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Books by Dwight Cathcart
Winter Rain
The president is announcing the bombing of Iraqi troops in Kuwait, Amos is in the hospital dying, Arabella’s marriage is falling apart, Alec is trying to hold his life together, Michael, Alec’s lover, has serious news to disclose, Alec’s son Stephen has left home and won’t return Alec’s phone calls, Alec’s father is calling, having gotten married for the fourth time. Everything seems be coming to a head around Amos’s still, unconscious body in the hospital. Winter Rain is the story of Alex Argento, of his life in crisis and of the little community around him, whose members sometimes help and sometimes make things worse. It is the story of men and women dealing with AIDS who know that, in time, many of them will be the still, unconscious body in the hospital. It is the story of fate and chance and tragedy and survival. Read More. [This link will also enable the reader—if you wish—to hear audio recordings of passages from these books read by the author.]
Race Point Light
Fair Shaw needs to be comfortable in his skin. He’s not, and, for a long time, he doesn’t know who has to change—himself or his culture. He fights for civil rights and against the war, is an activist for AIDS and LGBTQ rights, and he asks, How can I make my life work without losing myself? Race Point Light is about Shaw’s struggle and about fighting back, the power of sex, how complicated sex is, about how we get it wrong, much of the time. Shaw learns that LGBTQ people are going to change the definition of marriage, the meaning of family, the point of sex, what man and woman mean, and about our conception of heroism. We pit the intimate needs of men and women against every powerful force in the culture, and we do this on the playground, in seminar rooms, faculty lounges, churches, the military, the work place, hospitals, the way medicine is practiced, in the street, and, of course, in funeral homes. The struggles seem to reach into every corner of modern society. Informed by movies, lyric poetry and other novels, this novel is about the costs of great change and how they affect one man, Fair Shaw, from age three to age sixty-five. Read More. [This link will also enable the reader—if you wish—to hear audio recordings of passages from these books read by the author.]
Adam In The Morning
Bo Ravich, thirty years old, comes home from work in the West Village at two o’clock in the morning, Saturday, June 28, 1969, and stumbles into the middle of the riots outside the Stonewall Inn. He and Andrew, his lover, and their friends fight the police every night of the riots. Gay people have never fought back before, and these six people realize that fighting back means everything is changed. Everything has to be thought through again from the beginning. Adam in the Morning is about one of those rare moments when we are free to become ourselves. Read More. [This link will also enable the reader—if you wish—to hear audio recordings of passages from these books read by the author.]
Earthrise: Queer novels and the lives of LGBTQ persons
The NASA photograph called “Earthrise,” taken by astronaut Bill Anders of the Earth rising up out of the shadow of the Moon suggests how we are to look at ourselves—from a distance, on Earth, falling through black space, all of us in this together. The Earthrise essays, which were originally published as part of the Adriana Books blog, are on the nature of literature, politics, and the lives of LGBTQ persons. Since LGBTQ persons inhabit Earth, and there is no God—we see black, deep, empty space around us—and no one else for us to turn to to give our lives meaning, we must do that job ourselves by creating art and by our work, making something out of ourselves. When it is all over, we must be able to say, We made this, and then leave it behind as a marker. We were here. And This is what I felt. Read More. [This link will also enable the reader—if you wish—to hear audio recordings of passages from these books read by the author.]
Adriana Books – The Complete Blog, 2010-2021, Vol 1
The Complete Blog, in two volumes, is a collection of the posts Dwight Cathcart put up to the blog on <i>Adriana Books</i>. Volume 1 starts in November, 2010, and Volume 2 ends eleven years later, in November 2021, with a farewell. They are short, readable, pointed and have the daily immediacy of a journal or a newspaper, or of letters between friends. They are concerned with the same things his novels are concerned with—the real effect on LGBTQ people of living in a mostly bigoted culture. This continues below, in the description of Vol 2. Read More. [This link will also enable the reader—if you wish—to hear audio recordings of passages from these books read by the author.]
Adriana Books – The Complete Blog, 2010-2021, Vol 2
These blogs are about coming out, the marriage equality movement, violence against LGBTQ teenagers, publishing books interesting to queers, what to do about the dying gay bookstore, and they address, over and over again, the place of violence in our movement, whether revolutionary movements are most successful when they are rude, and other critical issues that generally don’t appear in our literature. Read More. [This link will also enable the reader—if you wish—to hear audio recordings of passaages from these books read by the author.]
The Great Question
—Fair Shaw, narrator of Race Point Light