Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [24]
“Your greatest gift,” he said, “is your capacity to face yourself.”
Those words rankled for years, beginning with my walk back to the dormitory. The words were comical, I thought, as I could not face myself even in the literal sense. I had a real unease around mirrors, and could not look into one except by approaching it obliquely—I would start a few feet back, then sidle up to it. It was as if I feared that if I looked at myself too quickly, I might see myself whole, that the halves I kept so separate might snap together. So I did not look. And hated my failure of courage.
In hindsight, I am gentler with myself. I see my desire not to see was a form of self-preservation. I was my own first audience, and I wasn’t ready yet. But that I could see myself averting my eyes meant I was, however fitfully, preparing.
I feel the same tenderness for the early gay rights movement. The answer for when the movement “came out” is clear: the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The preceding decades are often described as a wasteland. During the gilded age of conversion therapy, many gays never told their tales, dying in closets that materialized into coffins. Others came out to one another in bars with blackened windows on the outskirts of town, or in the Communist-type cells of the early homophile organizations, or on the couches of their conversion therapists.
Homophobes knew gays could not bear to look at themselves. Writer Judy Grahn’s account of a 1950s raid on the Rendezvous Bar calls up my own adolescent fear.
Another night two policemen came up to the table where I sat with my friend from the service. They shined a flashlight into our eyes and commanded us to stand up or else be arrested. Then they demanded that we say our real names, first and last, several times, as loud as we could. Sweat poured down my ribs as I obeyed. After they left, my friend and I sat with our heads lowered, too ashamed of our weakness to look around or even to look each other in the face. We had no internal defense from the self-loathing our helplessness inspired and no analysis that would help us perceive oppression as oppression and not as a personal taint of character.
Grahn’s account shows how adroitly the police, like the conversion therapists, deployed the self-hatred of gays against them. Forcing the women to speak their real names shattered the convention of such bars, in which last names were never used and first names were usually fictitious. It compelled them to look into a mirror they were not ready to face.
Yet just as the years before I came out laid the groundwork for that revelation, the pre-Stonewall decades have been shown by a new generation of historians—George Chauncey, John D’Emilio, and Lillian Faderman—to have been more foundational than commonly thought. These historians have unearthed a gay world that existed alongside the straight one—a demimonde marked by shibboleths and winks, red cravats and hidden doors. This world sustained bars like the Rendezvous, as well as homophile groups like the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, or the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955.
This resistance has been difficult to appreciate because it was, by modern standards, so equivocal. The irony of early gay activism is that its most prominent names were pseudonyms. Edward Sagarin penned the first American tract for gay equality in 1951 as Donald Webster Cory. One of the five founders of Mattachine is still identified by historians only as “R.” The names of the homophile organizations were similarly shrouded. The Mattachine Society took its name from a group of medieval mask-wearing French bachelors. Its publication, One, referred to a Thomas Carlyle quotation—“A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.” The Daughters of Bilitis took its name from Songs of Bilitis, a collection of prose poems by Pierre Louys.
Such evasions have led the activism of this period to be described in patronizing