Though the term “covering” can have many different meanings, for Yale Law School Professor Kenji Yoshino it meant the difference between a homosexual professional and a professional homosexual.

Yoshino delivered an address entitled “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights” on Monday in the Memorial Chapel. He described “covering” as one way that individual identities are compromised in society.

“As a junior professor at Yale Law School, I was told by a colleague, ‘You know Kenji, you would do much better as a homosexual professional than as a professional homosexual,’” Yoshino said.

He explained that his colleague had been telling him to “cover,” or downplay his identity as a homosexual. “Covering” individuals who do not conform to mainstream behavior might be able to have alternative identities, but they are often instructed not to flaunt them, making others uncomfortable with overt displays of difference.

According to Yoshino, “covering” is the final step in the phases in which people may have their identities compromised. Yoshino defined the phases as conversion, passing, and covering and used his own experience as a gay man for explanation.

Conversion is defined a coercion that can either be externally or internally forced upon a person. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, gay men were driven to conversion through processes such as electric shock therapy.

Yoshino said he initially denied his identity as a gay man and prayed as hard as possible not to be gay.

“No erotic desire that I had ever felt exceeded the desire for conversion,” he said.

The second step is “passing.” To highlight this, Yoshino used the example U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay men in the army. He explained that this was a case of passing, where it was not illegal to be, but a person could only be gay in private, and thus pass for being straight.

Yoshino described the turn of the millennium as heralding the phase of “covering,” making it permissible to be gay, but unacceptable to flaunt it. Yoshino said he believed that one of the harms of “covering” was that it prevents people from being accepted for being themselves, saying that people have to give up certain amounts of authenticity before they can be accepted. He blamed the process of self-denial in the covering realm for preventing people from connecting meaningfully with each other.

While central to his personal motivations for writing his upcoming book, also entitled “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights,” the issue of gay rights was only the starting block for his idea of “covering.” He explained that the concept could be applied to all people who were minorities either in number or power, like women in male-dominated workforces, Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Americans or homosexuals.

He spoke of “covering” with regards to racial minorities being pressured to “act white,” pointing to African Americans being pressured to straighten their hair and some Hispanics being asked to avoid speaking Spanish in the workplace.

To draw a parallel to gay men being asked not to participate in public displays of affection, Yoshino spoke of the physically disabled using able-bodied people as fronts, or eliminating their usage of canes and crutches in order to lessen the psychological discomfort of mainstream society in being faced with obvious differences.

Yoshino pointed to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s habit of always being seated at a table before other people entered for a meeting so that his wheelchair was not visible to them.

“[We are] seeing a seismic shift in the U.S. from one generation to another,” Yoshino said. “[In the first] discrimination was very obvious—there were no gays allowed, no women in the workplace. Although legislation has now banned these forms of discrimination, newer, subtler forms of discrimination [have emerged] that attack subsets of groups that refuse to cover.”

Yoshino said the civil rights law has yet to catch up with the second form of discrimination posed by “covering.” Although it is possible and common for a woman or a gay man to be hired in a law firm, he said, it would be nearly impossible for any to make partner if either was very open about wanting children or being homosexual, because they each represent an identity that society does not want to promote.

Yoshino’s suggested remedy for “covering” was to move away from group-based identity politics to universal human rights and liberty claims, because the latter focus on what draws people together rather than what keeps them apart.

“I thought he was the most effortlessly intellectual person I’ve ever seen,” said Daniel Heller ’06. “I’ve worked for two summers on gay rights and have never heard someone speak as eloquently as he did on these issues.”

Yoshino’s lecture was sponsored by the Center for the Americas and the Office of Affirmative Action. He is a Professor of Law and the Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life at Yale Law School. More information about his work is available on his website, www. kenjiyoshino.com