Books by Dwight Cathcart

Race Point Light

It used to be that gay lives had two events—coming out and falling in love—and almost all our movies and novels, beginning with Maurice, were structured around one or two of those events.  Race Point Light, in 530 pages, is different. It begins when the narrator, Fair Shaw, feels his first erection at age four or five and ends when he is sixty-three, holding hands with his partner, at midnight, walking west in the surf at Race Point in Provincetown. What never changes for him is his sexual response to the other person—he grows hard and there is no controlling that—and his realization that his culture wants to control his sex. At a Sunday picnic when he is ten he finds that his family think queers are terrible, so he learns to hide and to protect himself. He finds that an LGBTQ person is always dealing with his sexuality in some way or other. In the Army—when it was still a crime to be gay in the Army—he fights the big guy who calls him queer. He shows all the soldiers watching him fight that it is not OK treat a gay person like shit. He fights on this front from July 7, 1984, when his friend, Andy Darwell, was murdered by homophobic teenagers, to the last page of the book, walking in the surf. He fights the feds over marriage and the doctors over AIDS, and against the psychiatrists for their definition of mental illness, his birth family over whether he was, just as he was, “acceptable,” and academics who said Shakespeare didn’t love his young man. He fights for his definition of what a man is, and he writes two big novels about what it’s like to be gay in America. His life, all 63 years of it, is exhausting, thrilling, a redefinition of some of the foundational concepts of our culture—masculinity, family, education, value, autonomy, politics—and thrilling to read because these things are so seldom written about, all of it in a single guy’s life, from birth to death. He lived through all of it. 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 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.]