Winner of the 2007 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction

Seldom has a work of such careful intellectual rigor and fairness been so deeply touching. Yoshino... masterfully melds autobiography and legal scholarship, marking a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics... As healing as it is polemical, this book has tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"It is a fact that persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma (in many cases because it is known about or immediately apparent) may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large. . . . this process will be referred to as covering." Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963).