Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [39]
“It’s what I do,” I say, lamely. I think about making the argument for the “gay activist” gene.
“But why must you?” my mother asks. “Why can’t you teach constitutional law, rather than the law of gays? You will become a lightning rod. People will hate you.”
“It’s a little late for that,” I say. “I already get hate mail.”
“You get hate mail?” I wonder why this detail has quickened my father into speech. I flash on him as an eighteen-year-old Japanese in 1950s America.
“It’s one way to know I’m accomplishing something.”
I say this lightly. I have tried to keep all my words light, skating across the surface of emotions I cannot feel enough to name. But this is a mistake. I sound too casual.
“What you do has consequences for us, too.” My mother’s voice is suddenly heavy with grief. “If you speak so loudly, our world becomes very small.”
I plunge through the crust of my despair. I have for years had a recurring dream of a yellowing map of indistinct countries. A garnet stain spreads over them, following the long horizontal fibers of the paper. The stain has no visible source, so I expect it to exhaust itself. But it moves inexorably, sickeningly, over the whole. This dream began long before I came out, and probably has nothing to do with my orientation. But I have come to think of it as my “gay dream.”
Listening to my mother, I wonder when it is most difficult to be gay—when one is in the closet? When one is lying awake worrying about dying young? Or is it this moment, when I feel my parents will never see my work as anything but a stain colonizing the habitable world?
ASSOCIATION
It is 1996, and Paul and I are breaking up. He crouches on the bed, hugging his knees. We are both close to graduation—I from law school, he from college. I am committed to spend a postgraduate year clerking in New Haven. Paul has agreed to stay here for another year, instead of returning to his beloved San Francisco. On one condition—that I slow down and spend more time with him. I tell him I cannot—I am about to start hunting for a teaching job while working a full-time job. I tell him this is the fight of my life, what I have been preparing for years to do. And that is the end.
Thousands of couples, straight and gay, have this conversation every day. What I experience—and regret—as specifically gay about our breakup was the lack of any flexibility on my part. I know I would not have been so rigid if Paul had been a woman. As it stood, it was all too easy to privilege my career over our relationship. The career was prestigious, a source of public esteem. The relationship was stigmatized, and mostly a secret. I had not introduced Paul to my friends in law school, or to my parents. He never figured in the verbal portraits I painted of my world or future. To excise him from a life into which he had never been grafted was a simple matter, however painful.
In denying our connection, I was heeding a culture that told me gay individuals are more palatable than gay couples. “I don’t care what they do in their bedrooms,” a classmate once said in college as we walked by two men kissing. “I just don’t see why they need to do it in public.” Even then, I was able to give her the old gay rejoinder, suggesting she only perceived it as flaunting against a heterosexual baseline. Her displays of cross-sex affection with her boyfriend were no less public, just more routine. And even then, I found myself wondering why people unfazed by the statement “I am gay” could take such offense when they saw a tangible expression of that fact.
My favorite answer comes from Foucault. In 1988, he said: “People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but if the next day they’re smiling, holding hands and tenderly embracing one another, they can’t be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is intolerable, it is waking up happy.” I love this quotation for the counterintuitive truth it captures. Gays—particularly gay men—are often portrayed as unstable, isolated,