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Both my parents were born in Japan. My father graduated from high school in 1950. He looked at war-ravaged Japan and saw no future. At the suggestion of a relative, he applied to foreign universities, and was accepted at Columbia. He left Japan with his high school English, telling his parents not to expect him back for ten years. He has, in small things as in large, always kept his word.

When he returned ten years later, he had finished a doctorate in economics. While back in Japan, he met and married my mother, a Tokyo native who had earned a four-year college degree in economics, a rare feat for a woman then. He began teaching at UCLA—my sister and I were both born in Los Angeles. Then he got tenure at an Ivy League university, where he taught until he retired a few years ago.

My parents are an American success story, and decline to tell that story any other way. When I studied American history in junior high, I began to ask my father questions. When you came to Columbia, wasn’t that right after the Japanese internment? Wasn’t there virulent prejudice against the Japanese? To this day my father will not answer, choosing instead to talk about how hamburgers cost just a nickel then. Part of me rails against the blanks this leaves in my family history. But part of me knows he is trying to protect us both by keeping his life mythic.

My parents raised my sister and me in both countries—we spent school years in the States and summers in Japan. They taught us to assimilate into both societies, to be “one hundred percent American in America, and one hundred percent Japanese in Japan.” The day I won the Rhodes was a proud one in my father’s life—the ultimate proof his son had made it in America. And who could blame him? Assimilation is the magic in the American dream—just as in our actual dreams, magic helps us become better, more beautiful creatures, in the American dream assimilation helps us become not just Americans, but the kind of Americans we seek to be. Just conform, the dream whispers, and you will be respected, protected, accepted.

That whisper came differently to my gay ear. Here, too, I had a motive to assimilate—I would be more accepted if I stayed in the closet. I also had more opportunity to do so—I could pass as straight, but not as white. Yet I experienced assimilation less as an escape from homophobia than as its effect. I also sensed that assimilation played this negative role in gay history as a whole. I firmly believed gays would be fully equal only when society stopped conditioning our inclusion on assimilation to straight norms.

Over time, this skeptical view of assimilation prevailed. In fact, it seemed the signal contribution the gay rights movement could give to civil rights as a whole. The gay rights movement is profoundly indebted to its predecessors, such as the racial and feminist civil rights movements. As we reach maturity as a social group, gays can repay that debt, contributing a critique of assimilation that will enrich the civil rights paradigm for all who take shelter in it.

The applicability of this critique is not immediately obvious. Traditional civil rights groups, such as racial minorities or women, have generally not been subjected to conversion or passing demands. Conversion and passing, however, do not exhaust the forms of assimilation. There is also covering.

All civil rights groups feel the bite of the covering demand. African-Americans are told to “dress white” and to abandon “street talk”; Asian-Americans are told to avoid seeming “fresh off the boat”; women are told to “play like men” at work and to make their child-care responsibilities invisible; Jews are told not to be “too Jewish”; Muslims, especially after 9/11, are told to drop their veils and their Arabic; the disabled are told to hide the paraphernalia they use to manage their disabilities. This is so despite the fact that American society has seemingly committed itself, after decades of struggle, to treat people in these groups as full equals.

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