I remember…
I remember my first Pride parade. It was in Jerusalem, about a year after I first came out to my roommate, and a half-year since discovering the community at The Edge (ha-Katzeh) on Tuesday nights. I was still closeted to most of the people in my life, but I was becoming more accepting of myself.
Growing up, my fear was never to be beaten because I was gay; it was to be shunned. It was to lose my family and friends. It was to end up alone and unloved.
I began to develop friendships in the Jerusalem gay community. That drag show was my weekly respite from hiding in plain sight. I regularly took a roundabout route to arrive, and would nervously turn on to the street, just in case I would run into anyone I knew. I think I once ran into a friend on the corner and just kept walking on, circling down to the corner of the Old City of Jerusalem before turning around.
I still remember coming out to my second cousin and close confidante Naava, as we were walking on Emek Refaim street. I remember the conversations in which I saw that I transferred part of the weight of my struggle to her. She loved me, and nothing would ever change that, but my desired lifestyle was wrong. But she loved me. But. But. But. But. But.
However scared I was to be seen on the same street as the not-well known gay night at a random bar in Jerusalem, going to Jerusalem Pride was worse. I feared the news crews and I feared the cameras. I was terrified that my closet door would be blown wide open on CNN.
The parade route was shortened due to complaints from the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) community. I remember marching in the parade that year: happy I had found people who accepted me for who I was, but acutely aware of the hate held towards me from the religious community.
I remember being called to the Torah on Yom Kippur during the afternoon service when I was in high school, and hearing the reader read what should be done to the man who lies with another man. While jarring and unsettling to a deeply closeted teenager, that rhetoric was in a book and not being preached or practiced.
In school, our religious classes were more about understanding the legal nuances of divorces where the man wrote a conditional divorce contract and departed on a boat overseas than how to stone the gay. Sermons are largely reactionary to the issues of the day, and during the mid-90’s there was no impetus to lambast the homosexual. Even though DOMA was passed in that era, I can honestly not recall a single conversation about it.
At that parade, I finally saw the face of hate and disgust. I saw the protesters leering at me, scorning me for who I was and what I represented. During the course of the parade, my neuroses subsided a bit, and I understood that the bark of the cordoned-off protestors seemed to be harsher than their bite.
They were vociferously preaching the book, but thankfully weren’t practicing it.
Less than a year later, I moved to Tel Aviv. I cannot convey how open and accepting Tel Aviv was. I had never loved a city so much before, nor had I never felt so much at home before.
I remember sitting alone in my apartment one night and seeing notices on social media that an attack happened in a gay youth club less than a kilometer from where I lived. Even though Tel Aviv was the bastion of acceptance, that event prevented me from leaving home that night. And night after that. I cannot recall if the perpetrator was ever caught.
That week, I attended a well-attended quasi-vigil for the victims on Rothschild Boulevard and heard that some of the teens were only outed to their parents because they were in the hospital. At the time, it shocked me that the parents did not all react lovingly. Some refused to visit.
I remember panicking. What if the way I’d be discovered was an attack report on the evening news? What if those had been my parents? What if that had been me?
That week was the first time I feared bodily harm; the first time I really believed the religious would practice what was being preached. It was the actualization of my fears, the personification of my bogeyman.
But it was worse than I could have imagined. Until then, I had never fathomed that paternal love could be trumped by ritualistic hatred.
This story does not end with descriptions of Tel Aviv pride or a narrative of my coming out to my parents and family members, even though both went relatively well. The story jumps more than six years to a Facebook message from my cousin Naava informing me that she and her husband “adopted” a gay 19-year-old boy currently living alone in Jerusalem, because he was such an amazing person.
Tonight I read the how Naava described the people with whom she marched today. When I read her words, “I want my kids to grow up in a world free of crazy and bigotry such as this; I will do everything I can to make that world a reality” and her description of how tightly she hugged her children tonight, I remembered that initial hug she gave me.
For me, Jerusalem went from a place where a scared closeted boy walked in a Pride parade, to where my straight cousin would proudly march for her “adopted” son, for her biological children and for me. At the same time, Jerusalem became a place where the preaching turned into practice for the other side, as well.
Jerusalem has always been a dichotomy to me. New and old. Secular and religious. Love and hate. On one hand, I am hopeful; on the other, today leaves me full of fear.
But the fear is not for myself; it is that some scared closeted boy in Jerusalem will now fear for his life. The hope is that someone, like my cousin Naava, will be there to give him a much-needed hug and tell him that everything will be alright.
31 Jul 2015