Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [32]
Having now, like the Mariner, told my tale, I see I was foolish to think I could be free of it. Even the story I have told, more complete than any accounting I have ever given, is full of evasions and simplifications. Perhaps this is the Mariner’s predicament—perhaps there are stories we can never get outside, even when we see we are caught inside them.
There is, nonetheless, satisfaction in having set it forth. If it does not free me to stop telling my story, perhaps it frees me to listen better to the stories of others. When I came out, I was often called selfish, in a myriad of subtle and unsubtle ways—I was hedonistic, narcissistic, oversexed. Yet when I think of when I felt most selfish, I think of the time before I came out, when I was so afraid of myself, so unable to offer or receive intimacy. The great virtue of inhabiting a more authentic self is that one is simultaneously more alive and inert, and in both ways more available to others.
My gay students come out to me now, as I came out to Bill. Some of them are much further along than I was at their age. They tell me about coming out as teenagers, about taking minors in queer studies in college. I envy them—what it would be to come to law school with one’s sexuality so fully theorized! But others quake, bringing me back to the moment I was sitting in their chair, and Bill in mine.
I try to do for them what Bill did for me. This includes telling them not to take my class. When I teach “Sexual Orientation and the Law,” some students ask if I will change the name of the class on their transcript, so employers won’t think they are gay. I refuse, saying this would be an implied apology on our part. I ask them if they want to be employed by someone who would discriminate against them on this basis. But I also tell them they can wait, and take the class when they are ready, and that I am here in the interim.
The real revelation, however, has been understanding the other closets my students inhabit. To be a teacher, at least of the subjects I teach, is to know the coming-out story is universal. It is not only gay students who have stories to tell, their hands tense in their laps. After telling me how she passes, a multiracial student reminds me that the primary historical association of the word “passing” has been with race, from the antebellum practice of slaves passing as white to the recent phenomenon of “cyber-race,” or racial passing on the Internet. A Catholic student tells me he fears coming out as a believer, for he predicts his intelligence will go on a 25 percent discount in the law school. Based on such conversations, I tracked the word “closet” through a random news cycle to test my hunch the word had lost its gay specificity. I was not disappointed. The news is peopled with closet poets, closet Republicans, closet gamblers, closet artists, and closet fans of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. We all have secret selves.
Such secrets want telling. Like so many Ancient Mariners, my students tell their stories of identity over and over, holding me with their glittering eyes. Even when these stories come hackneyed to my ear, I find pleasure in these incantations, which, through their very banality, secure these identities for the next generation. At other times, and unpredictably, a story elicits the old cloudless wonder. It recollects the verve and urgency of each of my own moments of coming out, that rush of feeling that says, Life changes