Big Cover Up

Published April 1, 2008

By Peter Casasa-Blouin

Kenji Yoshino spoke for a receptive audience in the Livak Ballroom in the Davis Center on March 27th. He discussed his new book “ Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,” but more importantly he engaged in a conversation about the concepts addressed in his book. Covering, he explains, is an act of downplaying known-stigmatized characteristics. I have not read his book, but study extensively many of the issues he is elaborating on and exposing us to.

He prefaced discussing the book by highlighting the transitions he went through as a “gay and, to a lesser extent, Asian-American” that inspire the discovery of covering. Yoshino reveals three stages that he went through and that he later extends broadly to the American social conscience and policy. First, in his struggle against coerced conformity is conversion. He recalled a time when he was so socialized to stigmatize homosexuality that he attempted to convert to heterosexuality. The honesty that he brought to the speech demonstrated his conviction and dedication to the work he does. He revealed that he found himself praying to gods he didn’t believe in for heterosexuality.

After college he had come to terms with his sexuality inwardly. But he had not yet come out and was still squelching his true self. This stage is considered passing and is familiar to many people. He reminded us that the transition was not categorical but more in essence, happening gradually; pressures to resist stigmatized traits in one’s self are strong. It was not until he met a professor at Yale that he was exposed to an opportunity that would help him discover himself and help him guide others. It was a class on gender and sexuality in legal policy which simultaneously scared and intrigued him. This class and the professor became the foundation for his struggle through passing.

After reading the material he became acutely aware that he had to be engaged with law in a way that affects him personally. This recognition in part necessitated his coming out because his growing ambition necessitated authenticity, an authenticity he later would employ in his book. After coming out and taking his benevolent professor’s job he faced the challenges of covering.

He told us about a colleague who stressed he be a “homosexual professional not a professional homosexual.” This basically meant that people would accept his sexuality but not tolerate his flaunting it. This opinion did not reflect others’ but is still significant in its overt intentions. Often people will cover a known trait on their own, encouragement to cover would reveal their inability to do so.
But at this moment Kenji did not have a word for the experience. He was not being asked to convert and wasn’t hiding his sexuality, but he was being asked to dim it down. Remove an essence of himself from the gaze of the supposed homogeneous populous. This pressure affected him for a while until he felt unfulfilled and decided to dedicate himself to gender and sexuality in legal policy- much to Yale’s relief.
What concerns Yoshino is the relationship among the policies of conversion, passing, and covering and the way it is integrated into our social conscience. He claims that America has gone through a similar process as himself. The fight for Civil Rights began by fighting conversion, and then by fighting a need to pass and now is in the midst of shading the rays of individuality with urges to cover.
We are all products of our environment, which is to say, we’re predisposed to stigmatize certain things even when the very stigma is a part of your own identity. For Kenji Yoshino his homosexuality was the stigmatized trait that he learned to embrace and fight to protect.

Covering is necessarily different for everyone but he claims that everyone is covering.
I have been thinking hard about how this new idea applies to me and if the things I cover are as important as Yoshino’s. The stakes necessarily can’t be as high for a white male but it seems that Yoshino does not acknowledge covering’s multiplicity and pervasiveness as weakness in the theory. He revealed to us the crisis of identity and loss of personal power that one undergoes in their attempts to resist, mask or downplay characteristics that makes us individual.

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