Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [34]
The gays I know no longer debate conversion and passing—we categorically oppose conversion, and oppose passing while recognizing the importance of letting individuals come out on their own. We remain riven, however, by questions of covering—how much individuals should assimilate into the mainstream after coming out as gay. Should gays “act straight,” or embrace gender atypicality? Should we be discreet about our sexuality, or “flaunt” it?
If conversion divides ex-gays from gays, and passing divides closeted gays from out gays, covering divides normals from queers. This last divide travels in many guises—as one between assimilationists and liberationists, or conservatives and sex radicals. Whatever we call it, it is the major fault line in the gay community today.
By normals, I mean openly gay individuals who embrace a politics of assimilation. Writer Andrew Sullivan can stand for this position. At least since his influential 1993 essay in the New Republic, Sullivan has urged gays to reject “the notion of sexuality as cultural subversion,” because it “alienate[s] the vast majority of gay people who not only accept the natural origin of their sexual orientation, but wish to be integrated into society as it is.” Because he believes gays have become “virtually normal” (the title of his 1995 book), Sullivan has argued for a strikingly modest politics: “Following legalization of same-sex marriage and a couple of other things … we should have a party and close down the gay rights movement for good.”
By queers, I mean gays who emphasize their difference from the mainstream. Michael Warner, a professor of English at Rutgers, can stand for this position—his 1999 book, The Trouble with Normal, is the queer answer to Sullivan’s Virtually Normal. Warner exhorts queers to resist the normalization of the gay rights movement: “People who are defined by a variant set of norms commit a kind of social suicide when they begin to measure the worth of their relations and their way of life by the yardstick of normalcy.” For this reason, Warner believes queers should “insist that the dominant culture assimilate to queer culture, not the other way around.” His sentiment is captured in the slogan “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” which not only gives difference a local habitation and a name (“We’re here, we’re queer”) but also commands nonqueers rather than queers to accommodate that difference (“Get used to it”).
While this rift dates back to Stonewall-era disputes between “suits” and “queers,” it has become more pronounced in recent years. As social attitudes toward gays have softened, the historical line between “good” straights and “bad” gays has shifted in some quarters to distinguish between “good” straights and normals, on the one hand, and “bad” queers on the other. No longer an undifferentiated pathologized mass, gays feel increasing pressure to pledge an allegiance—to fade gratefully into the mainstream or to resist in the name of persisting difference. As African-Americans split between integration and separatism, or women split between equality and difference feminism, gays are splitting between normalcy and queerness.
So divisive has this schism proved that normals and queers sometimes seem to struggle against each other as hard as they struggle against homophobes. Normals rail against queers because they feel queers give all gays a bad name. Writer Bruce Bawer inveighs against the “men … in Speedos” and “bare-chested women” in gay pride parades, noting that these visible outliers “prop up misperceptions that undergird continued inequality.” Queers attack normals because they feel sold out in the normal attempt to secure straight acceptance. Warner criticizes normals for “throw[ing] shame on those who