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livYesterday I gave a research interview to a PhD student who is interested in the experiences of Queer Jewish women and gender minorities. I won't rehash everything I told her (apart from anything else that might spoil her research). But between giving that interview and a question I saw floating around on Twitter:
One of the main things I wanted to convey to my researcher was that for most of my life the Jewish community has been way ahead of mainstream society on Queer inclusion. Not always perfect, but way ahead. And yes, I'm very well aware that for many people religion is a major source of homophobic oppression and rejection, but that's not my experience at all.
I grew up, as a gay colleague put it, a "child of Section 28". That is, the 1987 Education Act prohibited schools from "promoting" homosexuality. The law was never actively enforced, and didn't technically apply to private schools anyway, but it created a massive chilling effect meaning that for most people of my generation, we grew up in a context where nothing related to non-straight relationships was ever mentioned overtly. Not in media, not in class discussions, no teachers were out. But in the Jewish community, in the Reform movement, in synagogues, in the youth movement, we were discussing gay topics. It wasn't always a completely positive discussion, but at least it wasn't a completely hidden subject.
Technically the first time I met someone gay was when a radical lesbian joined my community as a student rabbi. I didn't exactly know what a "lesbian" was (being stuck in ยง28 land), but what I understood was that some people thought it was a bad thing for a Jewish person, especially a future rabbi, to be, but decent people, people I looked up to, did not agree with that and believed that "lesbians" should be treated fairly.
I guess one answer to the Twitter question is, I was 10 when I first met a lesbian. I can't say I exactly learned about LGBTQ+ anything at that age; for one thing we didn't have that acronym in the late 80s and early 90s. What little scraps of information I picked up were about "gay" people, not LGBTQ+ people. Being interested in using technical terms correctly, I took pride in knowing that the female equivalent of "gay" was "lesbian", but it felt like pedantically using obscure words like "inventrix"; I didn't really have any understanding that there was a distinct lesbian culture.
As the 90s progressed and I became more aware of the world around me, I started to pick up the idea that gay people were an oppressed minority, and that it was wrong to be prejudiced against them. I knew a little bit about AIDS, mostly lots of counter-propaganda telling me that you couldn't catch AIDS from normal social interactions, and again, that it was wrong to be prejudiced against gay men because of AIDS stigma. Except that I didn't really know any gay men that I might hypothetically be prejudiced against, besides, well, another crop of student and newly qualified rabbis. I mostly looked up to them as rabbis, and had a sense that they had overcome obstacles to be able to be community leaders who were out. I vaguely remember my parents hosting a visiting rabbi and his male partner, and picking up from adult conversations that some members of the community might have a problem with this couple visiting, but of course we didn't, we were good people who weren't homophobic (did I know the word? Can't quite recall).
By my late teens I thought of gayness as a rare and somewhat unfortunate condition. Some people were "born this way" and you needed to accept and tolerate them. I don't specifically remember the infamous gay gene discovery headlines, but I did think of being same-sex attracted as something innate and somewhat pitiable. I knew that Oscar Wilde was gay and that he had been unfairly put on trial merely for having sex with men. I knew that Freddie Mercury had died of AIDS. But I had no idea that any of the other historical figures we learned about in school were also gay or bi, I didn't know about Evelyn Waugh or Virginia Woolf or Siegfried Sassoon or Chopin or Florence Nightingale or James I, and in retrospect it is very weird that we studied these people, especially the writers, with absolutely no idea of their sexual orientation.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, was debating whether to officially approve and conduct same sex marriages. One side of the debate was that we should absolutely be kind and tolerant to gay people but it was impossible for them to marry in Jewish ceremonies because their orientation contradicted Jewish law and morals. The counterpoint was that people in marriage-like relationships who happened to be the same sex should have religious marriage equality. At the time the idea of same sex marriage in general society seemed almost unthinkable, so in some ways just having that conversation at all seemed very forward-thinking. But as I started to have an inkling that maybe the discussion was personally relevant to me and my future, being debated about didn't feel entirely good.
By the time I left school I identified as bi though possibly asexual (I don't think I knew the abbreviation 'ace' back then). I picked that up by reading some sexology stuff, I was aware, for example, of the Kinsey report and had some notion that there was a bell curve of sexual orientation, and came to the conclusion that most people were basically bi but in a society where gayness was very stigmatized, anyone not right at the strictly same-sex attraction only extreme would effectively live as straight. I had fairly nebulous reasons for assuming I was likely somewhere in the middle, because I wasn't really conscious of being attracted to anyone (hence thinking I might be asexual). Actually the truth is partly that I didn't have a very good model of what "attraction" is supposed to feel like, and partly that I'm just fundamentally not attracted to teenagers, and that was already the case when I was a teen myself.
Then I went to university, and started meeting actual, not theoretically imagined, out gay peers. To answer the Twitter question specifically, the first time I knowingly met a lesbian, I was 19. I'm not counting the fact that as a child I knew a small number of adult rabbis who were gay, as knowing about LGBTQ+ people. Partly because I didn't entirely see adults as people – a rabbi, like a teacher, was their role more than a person I could relate to. And partly because basically the only thing I knew about these rabbis' gayness was that some people were prejudiced against them on the grounds of their sexual orientation, which wasn't very useful knowledge.
So there was a woman whom I knew through the Jewish community, a grad student a few years older than me, whom I really looked up to, who turned out to have a girlfriend. I saw them kissing, and fairly soon after heard them talking about their relationship, and that was the first time I really understood that being gay wasn't merely a reason to be oppressed, it was an actual thing that people did with their lives. It included being part of a couple who kissed and made plans for the future together. My first ever lesbian is in fact now married to the girlfriend whose existence turned my world upside-down when I was 19.
What I told the researcher was that throughout my university life there was a massive overlap between my Jewish circles and my LGB (we didn't typically include the TQ+ bit those days) circles. I started hanging out with flag-flying lesbian, bi and gay students because lots of the Jewish post-grads I was also hanging out with in synagogue and in intense Jewish study groups were part of those circles. Also because I met the woman I myself fell in love with at a Jewish society event, where she was seeking the kind of good bagels she was deprived of as an American expat. By the time we were dating, we were socialising with basically the same crowd in intellectual, feminist, progressive circles, and intellectual, feminist, mostly lesbian but we accept bi women and straight trans women circles. I met non-Jewish Queer people, of course. But it was Jewish people who imparted knowledge of meaningful Queer understandings of the world, who discussed and debated and tried to work out how we fit into heteronormative society and heteropatriarchal religion. How to do Queer relationships ethically without simply transplanting the sometimes problematic relationship norms of surrounding society.
So, I was 19. But I think if I hadn't grown up in the Jewish community I might have had very little context to frame this first encounter. Probably I wouldn't have had the impetus to explore further and join that overlapping community centred around Queer identity. But then the world changed very rapidly in the late 90s and early 2000s; people even 5 years younger than me, certainly 10, were probably much less likely to experience a childhood carefully scrubbed of any references to what we'd now call LGBTQ+ topics. And other Queer people my age mostly found their people somehow or other.
How old were you when you first learned about LGBTQ+ people, I've been thinking again about how much social change there has been in my lifetime.
One of the main things I wanted to convey to my researcher was that for most of my life the Jewish community has been way ahead of mainstream society on Queer inclusion. Not always perfect, but way ahead. And yes, I'm very well aware that for many people religion is a major source of homophobic oppression and rejection, but that's not my experience at all.
I grew up, as a gay colleague put it, a "child of Section 28". That is, the 1987 Education Act prohibited schools from "promoting" homosexuality. The law was never actively enforced, and didn't technically apply to private schools anyway, but it created a massive chilling effect meaning that for most people of my generation, we grew up in a context where nothing related to non-straight relationships was ever mentioned overtly. Not in media, not in class discussions, no teachers were out. But in the Jewish community, in the Reform movement, in synagogues, in the youth movement, we were discussing gay topics. It wasn't always a completely positive discussion, but at least it wasn't a completely hidden subject.
Technically the first time I met someone gay was when a radical lesbian joined my community as a student rabbi. I didn't exactly know what a "lesbian" was (being stuck in ยง28 land), but what I understood was that some people thought it was a bad thing for a Jewish person, especially a future rabbi, to be, but decent people, people I looked up to, did not agree with that and believed that "lesbians" should be treated fairly.
I guess one answer to the Twitter question is, I was 10 when I first met a lesbian. I can't say I exactly learned about LGBTQ+ anything at that age; for one thing we didn't have that acronym in the late 80s and early 90s. What little scraps of information I picked up were about "gay" people, not LGBTQ+ people. Being interested in using technical terms correctly, I took pride in knowing that the female equivalent of "gay" was "lesbian", but it felt like pedantically using obscure words like "inventrix"; I didn't really have any understanding that there was a distinct lesbian culture.
As the 90s progressed and I became more aware of the world around me, I started to pick up the idea that gay people were an oppressed minority, and that it was wrong to be prejudiced against them. I knew a little bit about AIDS, mostly lots of counter-propaganda telling me that you couldn't catch AIDS from normal social interactions, and again, that it was wrong to be prejudiced against gay men because of AIDS stigma. Except that I didn't really know any gay men that I might hypothetically be prejudiced against, besides, well, another crop of student and newly qualified rabbis. I mostly looked up to them as rabbis, and had a sense that they had overcome obstacles to be able to be community leaders who were out. I vaguely remember my parents hosting a visiting rabbi and his male partner, and picking up from adult conversations that some members of the community might have a problem with this couple visiting, but of course we didn't, we were good people who weren't homophobic (did I know the word? Can't quite recall).
By my late teens I thought of gayness as a rare and somewhat unfortunate condition. Some people were "born this way" and you needed to accept and tolerate them. I don't specifically remember the infamous gay gene discovery headlines, but I did think of being same-sex attracted as something innate and somewhat pitiable. I knew that Oscar Wilde was gay and that he had been unfairly put on trial merely for having sex with men. I knew that Freddie Mercury had died of AIDS. But I had no idea that any of the other historical figures we learned about in school were also gay or bi, I didn't know about Evelyn Waugh or Virginia Woolf or Siegfried Sassoon or Chopin or Florence Nightingale or James I, and in retrospect it is very weird that we studied these people, especially the writers, with absolutely no idea of their sexual orientation.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, was debating whether to officially approve and conduct same sex marriages. One side of the debate was that we should absolutely be kind and tolerant to gay people but it was impossible for them to marry in Jewish ceremonies because their orientation contradicted Jewish law and morals. The counterpoint was that people in marriage-like relationships who happened to be the same sex should have religious marriage equality. At the time the idea of same sex marriage in general society seemed almost unthinkable, so in some ways just having that conversation at all seemed very forward-thinking. But as I started to have an inkling that maybe the discussion was personally relevant to me and my future, being debated about didn't feel entirely good.
By the time I left school I identified as bi though possibly asexual (I don't think I knew the abbreviation 'ace' back then). I picked that up by reading some sexology stuff, I was aware, for example, of the Kinsey report and had some notion that there was a bell curve of sexual orientation, and came to the conclusion that most people were basically bi but in a society where gayness was very stigmatized, anyone not right at the strictly same-sex attraction only extreme would effectively live as straight. I had fairly nebulous reasons for assuming I was likely somewhere in the middle, because I wasn't really conscious of being attracted to anyone (hence thinking I might be asexual). Actually the truth is partly that I didn't have a very good model of what "attraction" is supposed to feel like, and partly that I'm just fundamentally not attracted to teenagers, and that was already the case when I was a teen myself.
Then I went to university, and started meeting actual, not theoretically imagined, out gay peers. To answer the Twitter question specifically, the first time I knowingly met a lesbian, I was 19. I'm not counting the fact that as a child I knew a small number of adult rabbis who were gay, as knowing about LGBTQ+ people. Partly because I didn't entirely see adults as people – a rabbi, like a teacher, was their role more than a person I could relate to. And partly because basically the only thing I knew about these rabbis' gayness was that some people were prejudiced against them on the grounds of their sexual orientation, which wasn't very useful knowledge.
So there was a woman whom I knew through the Jewish community, a grad student a few years older than me, whom I really looked up to, who turned out to have a girlfriend. I saw them kissing, and fairly soon after heard them talking about their relationship, and that was the first time I really understood that being gay wasn't merely a reason to be oppressed, it was an actual thing that people did with their lives. It included being part of a couple who kissed and made plans for the future together. My first ever lesbian is in fact now married to the girlfriend whose existence turned my world upside-down when I was 19.
What I told the researcher was that throughout my university life there was a massive overlap between my Jewish circles and my LGB (we didn't typically include the TQ+ bit those days) circles. I started hanging out with flag-flying lesbian, bi and gay students because lots of the Jewish post-grads I was also hanging out with in synagogue and in intense Jewish study groups were part of those circles. Also because I met the woman I myself fell in love with at a Jewish society event, where she was seeking the kind of good bagels she was deprived of as an American expat. By the time we were dating, we were socialising with basically the same crowd in intellectual, feminist, progressive circles, and intellectual, feminist, mostly lesbian but we accept bi women and straight trans women circles. I met non-Jewish Queer people, of course. But it was Jewish people who imparted knowledge of meaningful Queer understandings of the world, who discussed and debated and tried to work out how we fit into heteronormative society and heteropatriarchal religion. How to do Queer relationships ethically without simply transplanting the sometimes problematic relationship norms of surrounding society.
So, I was 19. But I think if I hadn't grown up in the Jewish community I might have had very little context to frame this first encounter. Probably I wouldn't have had the impetus to explore further and join that overlapping community centred around Queer identity. But then the world changed very rapidly in the late 90s and early 2000s; people even 5 years younger than me, certainly 10, were probably much less likely to experience a childhood carefully scrubbed of any references to what we'd now call LGBTQ+ topics. And other Queer people my age mostly found their people somehow or other.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-28 10:10 pm (UTC)But then the world changed very rapidly in the late 90s and early 2000s; people even 5 years younger than me, certainly 10, were probably much less likely to experience a childhood carefully scrubbed of any references to what we'd now call LGBTQ+ topics.
A few years ago I was chatting to one of my lovers who's about a decade younger than me, and I mentioned Section 28, and it was the first time he'd heard of it. He was pretty shocked when I told him about it, and I was astonished but delighted to realise how quickly the world had changed for that to have been possible.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-28 11:38 pm (UTC)I obviously learnt more about the issues around that time. I also remember that at undergrad uni, the CU wasn't part of the Guild of Students because of earlier issues around them and the LGB group. Then in 1999 I got involved with the Ship of Fools forums (Christian** discussion boards) and so would have become much more aware of the debates
At some point, at uni I thought if any prefix to -sexual applies to me it's a- and was glad to discover AVEN at some point later.
By the time I was a post-grad I was of the opinion that Jesus would have hung out with gay people (because he hung out with those the "religious" of his day disapproved of) but didn't see the problem with being celibate. I remember there being one openly gay occasional member of MethSoc who created a society for LGBT people of faith which caused a bit of a headache for the Student Christian Council while I was Convenor, but more because it was interfaith than because it was pro-LGBT. We created an associate membership for them and TCS or Varsity didn't bother publishing the story because it was boring compared the CICCU having an anti-gay preacher that week! And a few friends were openly Bi, but all in opposite gender relationships. It's interesting to think about those in MethSoc now because at least 3 more of the lads are openly gay and in gay relationships and three are non-binary/trans masc/fem. I also met other gay and trans people (in and around LSM for a start). In exploring my vocation, towards the end of my PhD I applied for a Lay Pastoral Assistant (LPA) post at a campaigningly pro-gay church in March/April 2006 and wasn't quite sure what I thought about that (and it's interesting to read the LJ post and subsequent comment on that, but I can't link because it's in a custom filter so not many could read it, though I'm pondering reposting it to reflect on the change.) I'm beginning to see to see my attitude to being celibate said more about me (partly having started going out with someone for the first time that Jan). Interestingly less than a year later I ended up worshipping in a church which became very pro-gay as it grew from about 15 to 30-50 people (though sadly the bishop has since stolen our building). By the time, I stood for General Synod in 2015 I did so as an Inclusive Church supported Candidate. There are other LJ posts about how annoying the CofE was being about stuff (including the one where I came out as Asexual but confused about trans stuff) which show my developing thought.
*It can't have been earlier because I had my SLR camera which I got for my 15th birthday, because dad was using it to take pics and James Galway's agent asked him to send the pictures to him and I still have a sticker with the address on the separate flash
**Well mainly, though not everyone agreed!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-29 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-29 01:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-30 01:40 am (UTC)Thank you for writing this. (For the record, hetero cis male, nominally Jewish, in my sixties, here.) I'm not sure when I became aware of homosexuality. Certainly by grade school. From "everything you wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask" (1969-1970)? No, I think I knew it/they existed before that. Someone always sorta knew. Didn't know anything about it other than its existence. Have always been a "live and let live" person, so although had only the vaguest and most incorrect ideas (i.e. gay men = lisping and effeminate, lesbian women = short hair and wear men's clothing), I never figured out why it was any of my business. Not sure when I actually was aware I knew any gay people. Hight School, I suppose.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-30 07:04 am (UTC)We really wouldn't dare mention it: the school and media environment were extremely and actively - and very effectively! - hostile.
The Sixth form college I defected to had a couple of openly and confidently gay pupils - not expelled, not ostracised, not living in fear - and it took me a while to get my head around that.
At university, Gaysoc were a clique who set themselves apart: very inward-looking and often aggressively unpleasant to outsiders, and that coloured my views for a decade.
I would say that I was tolerant of gay people in the 1990's, but did not grow to embrace them until my politics moved leftwards and my social life was rebuilt onnline and, in particular, on Livejournal.
That's a lost decade or two of my life, or two or three. Or, if not 'lost', appallingly impoverished: there are reasons I work against the current hate campaigns against transgender women, for I know where they will go.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-02 02:49 am (UTC)Then when I was 14 or 15 (so circa '96-97), my best friend came out to me as a lesbian. At that time I knew that some people liked the same sex and there was nothing wrong with that. So I just shrugged because, whatever. (Though I will confess to a little of the same "Crap, what would I do if this person was interested in me" reaction that I tended to have to straight guys.) (Being acespec, a late bloomer, and raised in a family with terrible boundary issues means it took me a horrendously long time, like until last year, to realize that if you're not interested you can say no, and if you're not sure but think you probably aren't interested, you can say no, and if you are maybe interested but don't think it's a good idea to date them, you can say no. And the other person should respect that, and if they cause a problem then they are the problematic person, not you, and if someone feels something towards someone else a valid response to that feeling is to do nothing.)
Then when I started college, gay and bi people were everywhere. My college was very liberal and of multiple themed on-campus houses, one of them was a queer cultural center. I remember going to an event there early in my freshman year with one of my new friends who was bi (and I think that was the first time I ever voiced the "I don't know if I'm bi or if I'm straight" that would plague me for years until I figured out I was on the ace spectrum and was experiencing a sampling size problem). And went from there.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-02 09:04 pm (UTC)FWIW, I was vaguely aware that one of the teachers at my school was homosexual, but sex and teachers weren't really concepts that went together for me (with the possible exception of Mrs Jones-Lee, who always went about surrounded by a dense cloud of perfume).
The first openly gay person I met was one of the madrichim on my year off, in 1991; despite being raised in the generally slightly homophobic culture of the 1980s, the fact he was gay meant little to me at the time. I think my own attitude towards gay people at the time was probably to look slightly askance at them, but I doubt I ever voiced an opinion on the subject.
What did impress me was the attitude of the Modern Orthodox rabbi in Edinburgh when I did my Ph.D. towards the couple of openly gay members of the community there (perhaps you remember them?), which meant that from then (1996 or '97) on I was aware that it was possible for Modern Orthodox poskim to push an interpretation of the verse in Leviticus that the halacha didn't have it in for homosexuals or even homosexuality but one specific sexual act.
I have no idea when I first knowingly met someone lesbian. Eve M. is the first example that springs to mind, which would have been when I was twenty-four in 1997, but I'm sure I would have met others previously without them sticking in my mind; it's all so long ago now. Likewise about bi people, for which the example that springs to mind is Sion A. in about 1994 (or at least that was when I discovered he was bi).
The first trans person I met was 2001, the second in 2002, then I met Sarah T. through you, and suddenly I seemed to be meeting lots of trans people through you.
The first member of my family to come out as gay did so in 2015; by that time the reaction of the entire family was no more than to shrug, and express solidarity, with the sole exception of my father.
Something that occurred to me a while ago but this is really the first place appropriate for mentioning it is how pro-LGBT people in particularly a religious context talk about gayness (or for that matter straightness) not being something one can choose, but is internal to oneself; yet at the same time there's the findings of the Kinsey report you mention, that most people are not, by inclination if not by practice, either completely heterosexual or completely homosexual, but are on a spectrum in between. These two narratives seem to contradict each other, yet they are both true.
On a separate topic, I ought to update my photos here; the one accompanying this comment is twenty-five years old!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-07 08:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-07 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-07 04:20 pm (UTC)I know that when I was about 10, 'lesbian' was used as a playground insult (not by or to me) and I wasn't sure what it meant. I know that by the time I was 15 I knew, and knew I was both heterosexual and homosexual and therefore was bisexual. I have no clear memory of the path between those points.
I *still* keep finding out that another famous/historical person is well known to have been gay or bi and yet I'd missed it because of Section 28, despite having consumed as much LGB/queer culture as I could find from age 15 onwards.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-07 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-11-09 01:19 am (UTC)I realized *I* was queer at 13, but looking back on it I vaguely recall knowing /of/ queerness earlier than that. But like, how much earlier I can't say. Reflecting that I probably found out what queerness was and then identified with that within 1-3 years suddenly makes the whole thing seem very fast, but it didn't feel that way at the time.