by Dwight Cathcart | Mar 26, 2013 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
On Towleroad, you can read Ari Ezra Waldman, their resident legal expert, about whom they say, Ari Ezra Waldman teaches at Brooklyn Law School and is concurrently getting his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. He is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College and a...
by Dwight Cathcart | Mar 7, 2013 | Fighting Back
At every step forward in this long process, we should stop and consider how we got here. We didn’t get here because we were polite and our opponents were kind. We got here because we were tough, relentless, and fierce. We got here because we knew our stuff and our...
by Dwight Cathcart | Oct 1, 2012 | Fighting Back, Larry Kramer
Before AIDS, people got sick, went to their doctors, were told what to do, and got better—or worse and died—and that didn’t change until HIV had been among us for five years or so. Since the drug companies weren’t coming out with effective medications, and since the...
by Dwight Cathcart | Sep 12, 2012 | Anger, Fighting Back
I told him I didn’t trust therapists. The young man said he didn’t know why a person wouldn’t trust therapists. I reminded him that half my life the American Psychiatric Association had in its diagnostic manual that gay people suffered from various kinds of mental...
by Dwight Cathcart | Aug 22, 2012 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
Now it is time to focus on the Supreme Court. Here are the stakes: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in 1933, Stephen Breyer in 1938, and Anthony Kennedy in 1936. These three justices were part of the majority in both major GLBT civil rights cases of the last...
by Dwight Cathcart | Aug 5, 2012 | AIDS, Fighting Back
My partner is out of town for the weekend, and this afternoon I went by myself to Dark Knight Rises. Much of the outdoor shooting takes place on Wall Street in pitched battles between the New York police and the bad guys. In the first image, Wall Street is cleared of...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jul 26, 2012 | Fighting Back
When I was thirteen or fourteen in South Carolina—we’re talking about the early fifties here—the Boy Scouts were different from all the other activities a boy could do. We went on weekend overnight campouts to some local “woods,” and I looked forward...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jun 27, 2012 | Fighting Back
Today is June 26th, and tomorrow is June 27th, and after midnight tomorrow night, one hour into June 28th, we will be into the forty-third anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. If you stay up one hour past midnight, it will be exactly forty-three years since Lt. Pine...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jun 13, 2012 | Fighting Back
The mixed news from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, discussed here last post, and the continuing epidemic of gay teenage-suicides around the country—it’s hard to find any positive aspect of that fact—may be what caused some of us to find Gay Pride a...
by Dwight Cathcart | Dec 26, 2011 | SCOTUS
John G. Lawrence is dead. He is the man who gave his name to “Lawrence v. Texas,” the case before the Supreme Court decided June 26, 2003 that invalidated all sodomy laws in the US. Lawrence was in his bedroom with another man, Tyrone Garner, having sex, when local...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jun 28, 2011 | Fighting Back
On Saturday and Sunday morning, the images of the celebrating crowds in front of the Stonewall Inn reminded many of us of the images of the very angry crowds in front of the same inn, almost exactly 42 years earlier. Then, there were no professional photographers, and...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jun 6, 2011 | Fighting Back
Hamlet, to set things right in Denmark, kills the king. Whatever he has going on in his life with respect to his mother and her second husband, and to the woman with whom he has fallen in love, he has to act against the king, and that is regicide. The audience to that...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jun 1, 2011 | Fighting Back
Mitzi, fifteen years old, transgender, homeless, a fierce fighter, has always known that the private, intimate details of her life seamlessly become public every time she goes onto the street. “I think,” Mitzi says, “every time I go on the street I’m giving the finger...
by Dwight Cathcart | May 19, 2011 | Fighting Back
What’s important is how hard we had to fight to get where we are now. There was fighting on Christopher Street very early—from one A.M. to about four A.M.—on Saturday morning, June 28, 1969. And then again that night, and then light skirmishes Sunday, Monday and...
by Dwight Cathcart | May 3, 2011 | Fighting Back
The Stonewall Riots have been in the news. PBS ran the documentary, “Stonewall Uprising,” on American Experience last week. I got out my copy of David Carter’s Stonewall, originally published in 2004, to compare notes. It’s cool seeing gray-haired men, talking about...
