Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [9]
On the plane ride home, I worried at these questions. I experienced the judge’s ignorance of the pink triangle as a literary offense, an offense against narrative. The pink triangle was the gay community’s bid to make its story known. How could the judge rule on those lives in such a consequential way without knowing that story? By the time I returned to school, I knew I would write an essay on gay symbolic politics that drew on both legal and literary theory. I wrote with a passion I had felt before only for poetry. I became a lawyer for the gay self I had tried to kill at Oxford, the poet I had thought to kill in law school. I wanted to reverse the infanticide of my professions and to resurrect those abandoned selves. If the law wanted to intervene in the intimate particulars of my life, I would ask it to know me intimately.
Some of the heat I put into this document came off it. The published paper was cited by progay judicial opinions. It also secured me a teaching job at Yale, where I have been a professor for the past nine years. I teach classes here in sexuality and the law, law and literature, Japanese law, and constitutional law. Contrary to my belief that I had to kill all but one self, it is the polyphony of selves that has been celebrated here.
The month I was hired, Arad killed himself. It would wrong the grief of his intimates to make too much of my own feelings. Yet I was shaken, especially when I read the eulogy his friends had written. Rather than continuing the narrative of perfection they thought had contributed to his isolation, his friends sought to humanize him. One detail was unforgettable—as a child at boarding school, Arad had been discovered in a broom closet with a bottle of bleach, trying to dye his skin white. As I read that story, I thought of Arad’s absoluteness. I thought of the alabaster angel in his photograph and knew, with some combination of guilt and relief, that I was imperfect and able to survive.
For even that far out of the closet, I was still making bargains. While closeted, I micromanaged my gay identity, thinking about who knew and who did not, who should know and who should not. When I came out, I exulted that I could stop thinking about my orientation. That celebration proved premature. It was impossible to come out and be done with it, as each new person erected a new closet around me. More subtly, even individuals who knew I was gay imposed a fresh set of demands for straight conformity.
When I began teaching, a colleague took me aside. “You’ll have a better chance at tenure,” he cautioned, “if you’re a homosexual professional than if you’re a professional homosexual.” He meant I would fare better as a mainstream constitutional law professor who “happened to be gay” than as a gay professor who wrote on gay subjects. Others in the vigorously progay environment in which I work echoed the sentiment in less elegant formulations. Be gay, my world seemed to say. Be openly gay, if you want. But don’t flaunt.
For a short time, I acceded. When I taught mainstream courses like constitutional law, I avoided gay examples. I wrote articles on nongay topics. I didn’t bring the men I was dating to law school functions. I chose my political battles carefully.
I soon grew tired of such performances. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in “straight-acting” behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture