Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [8]
At the beginning of term, I went to Bill’s office hours. His office was almost bare, which I attributed to his visitor’s status. My eye swept over his scattered effects, tracking the grit of his life. The crossword half done in pen. The untidily folded black glasses with their odd, hollow-looking stems. Behind him on the shelves, boxes and boxes of pens and pencils, stacks of sticky notes and yellow legal pads. Was this Yale hospitality, or was he an office supplies survivalist? Then I collected myself. I told him I was gay, still shuddering inside as I spoke the words. Nothing has convinced me of the power of words as much as the experience of coming out the first few times—one ends the sentence a different person. I confessed I was anxious about taking his course, as I feared it would out me to the law school community.
While I tried to speak calmly, Bill has since told me I failed. He said I reminded him of the dinner parties he was attending in those days. At the mainly straight dinners, his age peers would jabber on about their children. At the gay dinners, they’d jabber about their coming out. This made him think coming out is the closest many gay men will come to giving birth. The act of giving birth to oneself is miraculous and terrifying, but unlikely to be calm.
To my surprise, Bill advised me not to take the seminar, telling me to come out on my own schedule, not Yale’s. He urged me to get the syllabus, to buy the casebook he had edited, and to read along with the class. He promised he would discuss the materials with me whenever I wanted, and would do so in the library if I felt uncomfortable meeting in his office. He said I could take a course from him the next year if I felt ready to do so.
I took his advice. I also took to sleeping with his book. I would read it before falling asleep each night, and settle with my arm around it. In this time when everything was changing, this text would not change. The print would stay fixed on the pages, the words would say tomorrow what they said today.
Last year, Bill invited me to join him as a coeditor of his casebook. I felt I was being called home. For that book—my book of hours—was where the law began to matter to me. I could see the difference the law made in gay lives—employees were fired for saying they were gay, parents lost custody of their children, people were denied, in gay activist Larry Kramer’s words, “the right to love.” The sinews of legal language began to seduce me. A court’s saying, “You have no right to love,” did not just describe, but actually created, that reality in the world. It was like the incantations of myth, this speaking things real: “It is so ordered,” “We hold,” “We reverse.” In my second year, I began to speak myself more real as a form of resistance, coming out to more and more people. I signed up for Bill’s “Queer Theory” seminar. And I began to think about becoming a law professor.
In the spring of my second year, I interviewed for clerkships—postgraduate stints under a judge’s tutelage. During one interview, a federal appellate judge noted Bill’s “Queer Theory” class on my transcript and asked what the word “queer” meant. Still overawed by the federal judiciary, I assumed he knew the word and was gauging the subtlety of my grasp of it. So I said I understood it to be a derogatory term for homosexuals that had since been co-opted by the gay rights movement, like the pink triangle. I was about to continue when he asked what the pink triangle was. A beat. I told him the pink triangle was used by the Nazis during the Holocaust to mark homosexuals, but had since become a symbol of gay pride. He said, “I didn’t know that.”
Even as I tried to conceal my surprise, I tried to rationalize his authority. I reminded myself he belonged to an older generation, and that appellate judges could lead cloistered lives. But then I recalled this judge had