Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [14]
This book performs the point that the new civil rights requires both legal and cultural action. My first passion was literature, which I left from the belief that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Now I see Auden meant those words ironically, and find myself revisiting my old belief. Law wields a brutal coercion literature cannot approximate. Yet literature has a power to get inside us, to transform our hearts and minds, in a way law cannot. This book uses both languages, relying not only on legal arguments but on literary narrative—the stories of people, including me, who struggled against demands for conformity.
In telling these stories, I do not argue categorically against assimilation. Such an argument would be rash, for assimilation is often a precondition of civilization—to speak a language, to curb violent urges, and to obey the law are all acts of assimilation. Through such acts we rise above the narrow stations of our lives to enter into a broader mindfulness, and often, paradoxically, we must do this to elaborate ourselves as individuals. I argue here only against coerced assimilation not supported by reasons—against a reflexive conformity that takes itself as its own rationale. What will constitute a good enough reason for assimilation will be controversial, and I am for the most part encouraging us to have that conversation rather than seeking to impose my own canon. But one illegitimate reason is simple animus against a particular group—the demand that gays assimilate to straight norms, or that women assimilate to male norms, or that racial minorities assimilate to white norms—because one group is considered less worthy than another.
My argument begins at its source—gay rights. I retell the history of gay rights as the story of a struggle against weakening demands for assimilation—the demand to convert, the demand to pass, and the demand to cover. This history reveals the dark underbelly of the American melting pot and indicts any civil rights paradigm conditioned on assimilation.
I then argue that this gay critique of assimilation has implications for all civil rights groups, including racial minorities, women, religious minorities, and people with disabilities. In America today, all outsider groups are systematically asked to assimilate to mainstream norms in ways that burden our equality. These groups should make common cause against coerced covering, demanding an equality not staked on conformity.
In the end, however, I maintain that this quest of authenticity is universal. I argue for a new civil rights paradigm that moves away from group-based equality rights toward universal liberty rights, and away from legal solutions toward social solutions. I have a personal investment in framing civil rights in this way, as I sorely need, and often lack, the courage to elaborate the many invisible selves I might hold. It is because I have found my gay experience helpful in elaborating my other, nongay identities that I seek to share it. Told carefully, the gay story becomes a story about us all—the story of the uncovered self.
one
GAY CONVERSION
A colleague once told me a story of a house full of books. The house belonged to an intellectual historian who had accumulated a library with tens of thousands of volumes. When he decided to move, a friend of his who was a civil engineer urged care. The house contained so many books, the friend said, that it had sunk and settled around them, becoming dependent on them for structural support. Unless the books were removed in a slow spiral from the top down, the engineer warned, the house risked collapse.
After my colleague finished this story, she noticed my wide eyes. She asked if I related to the historian.
“No,” I said. “I relate to the house.”
There are books around which our lives sink and settle—the dog-eared, bath-warped books that line the shelves of home and memory. In my childhood,