CEREMONIES is the story of a gay community in a small city. The story begins with the vicious murder of a young gay man, a new arrival in town. He is chased by homophobic teenaged boys, beaten and thrown from a bridge into the river; he drowns. The murder traumatizes the town. CEREMONIES was inspired by the 1984 murder of Charles Howard in Maine, and in this novel, author Dwight Cathcart details the changes that took place in that city, especially in the gay and lesbian communities. The story intertwines intimate, first-person narratives from those gay men and lesbians who have been deeply affected by the murder. Some are surprised by the depth of their anger; others initiate a critical self-examination; others feel the call to action-all are moved by the transformational power of a horrific act of violence. The murder also unleashes an aggressive homophobic campaign by both town "night riders" and the respectable elements as well.

CEREMONIES is set against the backdrop of local and national events: the Democratic National Convention, the re-election campaign of Ronald Reagan, a recent federal court ruling that gay people have no constitutional right to privacy and statements from the Bishop of Portland who said "these people commit sin every time they have sex."

CEREMONIES is an epic story. It is full of drama, layered with psychological tensions, with characters in confrontation with the very nature of the social contract. It is also an exploration of the various levels of violence-actual, threatened, implied-that gay men and lesbians confront every day, especially in the constricted context of a small city. CEREMONIES develops its story through the accumulation of subtle effects; by its conclusion, Cathcart achieves a wide-ranging indictment of conventional social structures. In CEREMONIES, he has created a powerful, thoroughly encompassing-and, in many instances, painful-contemporary portrait of being gay in America.

Cathcart took years to write this book; in Maine, he had been an acquaintance of Charles Howard. CEREMONIES is a big novel driven by emotional hurt and intellectual probity. CEREMONIES is in the tradition of great novels dealing with American culture-it is deeply disturbing but utterly compelling to read.

CEREMONIES ($18.95) at Calamus Bookstore

Dwight Cathart has lived in Boston since 1984, and currently lives in Jamaica Plain. Cathcart grew up and attended schools in the South and, before coming to Boston, taught college in the Midwest and in Maine.  His field was the English Renaissance, and he regularly taught Shakespeare and seventeenth century lyric poetry on all university levels.  He has published a book of literary criticism, Doubting Conscience (University of Michigan Press), on the very argumentative poetry of John Donne. 

He was married and is the father of two children and the grandfather of two.  He reads widely in gay literature, and one reason he wrote Ceremonies is that he felt that gay fiction had not often enough confronted gay lives lived in communities.  Being a political person himself, he missed reading about characters who were moved by the politics of gay life.  He has always been a writer of some kind, but it was only after the murder of a friend that he turned to fiction as the best way to get at the place of gay people in America.  During the years when he was writing CEREMONIES in Boston, he painted houses, waited tables, did temp work, went to bars, and expressed an affinity for black clothes and black leather, in which he is usually to be seen on the streets of the city. His partner, with whom he lives in Jamaica Plain, is an instrumentalist and a singer.