Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights – LGBT Oppression

In February of 2007 the book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by author Kenji Yoshino was published. Kenji is a gay, male Asian-American of Japanese descent. His book, though out more than four years, remains in the top 20,000 books as ranked by overall sales popularity on Amazon. That’s quite an accomplishment given that Amazon maintains sales rank for more than 6,000,000 books!

Kenji’s book has 30 reader reviews and it ranks as a solid 4 stars out of 5. Again, it’s stellar considering the competition and the age of his work. What makes his book so special? Further, who is he? Have you heard of him? Quite frankly, I hadn’t until about six months ago when I first picked up his book.

You might ask, Why has it taken so long to write about it?” I’ll tell you why; it’s one of those books that’s hard to put down but, at the same time, it makes you think so much, it’s only digestible in little pieces. At least, it was that way for me. Yoshino, given his background and education is a master of language. He’s a poet, an author a legal scholar and so much more. He writes in a poetic style but with the well reasoned mind of an academic with a mission to defend his thesis.

His writing in this book centers around civil rights and the reason that we, as an LGBT population, are slow to receive full rights and, instead, remain opressed. His argument has little to do with politics as a blocking mechanism and even less to do with the religious right – remember the book was published in 2007 before the right started to push as hard as they are against equal rights. His argument is based on assimilation and covering, the act of covering being an effort to assimilate and not upset the powerbrokers of straight, white, able-bodied, male society. The act of covering he says is to “tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream”. He gives some very good examples of very famous people who have done this, primarily by doing something like changing their given name to something more palatable, more “American”.

Kenji asserts that when blacks and Asians act more white, when women act more masculine by, for example, not talking about child rearing duties at work, and when gays stay closeted or don’t “act” gay they are all covering to assimilate to fit into the old fashioned America as a “melting pot” ideal – which reveres the heterosexual, white, Protestant, able-bodied male, rather than showing a diversity of peoples. Further, he asserts that this covering has now become expected by a predominately white society as with don’t ask, don’t tell laws and other keep your private life, private doctrine.

Yoshino tells many stories to back up his assertions. One, near the beginning of the book struck me dumb for a time. It is, in fact in regard to something I blogged here about very recently; 3 days ago to be exactly when I reviewed the book The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps on August 31st. He was interviewing with a federal appellate judge for a postgraduate position. The judge had recently made a ruling against a gay rights issue of equality and equal protection afforded to groups like women and minorities where he would have had to have taken into consideration whether gays suffered a history of discrimination before ruling. Yet, the judge had no knowledge of the meaning of the word “queer” as it is used in the LGBT lexicon and, when Kenji Yoshino, likened gays and lesbians co-opting the use of the word queer to their adopting the pink triangle, once a symbol of their oppression to a current symbol of pride, the judge was equally uninformed with regards to the symbolism of the triangle. Had he truly researched whether a history of discrimination existed, he would have learned about the Nazi use of the pink triangle to mark gay men during the holocaust. Certainly there had been a long history of discrimination and oppression but the judge knew nothing about it.

This is an incredibly thought provoking book. I don’t agree with everything Kenji says but most of it makes perfect sense. One caution, there is a lengthy discussion on “converting”, AKA reparative therapy, in the first chapter. While the underlying premise still exits that some gays feel they need to “convert” to a heterosexual lifestyle to fit in, and while he admits that the therapy is not as common, he was writing at a time when homosexuality was still considered a disease in some cases so the book is a bit dated in that regard.