Quoted: Kenji Yoshino on Covering and Conformity [Racialicious Read-Along]

I would think, I wish I were dead.

I did not think of it as a suicidal thought.  My poet’s parsing mind read the first “I” and the second “I” as different “I’s.” The first “I” was the whole watching the self, while the second “I” – the one I wanted to kill – was the gay “I” nestled inside it.  It was less a suicidal impulse than a homicidal one – the infanticide of the gay self I had described in the poem.

My only consistent foray from my rooms was to the college chapel, where I prayed to gods I did not believe in for transformation.  No erotic desire I had ever felt exceeded my desire for conversion in those moments.  It is hard now to recall that young man at prayer.  To see him clearly is to feel the outlines of my present self grow fainter.

An older American student [also studying at Oxford at the time] tried to help.  Arad was struggling to come out himself, but seemed, I thought enviously, much more self-possessed.  He was the prodigy of his class – his intellectual feats, in medicine and philosophy, were reported in hushed and reverent tones.  Tall and angular, he accentuated his forbidding demeanor with a black coat that billowed out like the wings of a predatory bird.

Arad was kind to me. I never named my malady, but he knew its ways better than I.  I remember sitting in his rooms, listening to him describe the deadlines he had set for himself – to come out to his parents in three months, to go to a meeting of the college gay group in six months, to begin to date in a year. It was important, he said, to be a creature of will.  Unable to meet his eye, I looked over his shoulder at the wall behind him, which was tiled with diplomas and awards.  In the center were some framed black-and-white photographs he had taken.  One caught my eye – a statue of a kneeling angel weeping with her head buried in her arms.

It was a portrait of abject perfection, a portrait of him, and it terrified me.  I recognized the striving impulse in Arad as an attribute of my former self, and felt shame for having lost the discipline he possessed.  Yet I was also frightened by the harshness of that will.  I thanked him and left, never to return.  I could not help him, and I knew he could not help me. [...]

[After a year of disconnection] 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 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 among others. [...]

The month I was hired [to teach law at Yale], 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.

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