Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [10]
My struggle to arrive at a gay identity occurred in three phases, which I could also trace in the lives of gay peers. In the first phase, I sought to become straight. When I went to the chapel at Oxford, I prayed not to be what I was. I will call this a desire for conversion. In the second phase, I accepted my homosexuality, but concealed it from others. By the time I talked to Bill about his class, I was no longer trying to convert. I was, however, trying to hide my identity from my classmates. I will call this a desire for passing. Finally, long after I had generally come out of the closet, I still muted my orientation by not writing on gay topics or engaging in public displays of same-sex affection. This was not the same as passing, because my colleagues knew I was gay. Yet I did not know a word for this attempt to tone down my known gayness.
Then I found my word, in sociologist Erving Goffman’s book Stigma. Published in 1963, the book describes how various groups—including the disabled, the elderly, and the obese—manage their “spoiled” identities. After discussing passing, Goffman observes that “persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma … may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.” He calls this behavior “covering.” Goffman distinguishes passing from covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a particular trait, while covering pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how Franklin Roosevelt always stationed himself behind a table before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, downplaying his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities.
I read these passages in one of the cubicles in the Cross Campus Library. There, enclosed by walls marked with graffiti, I felt like Crusoe finding Friday’s footprint. Someone had been here. This distinction between passing and covering explained why I wasn’t done with conformity to straight norms when I came out of the closet. The demand not to write on gay subjects was not a demand to pass. It was a demand to cover.
I knew I would live with these three terms—“conversion,” “passing,” and “covering”—for some time. They described not only a set of performances on my part, but also a set of demands society had made of me to minimize my gayness. The conversion demand was the most severe, then passing, then covering. I had traversed these demands sequentially, and I believed many gay individuals had done the same.
These three phases were also phases of gay history. Just as I had moved through these demands for assimilation as an individual, the gay community had done so as a group. Through the middle of the twentieth century, gays were routinely asked to convert to heterosexuality, whether through lobotomies, electroshock therapy, or psychoanalysis. As the gay rights movement gained strength, the demand to convert gradually ceded to the demand to pass. This shift can be seen in the military’s adoption in 1993 of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, under which gays are permitted to serve so long as we agree to pass. Finally, at millennium’s turn, the demand to pass is giving way to the demand to cover—gays are increasingly permitted to be gay and out so long as we do not “flaunt” our identities. The contemporary resistance to gay marriage can be understood as a covering demand: Fine, be gay, but don’t shove it in our faces.
What I found jarring about these histories—one personal, one collective—was that they cast assimilation in such a negative light. I had always associated assimilation with ethnic identity, and had thought of it as a benign force. The Japanese say children learn by watching the backs of their parents. And no one could have been more