after-you-lost-them never happened. You spend energy on not letting your torso-without-legs intrude on the levity going on around you, just as I, when I was in my first year of college, spent some of my energy trying not to let my friends know I was gay and also because I was young and it would embarrass my father. That was when I still had respect for my father. When the four men get together at the end of the novel Race Point Light, at Race Point beach, in the dark, in the starlight, and the youngest of them says, I have never felt homophobia, it might be that the oldest of them, whose books are about pain and deprivation, feels grief whose source is so long ago and whose quality is so pervasive and shattering that it seems to turn the earth to crushed ice, and can only ask, Why do I feel so hated? Yet all of them are here, together, on the beach, in the starlight, feeling their feelings.

The centuries during which LGBTQIA+ have been oppressed have left a vast population on the beach laughing, singing, talking—without legs. And there is nothing anyone can do to atone for those missing limbs.

Dwight Cathcart

’s husband is Courtney, his daughter is Mary Moore, his son is Fran. His queer novels—Ceremonies, Winter Rain, Adam in the Morning, Race Point Light—are about a queer man living in America 1945-2010. He is a writer.