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This debate fascinates me in part because I have been on both sides of it. I played the normal role relative to Paul—I didn’t want to dress in gender-bending ways or engage in public displays of affection and didn’t like it when he did. Yet I now find myself in the queer role relative to others—my gay rights work has led me to be described as “militant” (usually by those who would keep me out of “the military”). Like many gays, I have come to see myself as normal on some issues and queer on others.

This suggests gays can cover along many axes. I believe there are four. Appearance concerns how an individual physically presents herself to the world. Affiliation concerns her cultural identifications. Activism concerns how much she politicizes her identity. Association concerns her choice of fellow travelers—lovers, friends, colleagues. These are the dimensions along which gays decide just how gay we want to be.

Here my argument assumes a truly general form. Unlike conversion and passing, covering is a strategy of assimilation available to all groups, including but not limited to the classic civil rights groups of racial minorities, women, religious minorities, and people with disabilities. These four axes are the fundamental dimensions along which we all mute or flaunt our identities. In later discussion, I will not set these axes forth so formally, but in the hope of introducing them clearly, I do so here.

APPEARANCE

To think about gay appearance-based covering is to realize homosexuality may not be so invisible after all: people often assume gay men will be “feminine” and lesbians will be “masculine.” In the nineteenth century, this link was sometimes attributed to “inversion”—the condition of being a woman trapped inside a man’s body, or vice versa. The woman trapped in a man, it was thought, would express not only her desire for men but also her “feminine” affect. Foucault writes that the sexuality of the homosexual was “written immodestly on his face and body … a secret that always gave itself away.”

Gays who counteract such stereotypes by “acting straight” are more likely to win straight acceptance. “I don’t even think of you as gay” is a compliment reserved for gay men who outjock the jocks or lipstick lesbians who outfemme the femmes. As individuals and as a group, gays can be exquisitely self-conscious about self-presentation along this dimension. I recently came across a website that helps gays ascertain how “straight acting” we are—danger signs for men include burning candles, getting pedicures, or (my favorite) enjoying the receipt of flowers. And if we look at the gay plaintiffs presented to the courts and the world as the public face of gay rights, we see “straight-acting” men like navy midshipman Joseph Steffan or Scout leader James Dale. We see less of Perry Watkins—an African-American army service member with an equally exemplary record who performed as the drag queen Simone. In this, progay litigation and public relations are driven by the same imperative—present gays as identical to straights in all ways except orientation, as if conducting a controlled experiment. A 1993 New York Times profile describes Steffan as “the perfect symbol for this fight” in his embodiment of “the understated, well-scrubbed boy next door.” To underscore that “perfect” means “straight-acting,” the article clarifies that “no one will ever label Joe Steffan a screaming queen.”

What are the harms of gender conformity? My answer is complex, as such conformity has brought me pleasure as well as pain. Growing up, women were not the mystery—I knew how they worked, or thought I did. Men were the mystery, obscure in their violences and their lusts and their ability to catch. Yet for many years I didn’t try to conform to “straight-acting” norms. I didn’t think I could—and perhaps achieved an integrity in that surrender.

Ironically, the impetus to “act straight” came from gays. (As Goffman observes, stigmatized groups often seek to “normify” their own with particular intensity.) After