Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [29]
The thwarted fantasy of transformation explains part of the rage against Chinnis. But it does not explain all of it. At first, I also deemed Chinnis a coward—he was out to the gay community, so what excuse did he have to reenter the closet? Over time, I came to see that if Chinnis was a coward, so was I. I, too, had engaged in selective passing after I had initially come out. Granted, the stakes of failing to come out to John or Maureen were lower, but so were the risks. Given my own history, I did not know what I would have done in Chinnis’s place.
I think many gays revile Chinnis because they, like me, fear they might have done the same thing. By lambasting him, we persuade ourselves we are not like him. But we must be more forthright about how we are not forthright. Every gay person I know passes on occasion. It follows that until we can forgive the clerk for what he did, we will not be able to forgive ourselves for our own failures of courage. Only then can we assign responsibility where it belongs. While attacking Chinnis is easier than attacking the Court, this is a misdirection of progay energies. It is an internalization of homophobia, in which we criticize the gay person for passing rather than the antigay institution that commands him to do so.
What did it mean for Powell to say he knew no homosexuals? In a post-Kinsey age, he should have confronted the statistical impossibility of that claim. More to the point, Powell was famous for hiring gay law clerks, many of whom became his favorites. His failures of social and personal perception suggest he had a studious investment in ignorance, even as he visited vast harm on those he sought not to know.
The straight insistence on not seeing what’s in plain sight would be comic if its consequences did not fall into another genre. A lesbian couple I know—Anne and Iris—recently went to an anniversary event at Oxford, a celebration that drew individuals of all generations. They were paired at dinner with an Australian couple in their seventies. Anne and Iris are in their mid-thirties. The older couple asked if they were graduates of Oxford. Iris took a breath and said Anne had gone to Oxford and that she and Anne were “together.” The revelation passed without comment, as did other allusions over dinner to living and traveling together. At the end of the evening, the husband leaned over and told Anne how wonderful it had been to have dinner with her … and her daughter. Anne was horrified. Iris, who got to be the daughter, was less so.
These stories capture an era of gay rights. They underscore that the passing norm has been built not just on gay silence, but on an antigay insistence on such silence. Not until the formulation of the military’s policy in 1993 was this bilateral social contract dubbed “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Yet the arrangement long predated the military policy, which did not spring from the head of Congress but grew organically out of an underlying culture. Unsurprisingly, then, the most serious shock to the passing norm did not originate in the cultural realm, but in the epidemiological one.
As a law student, I asked Bill Rubenstein how he had gotten involved in gay rights work. He responded that AIDS had hit America when he was in law school, in the mid-1980s, and had galvanized him politically: “We felt if we didn’t do something, no one would.” I filed that away, admiring his social conscience, but also wondering if he was being hyperbolic. Did people make lifelong career decisions based on one experience?
I now think of that conversation with Bill as an intergenerational one. Because gay rights has moved so fast, even a decade constitutes a generation.