Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.

• Author: Horwitz, Paul
• Position: Book review

COVERING: THE HIDDEN ASSAULT ON OUR CIVIL RIGHTS. By Kenji Yoshino. New York: Random House. 2006. Pp. xii, 282. $24.95.

INTRODUCTION: ON BEING "CHARLIE SHEEN"

Kenji Yoshino (1) begins his thoughtful, often beautiful book with a series of examples of "covering"--"ton[ing] down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream" (p. ix). In his opening example, he notes that "Ramon Estevez covered his ethnicity when he changed his name to Martin Sheen" (p. ix). Sheen regrets his choice, and "exhorted his sons--Emilio and Charlie--to use the family name. One of them has not done so, signaling the enduring force of the covering demand." (2)

That is one way to explain Charlie's decision. But one could interpret it in other ways. Perhaps, rather than seeking to cover his ethnic identity, the younger Sheen, bursting with filial pride, chose the last name that would most closely identify him with his father in the eyes of the world. Maybe Sheen was acting less out of a desire to conceal his Hispanic heritage than out of a willingness to trade on his father's stage name. Maybe he flipped a coin. After all, to quote Charlie Sheen, "What's in a name?" (3)

All of this might mean little more than that no good can come from opening a book (or a book review--or a movie) with the name "Charlie Sheen." Certainly it all seems a little far afield from the contested identities--sexual orientation, gender, race, religion, disability--that are the primary subject of Yoshino's book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights.

But there is a serious point to be made here. For the subject of this book is the defense of the "True Self" against society's demands that we act and present ourselves as something other than what we truly are (p. 185). We are all engaged in an act of "self-elaboration:" a "search for authenticity" that "each of us must do for ourselves," and that "is the most important work we can do" (p. 184). And it is this account of the human project that is called into question by the parable of Charlie Sheen. Sheen's story nicely illustrates that concepts like "self,.... identity," and "authenticity" are deeply contested. We would be hard pressed to identify the "real" Charlie Sheen. He may be a Hispanic man trying to pass as Anglo; an actor trying to flaunt his business connections; or a denizen of Hollywood who, no matter what his birth name, identifies as a dynastic heir. And so it is, in more or less significant ways, with each of us.

This Review raises several questions about Yoshino's treatment of identity, authenticity, and the "true self' in Covering. Part I summarizes Yoshino's book and offers some practical criticisms. Section II.A argues that Yoshino's treatment of authenticity and identity leaves much to be desired. It is not clear that the search for authenticity is "the most important work we can do" as human beings (p. 184). But even if it were, such a project cannot depend only on acts of "self-elaboration," as if the true self were a nugget of gold to be excavated from the layers of the "false" social self. Our truest, most authentic selves are often those we forge precisely in moments of dialogue and interaction with others. Yoshino's focus on "self-elaboration" may be the result of his placement of the gay experience at the center of his book. Whether and how that experience generalizes to the broader spectrum of identity groups, however, is a complicated question.

Section II.B argues that Yoshino's focus on covering as an act of coerced assimilation fails to fully capture the extent to which one's identity, and one's uses of identity, may be fluid and deliberate. Charlie Sheen's name may have less to do with the enduring force of the covering demand than it does with the enduring ways in which we foreground different aspects of our identities on different occasions--sometimes out of fear or coercion, and sometimes out of calculation.

Section II.C focuses on another identity trait that runs through Yoshino's book, always present but never remarked upon: those aspects of identity and covering that involve wealth, privilege, and social status. These traits, which are so often central to our identities and our self-presentation, are constant undercurrents in Covering, but are rarely if ever openly acknowledged and examined.

Notwithstanding these concerns, this is not an attack on Yoshino's book. Covering offers a valuable typology of the stages of civil rights, and brightly and movingly illuminates the many formal and informal claims that our society makes upon our selves. Nevertheless, Yoshino does not do full justice to the fluidity, the complexity, and the irreducibly social nature of the "self" that lies at the heart of this literally self-centered project. Parts III and IV conclude by suggesting that this failure to fully account for the complexity of the self may have a number of important implications for the project Yoshino has undertaken.

1. YOSHINO' S PROJECT

   1. Conversion, Passing, and Covering

      In Covering, Yoshino sets out a typology that retells the history of civil rights as a shifting series of demands encapsulated in the terms "conversion," "passing," and "coveting." Although he shows that these demands have been applied to a number of groups that traditionally have been special subjects of our civil rights laws (pp. 21-22), he tells this story most strikingly as a story about the "phases of gay history" (p. 19), and thus of gay civil rights.

      Conversion, in the gay context, is quite simply the demand that gays and lesbians convert to heterosexuality (p. 27). In American history, this story is the tale of efforts to treat homosexuality as a medical or psychological pathology and heterosexuality as "health." These demands required gays to engage in a form of self-murder as the price of entry into the broader society. (4) Ultimately, shifting views within the psychiatric community, and the growing assertiveness of the gay community itself, led to the substantial demise of the conversion demand (pp. 38-41). Despite some continuing efforts to preserve it (p. 41), the conversion demand has largely been consigned to the darker quarters of gay history.

      As conversion demands gave way, society continued to demand that gays and lesbians "pass"--that is, that they conceal their identity as gays and lesbians. In Yoshino's words, a passing demand "accept[s] silence in lieu of transformation" (p. 69). A paradigmatic example is the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, in which the fact of one's gay identity alone will not disqualify a member of the armed forces from service, as it would under a conversion regime, but one's visibility as a gay man or lesbian will disqualify that individual (pp. 69-70).

      The response to the passing demand is the assertion of the right to "self-identify[] as gay" (p. 70). The classic trope of gay self-identification is the coming out story, one of which, richly recounted here, is Yoshino's own (pp. 58-60). Yoshino argues that the best response to the passing demand is the First Amendment, which should protect the right to announce one's status (pp. 70-71).

      The third and final phase of gay civil rights history that Yoshino describes is also the book's central contribution: the demand to cover. Covering, a form of coerced assimilation, is not a demand that one negate one's homosexuality (conversion), or hide it (passing). Rather, it accepts that the subject of the demand is gay, while requiting him to "act straight" (p. 77). For example, an employer might be willing to hire a gay man, but expect him to present himself largely in ways typical of a straight man: to "answer an interview question about hobbies by discussing football," not "by discussing [his] antique lamp collection." (5) Coveting says that you can be whatever you want--as long as you don't flaunt it.

      Yoshino argues that coveting is not limited to gay identity: it is equally present for many groups, including members of racial and ethnic minorities and women, each of whom are asked to assimilate to the mainstream majority rather than accentuate their differences (pp. 111-64). More generally, although his special focus is on traditionally persecuted minorities, Yoshino suggests that we all, at different times, mute some aspect of our identity. To quote the first sentence of his book, "[e]veryone covers" (p. ix).

      To this necessarily brief precis must be added some qualifications. First, coveting has its converse, reverse-covering: demands that one flaunt, rather than downplay, one's identity. Although this demand may be less common for gays and lesbians, it is often faced by members of other groups. Thus, women in the workplace may be asked to cover their feminine identities by acting "masculine," while being simultaneously punished for their failure to reverse-cover if they do not "'[w]alk more femininely, talk more femininely, ... [and] wear make-up and jewelry....'" (6) The Supreme Court confronted this classic "catch 22" for professional women in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. (7)

      Second, coveting is a fluid category. It may be unclear whether a particular demand involves passing or covering. Nor is it always clear whether a particular act consists of coveting or flaunting one's identity; depending on one's perspective, same-sex marriage can be seen as an act of assimilation to straight cultural norms, and thus an act of coveting, or as a flaunting of one's asserted tight to publicly love someone of the same sex (p. 91).

      Third, Yoshino does not oppose all forms of coveting, or all coveting demands. Not all demands that we conform ourselves to the expectations of others are necessarily wrong (p. 26). No paean to self-expression will rescue the person who feels the need to spit on the floor at the opera house, or (worse still) to wear a Yankees jersey at Fenway Park. He takes aim only at covering demands that are both coerced and unreasoned--"against a reflexive conformity that takes itself...