Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [40]
Paul was good at waking up happy. He wasn’t oblivious to the looks of strangers, but could ignore them more easily than I. When we took walks up Whitney Avenue, his hand would reach for mine in an unconscious radiation of affection, making me feel small-souled for wanting to reject it. And yet I usually did. I wince remembering one particular refusal. Paul and I had gone to the hospital to get a diagnosis for him that could have been serious. In the waiting room, his right leg was going like a jackhammer. He reached for my hand, and I brushed it away.
What does it matter? I would say to myself. He knows I care about him—in our apartments, in our private places, I show him. Yet I have come to see this differently. In saying I was gay, I showed I was willing to value myself over the world’s opinion. In reaching for my hand, Paul was asking me to give him the same priority.
In 2004, Paul and his partner became one of the first couples to enter a same-sex marriage in San Francisco. Always practical, Paul asked his friends to send money to the Human Rights Campaign in lieu of sending gifts. I liked that he was one of the first men in the country to marry another man. I see it as his reward for extending his hand, against the odds.
Covering seems a more complex form of assimilation than conversion or passing. At the most basic level, it raises thornier issues of classification. I’m sometimes asked, for instance, whether I consider same-sex marriage to be an act of covering or flaunting. I think it is both. Along the axis of affiliation, marriage is an act of covering, as marriage has historically been associated with straight culture. This is why queers like Warner revile it and normals like Sullivan endorse it as an act of assimilation. Along the axes of appearance, activism, or association, however, marriage is an act of flaunting. This is why right-wing moralists object to it as a sign that gays are getting too strident in our claims for equality.
Covering is also morally complex. Many who accept that conversion and passing are severe harms do not feel the same way about covering. They often perceive the covering demand to be entirely appropriate. Do gays really need to dress in gender-bending ways, dance shirtless, handcuff themselves to government offices, or hold hands in public?
An easy response to those who are anti-passing but pro-covering is that their stance is hard to maintain, as passing and covering are often indistinguishable. The same behavior—such as not holding hands with someone of the same sex—can constitute passing or covering, depending on the literacy of the audience. As Goffman observes, “what will conceal a stigma from unknowing persons may also ease matters for those in the know.” Just as conversion and passing grade into each other, so do passing and covering.
But I have a deeper, more visceral response that flows from my experience of these three demands. I experience the right to be gay, and the right to say I am gay, as critical prerogatives. Yet I also experience them as minimal ones. Being gay shifted for me from being a condition into being a life only when I began to overcome covering demands. This was where I came to possess my emotions, my culture, my politics, my lovers. This was where gay life assumed a tincture of joy.
When I say this, some hear me to say an “authentic” gay person must flaunt along all dimensions. This is not my