Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [47]
One way of tracking the gay rights movement is to listen to the laughter attending it. In his firsthand account of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, Edmund White says that when one of the gays in the bar cried out, “Gay is good,” other gays laughed. Still in the grip of the conversion demand, gays could not take their own claim to equality seriously. In 1986, the Bowers Court enraged the gay community when it characterized the argument that the right to privacy protected same-sex sodomy as, “at best, facetious.” While we gays had stopped laughing at ourselves, the Court still deemed our civil rights claims a joke. Now, in 2003, as a justice on the Court made a no-promo-homo contention about wavering children, gays in the audience were laughing at him. Who is laughing, and with what emotion, has changed very much, very quickly.
Our history of gay assimilation is now complete—we have moved from conversion, through passing, toward covering. As we shift into the covering demand, gays are nearing full equality. Yet with that movement, gays have become more ambivalent about assimilation. While most gays strenuously resist conversion and passing, many gays have embraced covering. They do not view covering—even when coerced—as a harm to personhood.
But we should not become complacent about coerced assimilation now. Why, after all, is covering required of gays? Consider the punishment of displays of same-sex affection: the kissing gay couple criticized by my college friend; Shahar fired for a same-sex wedding; parents deprived of children for affectionate same-sex behavior. What were these individuals flaunting that needed to be penalized so severely? Straights engage in this activity all the time, so the activity is not intrinsically indiscreet. I am left with no answer but that they were flaunting their belief in their own equality. They were flaunting the belief that they, and not the state or society, should determine what kinds of human bonds are worthy of expression in the public sphere.
So the demand to cover is anything but trivial. It is the symbolic heartland of inequality—what reassures one group of its superiority to another. When straights ask gays to cover, they are asking us to be small in the world, to forgo prerogatives that straights have, and therefore to forgo equality. If courts make critical entitlements—such as employment or custody—dependent on gay covering, they are legitimating second-class citizenship for gays.
For this reason, I have more intellectual respect for people who say they oppose gay equality and want gays to convert than for people who say they support gay equality but want gays to cover. It is consistent to abhor homosexuality and to demand all three forms of assimilation. It is not consistent to support gay equality but to push gays into second-class citizenship through the covering demand.
Gays should not rest now, but move forward by looking back. From the beginning, the gay rights movement has grasped the dark side of assimilation, and has understood that we should not buy an equality conditioned on such assimilation at the price of our souls. This is why gays have much to say to other groups about the dangers of assimilation. Decades of battling conversion, passing, and covering have distilled our call of resistance. It is now time to sound that call more broadly.
two
RACIAL COVERING
No one here can tell why the bells ring in the village temple. The chimes roll in widening circles through the August heat—through the walls of the low-eaved house of my grandparents, through the stiff paper of our handheld fans. I sit with my grandparents at the kotatsu—a low table fitted over a square cavity. In the winters, a heater hums in the cavity, and a table quilt traps the heat. Then, my grandparents huddle here for warmth. In the summers, we settle here because, in this chairless