Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [23]
We all have a story we must repeat until we get it right, a story whose conveniences must be corrected and whose simplifications must be seen through before we are done with it, or it with us. For gay people, that story is often the story of how we came out. There are times when I feel like the Mariner, wondering how many more times I will have to tell my tale. Sometimes the parallel seems so close I worry I will have to do so in rhyme. Each time I tell my story, I am released, yet this is also the story from which I yearn to be released. But who could release me? Release implies compulsion, and no one is forcing me to speak. Even those who ask when I came out generally expect—and want—no more than the one-line answer I often give—“The year after college.”
Like the Mariner, my compulsion is internal. I experience my one-line answer as true, as it describes when I came out to my parents. Yet I also experience it as incomplete. Coming out is a process as endless as its audiences. If I were to give a true accounting, the kind that might free me to tell other tales, I would need to describe a series of audiences, a series of moments.
A cube enclosing a cube, the Louis Kahn library at Phillips Exeter is a mecca for architecture students. Its most striking feature is that each of the inner cube’s vertical walls has a giant circle cut out of it. As a student, I would often pause on the Oriental rug on the bottom floor and look through the circles at four floors of books. I felt I was looking at an ant farm, privy to a cutaway perspective of the drones, unaware, at work.
One spring afternoon, when I was seventeen, I looked up and saw him. Matthew was lying on the curve of one of the circles, twenty feet above the floor on which I stood. I whipped my head around for some other watchful presence, but it was only he and I. I looked again. Matthew’s face always looked a little melted. His Midwestern drawl could slow a conversation, and on the soccer field, the ball waited for him. He nestled on the lip of that circle as if to distill that languor. He looked down, saw me, and waved. As I waved back, I was the one in danger of falling.
I went to church that night. I was a believer then, in a cloudy, nondenominational way. I even worked at the church, though I was drawn to the job less by religious conviction than by a catlike instinct for the safe warm place in the school. On Tuesday evenings, the minister, whom we called Mr. Mac rather than by his longer Scottish surname, would give readings that were the still centers of my weeks.
By day, Mr. Mac was out of Dickens—tall, rubicund, balding. During his religion classes, he would hold his outsized hands over a student’s shoulders as she struggled with an answer, as if to remind her they were on the same side. Even at service on Sundays, he was jovial—“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” he would say after booming out a hymn—“Noise, not song, thank God.” But in the evenings, he cast long shadows as he read James Agee’s letters or a chapter of Paulo Freire. I never heard him crack a joke after sundown.
After service, he would speak to me from the same place in himself. I would snuff the candles, unplug the microphones, and lock the heavy doors. Then I would stop by his office to say good night. We would chat—briefly, for I had my curfew, but often memorably. More than anyone else at the time, Mr. Mac enlarged my sense of who I could be. He would lift his tortoiseshell glasses, squeeze the triangle of flesh above his nose, and speak with oracular concision. I questioned how he fed my messianic impulses—what end did it serve to tell me I was meant for some great work, that I was meant not for happiness but joy? But his aphorisms stayed with me.
That night, I told him I had seen a student balanced on one of the great circles in the library. I was not trying to indict Matthew, nor to protect him. I was trying to reassure myself that the scene, which had faded with its light, was memory