Growing Up Gay in an Orthodox World: My Final Game of Tag
http://hilleltribe.com/2012/11/22/growing-up-gay-in-an-orthodox-world-my-final-game-of-tag/
When I was in the sixth grade, I would count the minutes every morning until recess. I was pretty athletic, though I wasn’t into most organized sports. But I loved playing tag. It was simple: all you had to do was be faster than the slowest runner. If you could outrun the weakest player you wouldn’t lose, and if you didn’t lose you won. But I never really felt like a winner.
I remember there was this one boy who
always wanted to play. Shlomo (this wasn’t his real name) was thin and
lanky, and not exactly popular. He was obsessed with Britney Spears, and
liked to sing and dance to pop songs. Most of the other kids in my
class didn’t like to play with him, but when they did they would make
sure to keep him tagged “it” for almost the entire game. They battered
him with insults, shouting at him and calling him “homo” and “faggot,”
and sometimes they even got violent. It was hard to tell who was really
chasing whom. At the time, I didn’t understand what it was about Shlomo
that made others so angry. I felt terrible about the way most of my
classmates were treating him, inside and outside the classroom. And yet I
did nothing.
Almost a decade later, I found myself in a
position similar to his, only the playground was bigger. At the end of
my freshman year of college, I came out to my parents. It was the
hardest thing I ever did in my life. At the time, there was nothing more
humiliating to me than admitting I was gay. So when my father asked me,
I panicked. I could not bring myself to utter those three letters, but I
thought that if I lied again I would only be dragging out the
inevitable. Then I realized that a few seconds had already gone by. I
was silently answering the question I had been debating with myself
every day since the fourth grade. There was no going back. I thought my
life was over.
As it turned out, my parents were far
more understanding than I ever could have expected. But they could never
really understand my experience. They would never know what it was like
to believe as a child that at some point in my life the ones I loved
most would not want me anymore. That all my fears would be realized, and
all my dreams would be dashed.
When I first arrived at yeshiva in Israel
two summers before I started college, I was optimistic. I thought that I
had been given a chance to fix myself. I thought that if I could just
stick it out and make myself into the person I wanted to be, everything
would be fine. But that’s not how things turned out. It seemed like
everywhere I turned my friends would be talking about girls. Girls they
knew, girls they saw in movies and on TV, girls they had been with, and
girls they wanted to get with. And every time I sat silently.
Eventually, people began to notice. They prodded me about whether I
liked this girl or that. Being a terrible liar, my answers were always
obviously forced. I fooled a few, but not everyone.
Then they started asking me whether I was
gay. I tried wiggling out of answering, and often found myself saying,
“If I were gay, I’d lie to you anyway.” Wasn’t I clever? But one time
there was this huge third-year who replied, “So you’re not gay? Good.
Because I’d kill a gay person if I had the chance.” He explained that
the Torah had told him to. That was my dorm counselor. He was considered
a masmid.
I was always a good student, I followed
the rules, and I like to think I was a good friend. But at the time,
none of this seemed like enough for anyone. I had to be more than all
that. I had to be more than I could be. I don’t know whether I can fully
express in words what it is like to realize that no matter how hard you
try you can’t change. To be constantly worried that someone will
eventually figure you out. To be told, and to believe, that you are an
abomination. I can’t tell you how badly it hurt for me to learn that
perhaps the greatest halachic authority of recent times had written in eternal words that I was the way I was because I wanted to rebel against God.
My sexuality is a drop of who I am, but
it’s a drop that paints the way I interact with the people in my life,
both guys and girls. It has helped determine so many of the decisions I
have made and so many of the conclusions about life I have drawn that I
can’t think of a single one unrelated, in some way or another, to my
being gay. My experiences dealing with bigotry from rabbis, neighbors,
and “friends” have helped mold me into the person I am today. If I
weren’t gay, I am sure I would be an entirely different person.
Still, being gay in the frum
community is difficult and has led me to reconsider my past beliefs and
my feelings toward my community. There are many, several of my rabbis
from shul and yeshiva included, who continue to propagate lies
about gay people being mentally ill, being sinful, being a source of
societal corruption, and even being the cause of recent natural
disasters. I have heard my own neighbors say that they would not marry
their children into a family with a gay member. Among my peers, it’s
been joke of the day for as long as I can remember to call anyone and
anything that is annoying, gay. But it just isn’t funny when you
consider that by law I could get fired in most states just for being
gay, regardless of how I lead my life. It isn’t funny when you learn
that forty percent of homeless youth in New York City are lesbian, gay,
bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), and that in parts of the world people
are still being hanged by their governments for being gay.
I’m a regular guy who wants the same
things in life that everyone else wants. I want to build a family, I
want job security, I want to be treated equally, and I want to be valued
not for whom I love but for how much I love. And I hope that by coming
out to my closest friends and family, and by telling a bit of my story
to you fellow friends, classmates, and Jews, I have begun to help turn
the tables. With every day I am more proud to tell people who I really
am. I am done running.
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