Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [36]
So I hit the gym. What pleasure I found there! I realized there was no mystery to inhabiting a man’s body—I just needed to pick up heavy objects and put them down again. This I could do. I let the truncated banister of the StairMaster guide me upward into manhood. Admittedly, my thoughts as I worked out were not the manliest. I dreamed of a gym spangled with lesbian poetry—Emily Dickinson’s “I like to see it Lap the Miles” over the pool, Adrienne Rich’s “the experience of repetition as Death” over the weight rack. But no one needed to know this.
Not every act of assimilation into “straight-acting” norms, however, felt like grace. When I began teaching, I worried about my self-presentation. Like many young professors, I was inundated with students. While I genuinely enjoyed working with most of them, I also struggled to establish boundaries. My primary concern had nothing to do with orientation—I knew the tenure decision would be made on my research, so I had to make time to do it. But a tiny voice also pressed me to avoid the stereotype of the pastoral gay man—that stock figure endowed with compassion and sensitivity unusual in a man. I wanted to be taken as seriously, and to be able to express my intellectual aggression as openly, as my straight male colleagues.
Like many covering demands, this voice was internal—no colleague ever imposed it on me. I came to distrust it. I have a nurturing quality or two, and value them in myself. To withhold them from my students to rebut a stereotype seemed self-defeating, even unethical. Nowadays, when I maintain boundaries, it is for different reasons.
AFFILIATION
A few summers ago, I took a share on Fire Island. For years, gay men had asked why I hadn’t joined the gay male community at the Pines. For years, I had demurred. My resistance came from my professorial parts—I was afraid my bookish self would be out of place there, and afraid of succumbing to cliché.
My curiosity got the better of me. My first time out, I liked how every leg of the journey got more gay. On the train from Penn Station to Babylon, the passengers were not noticeably gay. From Babylon to Sayville, the demographic grew solidly gay. By the time I reached the Sayville ferry station, everyone was gay, at which point the gay men were separated from the lesbians.
The downpour in which I arrived dampened my enthusiasm. The sheeting rain stippled every pixel of the harbor and threw up crowns on the famous boardwalks. I had no umbrella; I was alone; I couldn’t find my house. A group of men came walking in the opposite direction, blooming with camaraderie and umbrellas. I stepped to one side of the boardwalk to let them pass, when one of them detached. To my shock, he proffered his own umbrella and uttered the words that have become my character note for the Pines.
“Honey,” he said, “take this umbrella. Your hair has melted.”
I was reminded then of a colleague, a nonobservant Jew, describing how it felt to go to Israel for the first time. He, too, had been asked by peers why he “hadn’t been yet.” He, too, had resisted into adulthood. Yet when the El Al plane touched down in Tel Aviv, and the passengers broke into the “Hatikvah,” he wanted to kiss the earth.
A gay friend of mine recently took his mother to Fire Island, showing there is diversity in this matter of mothers. I tried to imagine her, a Midwestern septuagenarian, threading her way through those naked torsos shining with their business. I asked him what had possessed him. “I wanted her to understand I have a culture,” he said, with a truculent tilt to his chin. I asked him to describe it. He said it was a culture in which he could imagine gay equality, in which his ordinary desires were not extraordinary, in which the closet opened onto