Pride

There was that second when my synagogue’s director of training and youth programming and I checked out one another, and we got here to an fascinating conclusion.

A really massive proportion of our synagogue teenagers are LGBTQ.

Thus was born Temple Israel of West Palm Seashore’s outreach program for Jewish LGBTQ youngsters, generously supported by the Jewish Federation of Palm Seashore County. Our purpose: to create a secure area for LGBTQ Jewish youngsters and their allies, and to view this problem by way of a Jewish lens.

I’m proud to say that youngsters are signing up — each affiliated and non-affiliated.

However, the place did that concept actually begin — at the very least, for me?

Let me let you know about my worst days as a child. These have been the times in center faculty, and in highschool, when different youngsters would torment me – with three slurs.

Hippie Jew f phrase – a derogatory time period for a male gay that begins with the latter f and ends with the letter t.

That is what my adolescent tormentors have been saying.

You’re the Different.

• You’re a hippie. We’ve crew cuts, or slicked again, greased-back hair; your hair is all the way down to your shoulders.
• You’re a Jew. We go to the native church, and also you go to the native synagogue. As a lot of my tormentors advised me. yu are personally liable for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Sure, Pope John XXIII had exonerated the Jews from the cost of deicide, however it took years for the information to get to our nook of Nassau County.
• You’re the F phrase. We like soccer and dreaming of quick vehicles. You want music and theater and poetry.

They have been following the playbook that the late German historian, George Mosse, had described. Mosse taught that each tradition defines its personal sense of what it means to be a person, after which makes use of that definition to painting those that are otherwise masculine as international, because the Different.

These experiences formed me, greater than I may have ever imagined. They pushed me right into a life lengthy journey by way of the which means of masculinity, leading to two books: Looking for My Brothers: Jewish Males in a Gentile World and The Trendy Males’s Torah Commentary.

However, greater than that, these experiences inculcated a social consciousness about LGBTQ life.

Three motion pictures from my youth have been a necessary a part of that curriculum.

Advise and Consent (1962) Based mostly on the novel by Alfred Drury, it tells the story of Robert Leffingwell, performed by Henry Fonda, who has been nominated to be Secretary of State, and the assorted forces that collect to assist, or to defeat him.

Brig Anderson, a legislator from Utah, is on the fence about Leffingwell. He turns into the sufferer of blackmail. If he didn’t assist Leffingwell, he would face publicity a couple of gay affair that he had throughout navy service. In the end, and tragically, Brig Anderson takes his personal life.

The Kids’s Hour (1961), with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, primarily based on a play by Lillian Hellman. It’s the story of a pair of girls who run a lady’s faculty. One of many ladies turns into the sufferer of a vindictive scholar, who spreads the rumor that she is a lesbian. Lastly, she, too, takes her personal life.

The Boys in The Band (1970) I just lately watched the remake – this time, with a solid of out homosexual actors. It’s the story of a cocktail party, attended by homosexual males – in which there’s the underlying theme of furtiveness, secrecy, and self-hatred.

(For extra on the cinematic expression of LGBTQ, I heartily advocate The Celluloid Closet, a documentary about how motion pictures have handled this topic.)

These motion pictures formed my view of homosexuality, lengthy earlier than I knew anybody who was homosexual.

Really, that’s not actually true.

For forty-five years, Aunt Trudy had been my great-aunt Charlotte’s – what was the phrase? — “Room mate?” “Condominium mate?”

That’s what they have been, technically.  

I used to be fifteen when Aunt Trudy died. It was the primary funeral that I ever attended. Because the funeral started, the funeral director escorted Charlotte out to the chapel – as, in many years therefore, I’ve seen funeral administrators escort grieving spouses out, time and again. I can nonetheless hear Aunt Charlotte’s shriek of ache.

Aunt Trudy had died, and Aunt Charlotte was the grieving partner.

However, there was to be a extra bitter lesson, and it’s a lesson that I had not considered in many years.

It’s 1978. I used to be dwelling in New York Metropolis, and it was winter. A pal and I have been strolling throughout Central Park. A gaggle of adolescent boys accosted us. “Whats up, boys!” they mentioned, in an exaggerated effeminate manner. They pelted us with snowballs, after which with stones.

Hours later, we mirrored on that incident.

“Do you suppose that they attacked us as a result of they thought that we have been homosexual?”

Had we two straight guys been the sufferer of homosexual bashing?

What would I need our LGBTQ teenagers, and their allies, to grasp?

There are parallels between the historic expertise of the Jews, and of LGBTQ folks on this world (figuring out, after all, that there are numerous who discover themselves in each classes).

• In Europe, in sure occasions and locations, publicly partaking in Jewish acts was to courtroom a loss of life sentence. So, too, with LGBTQ folks.
• In America, in an effort to discover employment, or to dwell in sure areas, or to attend sure universities, or to affix sure golf equipment, Jews needed to move. “Don’t be too Jewish!” So did LGBTQ folks.
• Jews needed to change their names; LGBTQ needed to conceal who they have been.
• The phrase “Jew” freely entered our vocabulary – as a phrase for bargaining, negotiating, and cheapness. The phrase homosexual freely entered our vocabulary – as a phrase for something you didn’t like. “That’s so homosexual.”
• Jews have been typically victims of ferocious, internalized, typically suicidal self-hatred; so have been LGBTQ folks.

The intersectionality of Jews and gays had a specific energy and poignancy. Within the quick story “A Letter to Harvey Milk” by Leslea Newman, an outdated Jewish man, a Holocaust survivor, remembers the short-term gay relationship that he had in Auschwitz, and the way his mate was put to loss of life for being homosexual, and the way that loss of life has haunted him for the remainder of his life.

There’s a cause why we Jews put on tzitzit, fringes, on the corners of our tallitot. It’s certainly as a result of we all know what it’s prefer to be on the fringes of society.

We embrace LGBTQ folks, as a result of they don’t seem to be “them.” They’re “us.” To take a look at “them” is to take a look at “us.” They’re our kids, our siblings, our dad and mom, our cousins, our colleagues, our lecturers, our neighbors, our….

They have been my classmates in faculty, who single-handedly raised my consciousness when it was crucial.

They’re my colleagues — rabbis, cantors, educators, and so forth. — who’ve taught me a Torah of life over the previous 4 many years. That Torah moved me moved me, amongst different issues, to embrace Jewish ceremonies for same-sex {couples}.

Michael Walzer teaches on the Institute for Superior Examine at Princeton. On the age of 87 years outdated, he’s nonetheless productive and intellectually adventurous.

His small however weighty e-book, Exodus and Revolution, was one of the vital books that I’ve ever learn.

The Egyptian enslavement – and later, the Exodus — shaped the Jews as a folks. However, greater than that, it shaped and knowledgeable our world view. It bred inside us a the ethical ardour that we will carry to bear on the plight of the spat-upon of society. It inculcated inside us morally conscious and passionate concerning the position of the Different, the stranger in society.

So, you’ll ask once more: Why are we reaching out to our LGBTQ younger folks, and those that could be their allies?

Blame it on the e-book of Exodus. Blame it on the children who tormented me in highschool. Blame it on the films I beloved as a child. Blame it on Charlotte and Trudy.

And sure, you may blame it on the children who threw snowballs at me and my pal in Central Park.