Re: How has being gay shaped your worldview?

Description: Is gay an identity? Yoshino believes it is.

Question:  How has being gay shaped your worldview?

Transcript: Well I think very similarly in the sense of it’s definitely put me on the American side of the Japanese-American divide in the sense that America is obviously light years ahead of Japan in terms of where we are in gay rights.  But I think more deeply it’s given me a profound sense of how important it is to live in a society that honors difference and is able to see difference as a strength rather than as a weakness.  One of the things that has always troubled me and continues to trouble me about Japan is how difficult it is to be different in any way whatsoever there.  And that can range from being a woman; being of a different race; being of a different nationality even within the same race, if you look at the treatment of Koreans in Japan; obviously being gay.  But even to very, very . . . things that we would think of as being completely within the discretion of the individual, sort of very personal things like hairstyle or dress.  And if you are outside of the box in any way, you very quickly get driven back into line.  The Japanese proverb is, “The protruding nail gets pummeled.”  And I think that one of the things that I love about this country and really our constitutional tradition is that you can be quite different before you get pushed back into line in that way. 

Question: Is gay an identity?

Transcript: That’s actually a great question because I think it’s a question we’re wrestling with a lot these days in our national politics because . . .  I guess I need to backtrack a little bit and to say that . . .  I would say that for some purpose gayness is an identity, and for others it is not.  So I would say that when I go out into the world, I understand that I code as a gay man and I identify as a gay man because there is a fight being fought in this country, and it’s really important to self-identify yourself in a way that allows you to be a role model to other people; that allows you to make certain kinds of arguments because you have the standing to make them, and so on and so forth.  But on the other hand I like the question because there are so many other ways in which I think that it isn’t an identity.  And increasingly if you look at the generation that’s below me – so I’m thinking about people who are just coming of age now and entering college, or in their early twenties who really think of being gay as completely tangential to their existence, and they don’t accept it as an identity.  There is an increasing movement of saying, “I choose not to label my sexuality.  I’m just going to fall in love with whoever I love with.  I’m gonna have sex with who I wanna have sex with, and that shouldn’t be consequential for my career.  It shouldn’t be consequential for my family.”  You know obviously there are complications if you’re with someone who is of the same sex in terms of, you know, reproductive technologies and things like that.  But that could also be true between a man and a woman if either of them were having difficulty procreating.  And so it’s become akin to that.  And so I think that that is a really interesting generational shift that we’re looking at.  One of the things that I still think is really important though in terms of identifying as a gay man is that the fight is far from over.  And whether or not we in the ivory tower wanna theorize that as a status – I am gay – or a conduct – I am gay to certain forms of behavior – the practical political reality is that politics occurs around groups, and that we have to ally ourselves as being on one side of that battle or the other.

Recorded on: 11/11/07