Thanks to last weekend’s “Values Voters” Summit, I am learning that I am not an ordinary gay American. Apparently I am Darth Vader: evil, out to destroy the Republic, and a threat to public health.

The title, Who Are We, signals a questioning about identity and begins an exploration of its “vexed terrain.” Gary Younge, columnist for the Guardian and The Nation and the author of two previous books, lifts our understanding of identity from the taken-for-granted where it is too often treated as a fixed and done thing. Instead, Younge brings us into layers of our identities from micro to macro, from the personal to the political, revealing paradoxes both in how we know ourselves and how others (too often wrongly) ascribe identity to us.

Faced with having to allow a lesbian couple to attend their high school prom, a town conspires to hold two proms–one for gay and physically handicapped student, and one for everybody else.