Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [7]
My academic career self-destructed in slow motion, like a glass that bounces on the floor before it bursts. My tutors could no longer hide their contempt. But I no longer needed to be beyond their criticism. I had to trust that what felt right was as often right as what felt wrong was wrong. And what often felt right was the steaming water in the bathtub in my dormitory. The wall clock, whose Medusa face had paralyzed me, now ticked toward my recovery. I felt like a statue coming to life. It was my own warmth that startled me.
One Saturday, we wandered into a haberdashery on Jermyn Street in London. I found a vest—gold lions ramping through a cobalt brocade. I would not have worn it as an undergraduate, nor do I wear it now. But then, as I ran the brittle fabric between my thumb and finger, I experienced a jackdaw craving for it. I slipped it on. I could not decide whether it looked ridiculous. “It becomes you,” the shopkeeper said gruffly through his waxed mustache. I realized it did become me, and that I could become it. It did the work outlandish clothes do for us—it drove my invisible difference to the surface and held it there, relieving my psyche of that work. The shop did not take checks, so Maureen put the vest on her credit card, and I signed away an alarming portion of my living stipend to her. By next mail, she sent back my pale green check, cut in half and folded into two origami cranes.
Toward the end of my second year, we went to the London Zoo. After we thought we were done, we saw signs pointing down to the “Moonlight World.” We descended into a murk lit only by a green neon strip along the handrail. Here were the fragile fantastics that could not stand the light. Lorises glowered with their amber eyes; echidnas shambled through their holes; bats hung in the velvet bags of themselves. With their leaflike hands on the rails, the children and their grandparents were so quiet—closer, on either side, to speechlessness than we. I stared into the liquid eyes of a loris and thought I had lived like this for some time now—darkly, grotesquely, remarkably.
I surfaced back into my life. I made decisions with percussive efficiency. I chose the American passport over the Japanese one, the gay identity over the straight one, law school over English graduate school. The last two choices were connected. I decided on law school in part because I had accepted my gay identity. A gay poet is vulnerable in profession as well as person. I refused that level of exposure. Law school promised to arm me with a new language, a language I did not expect to be elegant or moving but that I expected to be more potent, more able to protect me. I have seen this bargain many times since—in myself and others—compensation for standing out along one dimension by assimilating along others.
I had been wrong to think there was no beauty in the language of law: the line of legal argument has its taut pleasures. But law school is not a safe place for poets. Eyes awelter with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, I wrote ruefully to Maureen that I had switched from being the Pied Piper of Hamelin to being its mayor. As the maples in New Haven changed like traffic lights from green to yellow to red, I felt my own life slowing again.
The German Romantic poet Hölderlin says, “The danger itself fosters the rescuing power.” We are lucky when that line describes our lives. That spring, I needed a path into the law. That spring, a visiting lecturer named Bill Rubenstein offered, for the first time, a course titled “Sexual Orientation and the Law.” At the time, he was the only openly gay person on the law school faculty.
In his mid-thirties at the time, Bill had worked as a gay rights litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union before making this transition