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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.
