Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [4]
Of course, it was not wonderful to be her, either. Yet it was many years before I would speculate about the other side of that kiss. Only after I came out did I listen to the rueful stories of gay men—how one picked fights with his wife to avoid sex, how another wished his girlfriend would turn into a pizza at nightfall. The trials of those who love the closeted have yet to be told. I was nowhere near imagining them then.
My rising anxiety gave me limitless life force in other spheres. I remember a biology lab in which we observed a spear-headed water worm. Like a starfish, it could grow back anything we razored off it, even to the point of generating multiple versions of itself. I saw myself in that gliding shape. Arrow-shaped, it never arrived where it wanted to go. But it knew, when cut, to grow.
As I moved from high school to college, my mill of activity became more frenetic, a way of keeping the world at bay. At Harvard, I took five or six courses a semester, and as many extracurriculars, foreclosing time for thought, for breath. Friends complained I was walled up, a Jericho waiting for its Joshua. Yet alongside my silence was a ravening urge to speak. So I began to study poetry—a childhood passion—more formally, finding solace in a language more public than thought but more private than prose. Instead of writing an analytic thesis to graduate as an English major, I petitioned to write a collection of my own poems.
Writing these poems gave me more pleasure than anything before. That year, the only reason anything had to be, was to be a poem—the icicles making their small clear points on the eaves, the broken gate that clacked double knuckled on its hinge, the bitter flesh star at the heart of a lemon. Poetry was my medium, as rigid and formal and obscure as its author. On Saturday nights, I would sit in my cement-block dorm room with my face lit green by my IBM’s glow, agonizing not over women, or men, but line breaks. I thought myself happy, and in some sense I was.
The readers of my collection understood as much of me as I did. One grader took it on faith: “I cannot see what you have seen. But I can see that you have seen.” The other did not. Impatient, he quoted Marvin Bell’s line about how to become a writer is to become “less and less embarrassed about more and more.”
Neither grader had license to say the collection was hard to read for a different reason: it was full of pain. The collection ends in crisis—the last poem, titled “The Infanticide of My Professions,” was about the selves we had to kill in young adulthood. The word “profession” carried its double sense of façade and occupation. The poem expressed the hope I would destroy the selves I only professed to be, and be left with one with a natural vocation. That hope was smothered by the fear I might murder the real self or, worse, that I might find that self to be a tragic one. I still find this poem difficult to read.
Yet when I wrote it, I acted as if I could carry the world before me. My curricular and extracurricular frenzy had won me a Rhodes scholarship to England. (Perhaps the closeted should not be permitted to compete for these fellowships—we have the advantage of those Saturday nights.) But the carbonation in my veins when I won was less joy than relief. I had a new precocity to balance against my backwardness, this social acceptance to weigh against my refusal of life.
One person saw through me. The poetry professor who had supervised my thesis was a Pre-Raphaelite figure. A whippet-thin chain smoker, she had waist-length auburn hair and eyebrows sharp as circumflex accents. She was the best teacher I have ever had—she returned each poem marked up in three colors, one for each pass she had taken over it. She gave me a nickname: Radiating Naivete. “Radiating Naivete,” she would say when we bumped into each other near midnight at