Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [33]
GAY COVERING
It is 1995, and my first boyfriend twitches in his sleep to wake me. In sleep, an electrical storm judders through Paul’s body, sometimes waking me without waking him. At least in the initial months, I relish being startled awake like this: it enacts his startling presence in my life. From the beginning, lovemaking feels natural; I have a map of his body in my own. It is watching him asleep beside me that stills me to awe.
I met Paul at my favorite Italian restaurant, where he was working as a waiter. When I chatted him up, he handed me a card to fill out to be kept abreast of restaurant “Special Events.” I received a letter a few days later informing me I had won the “Get to Know Your Waiter” event.
As I got to know my waiter, I learned he had been training at Juilliard to be a violinist. Close to graduation, he had developed an arm condition that prevented him from practicing for the hours a professional career required. So he had left music to do his undergraduate degree in English at Yale, and was halfway through at the age of twenty-three.
I first heard him play at a concert in his residential college. I have a stilted relationship to music. But listening to him, I knew this much: I had been speaking to him in his second language. To hear his talent was to feel his loss, the betrayal of his body.
Paul felt anything after music was a second-best life. And yet he gave that life the full force of his character. I once teased him about how finicky he was about his waiter’s uniform as he ironed it before coming to bed. He replied that this was his life now, and that he still needed to be the best writer and waiter he could be. I fell in love with him then. We dated for my last two years of law school.
Perhaps none of us assumes romantic love to be a birthright. Yet the confidence it will come surely admits of degrees. Growing up, I assumed I was the word that rhymed with none other—like “silver” or “orange,” glistering bright, but sonnet foiling, and always solitary traveling. Somewhere love happened, plausible as a catch of distant conversation. But not in the self’s way.
So there is something seismic about holding Paul in my arms, of wondering what color his eyes, which in daylight shift through the shades of slate, settle into under his lids. No one has written adequately of what happens when enough of the body’s naked surface is pressed against another human being’s. It is a slow dismantling of the ego, a suspension of the instinct to distinguish me from not me. I shudder at my certainty that in other centuries I would have died without experiencing this indispensable warmth. I pull him closer, and he is lumpen, he is corporeal, he is that glorious inversion, reality come to soothe the imagination. Drifting off to sleep, I think it should end here, now.
It does not. We wake and dress, and Paul puts on a skirt to go to an ACT UP rally. Or we wake to a ringing phone, which I ask Paul not to answer because it might be my parents. Or we wake, and I make him breakfast because I feel guilty about not taking him to a party to which partners are invited. After I realize our fights almost always concern the outside world, I voice my wish we could live sequestered, have the food shipped in. He says I wish for a closet built for two.
This angers me. By this time, I have come out to my parents, my friends, my classmates, my professors. I am also just as activist as Paul in some ways, like making gay rights my work. Yet I know what he means. Paul is more radically queer than I. He grew up in San Francisco and came out at fifteen, and now experiences anything short of full-flaunting equality as self-hatred.
I puzzle over how much we fight about how to perform our gayness, even though we are both openly gay. Although I do not realize it then, we are having the debate of the gay moment—the debate between normals and queers over covering.
At millennium’s turn, gay self-elaboration has entered its final phase. As sociologist Steven Seidman observes in his 2002 book, Beyond the Closet, many gays “can