by Dan Savage
The army isn’t perfect yet, and there is still room for improvement. But the British Armed Services is fully committed to making the military as gay friendly as possible, a place where everyone is able to be themselves. The Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force are all members of the Stonewall Diversity Champions program, where employers work with Stonewall, and each other, in order to improve the working environment for lesbian, gay, and bisexual service members.
My experience shows that a lot can change in a very short space of time. Things can get better today if we all work together to combat homophobia in our workplaces and in our schools. You, too, can make a difference by challenging homophobic bullying at school and by encouraging your school to do the same. If the army can do it, you can do it, too. It gets better today; we can make it happen.
Author Note: Stonewall is a lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights organization in the United Kingdom. Now the largest gay equality organization, not only in the UK but in Europe, it was formed in 1989 by political activists and others lobbying against Section 28 of the Local Government Act (an anti-gay amendment that has since been repealed). Although Stonewall is a lobbying organization rather than membership organization, it has diversified into policy development for the rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people.
Lance Corporal James Wharton joined the British Army in 2003 at the age of sixteen, having just left secondary school. On completion of his phase 1 training (basic) in North Yorkshire, James decided to join the Blues and Royals, a regiment that makes up one-half of the Household Cavalry. In 2006, James began preparations for operations in the Middle East, and in 2007, deployed with the Household Cavalry to Southern Iraq on a seven-month tour of duty. In 2008, James spent four months in Alberta, Canada, assisting in the training of other soldiers facing operational deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The following year, James returned to central London, on promotion, to carry out further ceremonial duties. James and his partner, Thomas, were united by a civil partnership in 2010 and now live together in London with their dog, Pickle.
GETTING STRONGER AND STAYING ALIVE
by Gabrielle Rivera
BRONX, NY
As a gay woman of color, I just want to let the youth know that it kind of doesn’t get better. All these straight, rich celebrities, I’m not even going to name them, they can tell you that it gets better because they’ve got money and people don’t care what they do. They’re comin’ from a good place and stuff. And I appreciate that, but I’m gonna be real, because I live this life and I’m not rich and I’m brown and I probably look like most of you.
First of all, it doesn’t get better but what does happen is this: You get stronger. You realize what’s going on; you see how people are; you see how the world is. And as an adult, you learn how to deal with it. You learn how to love yourself. You learn to just take it for what it is. You learn that other people are just crazy and caught up in their own crap.
Like all the people that are religious that say that gay people are bad, and then you see them being caught up in gay scandals. I might be gay, but I don’t have relationships with prostitutes—no disrespect to prostitutes—but I don’t have illicit affairs with prostitutes and get caught up in drugs. I’m a normal person that lives her life as a gay individual, has a relationship, and just tries to make it in this world. And I would have been just like some of those other kids, and taken my own life, if it hadn’t been for my strong family and my religious upbringing.
My parents raised us Pentecostal Protestant with a literal interpretation of the Bible as our guide to navigating life. Coming out to my parents was insane! I thought God was going to strike me dead as the words came out of my mouth. My dad was cool but my mom flipped like it was the end of her world; the world that had me as a straight woman that would give her grandkids. I also thought God would just turn His back on me. I asked Him through prayer every night to take my life, seeing as though I was a deviant homosexual. God never took my life and so I viewed that as a sign to carry on and find love anyway that I could. Even momma eventually came around but on her own terms. I didn’t force an agenda. I was just always myself and as a loving mother she found herself with no choice other than to continue loving me as she always had. Damn, now she’s practically a gay rights advocate and we’ve never been closer.
And as for me and God, I view our relationship as hella strong. God made all of us so God made me. Therefore, in my mind, God is cool with being gay. And if Jesus were alive today, he’d chill with us because everybody else hates us. I will say this: Don’t give in to this myth that it’s going to be fancy and amazing when you’re older and that everything’s gonna to be fine. Just know that you gotta get stronger. And the stronger you get the easier dealing with all this craziness will be. The stronger you get the more you hold on to your own life; the more you’ll love yourself. And you’ll be better able to be in relationships with other people. You’ll be better able to deal with the fact that you are gay. And you’ll realize that’s not the problem. It’s never a problem to be gay. The problem comes from everyone else giving you a hard time about it, making laws against you because they’re afraid to be who you are.
So, do I say it gets easier? No, but you get stronger. And you get more beautiful. And you believe in yourself harder. And anything this messed up world throws at you, you’ll be able to handle.
Don’t take your own life. It’s not worth it. If you take your own life, they win. And if you take your own life, that’s one less gay person of color, or white, or disabled, or multi-abled, or whatever, that isn’t here, able to show them the truth. So please love yourself. Please be strong. And you’ll be all right. That, I do promise you.
Gabrielle Rivera is a Puerto Rican queer born and raised in the Bronx. She is a writer, poet, and director. Her short film, Spanish Girls Are Beautiful, details a night in the life of a group of queer Latinas navigating love and parties in an urban world. Her short stories have been pubished in Hip Mama magazine and Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, an anthology edited by Ariel Gore.
COMING OUT OF THE SHTETL: GAY ORTHODOX JEWS
by Marc Tannen, Chaim Levin, Ely Winkler, Justin Spiro, Moishie Rabinowitz, and Mordechai Levovitz
NEW YORK, NY
Chaim: Growing up, I always knew that there was something different about me. What you’d call queer or strange or what I felt was strange.
Ely: It’s hard to explain when a person knows that they’re gay. In general, I think it was just a feeling of being different from everyone else.
Justin: All my friends would always make jokes like, “That’s so gay.” Or, “What a fag.” And I was so afraid that if I said I was gay, that people would make fun of me, taunt me, try to beat me up. So I didn’t say anything.
Moishie: I always thought, growing up, that no one understood me.
Mordechai: The bullying never stopped in high school. It was always, “Why do you wear your hair like that? It’s so girly?” Or, “Why do you talk like that? It’s so high.” Or, “Why do you sit like that and cross your legs? Boys don’t cross their legs like that; girls cross their legs like that.”
Chaim: Someone in school actually ridiculed me in public in front of fifteen other people. Not only did he embarrass me in front of all those people, but not one of those fifteen people said a word.
Mordechai: The only time I ever heard the word gay, was when I heard the rabbi speak about the “terrible gays” and “the gay agenda” and how they’re an anathema against the Torah and Judaism.
Moishie: When I was about twelve years old, I went to an all-boys summer camp in the Catskills. It was the summer before my bar mitzvah, and my counselor took me to the side one day and said he had to speak to me about something very important. He wanted to tell me that most of the older kids in camp were talking about how Moishie Rabinowitz was a huge faggot.
Ely: As high school continued, I got more and more sad. I got more and more scared that I would never come out of it.
Mordechai: In high school, on yearbook picture day, I came to school and my hair was up in a chup [quiff] and I was wearing a colorful vest. I was just trying so hard to express myself. I was just trying to say, “This is who I am; this is Mordechai.” The rabbi told me that there was no way I could be in the high school yearbook picture like that. He sent me home. My aunt happened to call the house and she sensed that something was very wrong. I think she also felt like an outsider when she went to high school. She said, “Mordechai, sometimes high school, sometimes day school, sometimes even college is just terrible. It’s not fun. But I promise you that if you stick it out, it gets better. I promise you that there will be a time when you feel wanted in this world, when you feel like you can give something to this world, and when feel accepted and loved. But you just have to stick it out. You just have to live through this really hard time.” And that was the exact thing that I needed to hear, someone in my family saying that they understood.
Ely: There were days where I didn’t want to get out of bed because I felt that nobody wanted me in the world. I was too different. I wasn’t going to fit with what my community wanted from me. I wasn’t going to marry a woman and I wasn’t going to have the traditional modern Orthodox family and life that I wanted for myself. And I did want it so badly.
Chaim: I didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t think being gay was an option. So I went to reparative therapy and I spent months of time and energy trying to change. And every day that went by that I didn’t change, I blamed myself. I really thought that it was my fault that I wasn’t working hard enough. I wasn’t trying hard enough. And according to everyone around me at the time, it was possible to change. So I was constantly blaming myself. Then one day I just realized, it’s not working. It just doesn’t go away. I can’t change. No matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I try to take my mind off these attractions, they’re not going away. There was a time in my life where I actually tried ending my life. I swallowed a bunch of pills and ended up in the hospital. I wanted to die because things were so bad. I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore. But afterward, lying in the hospital bed, I realized I had so much to live for. I had so many things that were good in my life. I’m smart. I’m a nice person. I’m a good person. I am a human being, and I want to live.
Mordechai: The greatest thing that happened to me was going to college and realizing that I really wasn’t alone. Even in the Yeshiva, where I went to high school, I wasn’t the only gay person. There were other gay people in the Yeshiva. I just didn’t realize it at the time. In every camp that I went—where I felt bullied and felt like nobody could be like me, that nobody was going through the same thing that I was going through—I found out later that there were other gay people there, too.
Justin: When I moved to New York City, I met a lot of people through this great organization, JQY [Jewish Queer Youth]. I met people who grew up in the Hasidic world, in the ultra-Orthodox Yeshivish world, in the modern Orthodox world, and some who became more or less religious over the course of their lives. I realized that not only were there other people like me but there were dozens and dozens of people like me.
Chaim: They understood what it was like to be closeted, to be ashamed, to be embarrassed. And these people, they set an example for me because they were all just at peace with themselves. That’s something I never had.
Moishie: Ultimately, it’s about living your life. The more you live your life based on who you are, the better friend, the better son, the better brother, the better Jew you will be.
Chaim: With the help of good friends and a great support system, I started realizing that it’s okay. I’m okay. I’m allowed to be the way I am.
Ely: Five years ago, when I was graduating from high school and was choosing which Yeshiva I would go to for a year in Israel, I never thought that I would be sitting here today so happy and so proud of who I am. Because it’s hard to be proud of who you are when your community tells you not to be. When you feel that no one around you will accept you.
Mordechai: If you stick through it, if you live long enough, you’ll find that not only do you grow older and more mature, but everyone around you also grows older and more mature. People do want to learn and understand, and, ultimately, accept you.
Ely: In my last year of high school, I told my rabbi—who I was very close with at the time and still am today—and he was one of the most supportive people I have ever spoken to.
Mordechai: There are many rabbis—Orthodox rabbis—who go out of their way to tell people to be nice, understanding, sympathetic, and to accept gay people in the Orthodox community.
Ely: I wish that I could have told myself this: The love and support is there. It’s out there. Your friends are out there, your teachers are out there, and even, eventually, I learned that my family was out there.
Justin: If I could now, at twenty-six, speak to my fourteen-year-old self—or even my nineteen-year-old self in college—I would say don’t worry about being gay. That’s who you are. That’s how God created you. He created me as a Jew, and he created me as a gay person.
Moishie: If you close your eyes right now and think about what it would feel like to lift that dark cloud off, lift that burden, lift that feeling of hopelessness and despair. Think about how awesome it would be to actually be able to live who you are and still have friends and still have ties to your community and still be respected. I can promise you that that feeling is a hundred times better in real life. I promise it gets better.
Chaim Levin was born and raised in the Crown Heights Lubavitch community. He spent two years in reparative therapy. It didn’t work. Today he lives in New York City and speaks on panels supporting LGBT issues.
Mordechai Levovitz grew up in an Orthodox religious family in Lawrence, Long Island. In 2001, he cofounded JQYouth (Jewish Queer Youth), a support community for Orthodox LGBT youth. He is now the co-executive director of JQYouth, spearheading educational outreach into the Orthodox community about its LGBT population.
Moishie Rabinowitz grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Queens, New York. He is a founding member of JQYouth. Michael works in theater producing and is currently developing a television pilot based on his childhood.
Justin Spiro earned his master’s degree in social work from New York University and he currently works as a psychotherapist in a Bronx middle school. Justin has spoken on numerous panels regarding Orthodox Judaism and homosexuality.
Marc Tannen (director/editor of video) was born in London, England, and raised in the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon. He moved to New York in 2002 and became a founding member of JQYouth. Marc is currently in production on a feature-length documentary film about the lives of gay Orthodox Jews.
Ely Winkler is a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, studying for his master’s in social work at Hunter School of Social Work in New York City, where he currently resides. Since coming out two years ago, Ely has been an activist for the gay Orthodox Jewish community through social media tools such as Blogger and Facebook.
For more information about JQYouth, please visit our website, www.jqyouth.org.
GOING BACK IN
by Michael Cunningham
NEW YORK, NY
Like so many gay kids, I had a secret childhood.
There was the conventional outward childhood: school and birthday parties, family trips, all that. And there was the darker inner childhood that started before I can remember. The sense that there was something deeply wrong about me. That I was impersonating someone. That I had to keep my strangeness to myself, or it would all come toppling down.
It was a little like having an unwholesome imaginary friend. A friend who hung around even though I detested his company.
Like so many gay kids, I grew adept at impersonation. I got fluent in normalese.
I grew so fluent that, by the time I got to high school, I had a crew of guy friends, a girlfriend, all that. There were times when I believed that the nasty imaginary friend, m
y own personal Gollum, had gone away. But he was always there.
I went to considerable lengths to keep him hidden. I became ultranormal. I did well in school. I hung out. I hooted along with my friends about all the girls we wanted to do nasty things to. And, yes, I laughed at the gay jokes.
Here I am on an ordinary Saturday night, getting stoned with my friends. Their names were Craig, Peter, Bronson, and Rob.
Linda’s tits got bigger over the summer. She bounces really nice now.
I’d like to bounce on her.
Dream on.
I’ve got a thing for Vicky’s ass.
You’re an ass man.
I’m Vicky’s ass man.
Faggot!
You’re a faggot.
Yeah, right.
Who brought it up first?
Eat me.
You’d like that.
I hereby vow I’m going to nail Linda by Thanksgiving.
Dream on, faggot.
It doesn’t matter which of us said what. We were all working from the same script.