by Joel Derfner
“Can I ask you a question?” I said. “Do you consider yourself Jewish—”
“Yes.”
I gritted my teeth at the interruption. “—or Christian?”
“Yes.” I was a hair’s breadth away from slapping him. “I’m still one of the Chosen People. My Christian friends love that I’m a Jew who has come to the faith. I’m just glad I’m not bound for eternal hell.”
I wasn’t going to touch that one. “All right,” I said. “Here’s another question. People here keep saying things like ‘I trust God’s plan for me’ and ‘God supplies all my needs.’” David nodded. “So take Darfur, where half a million people have been massacred by the Janjaweed militia. Has God been supplying their needs? And if not, why not?”
This is what drives me crazy whenever I hear people say things like, “Ask the universe for what you want, and you’ll get it,” why I fucking hated that Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist that everybody was reading in the late nineties. Whenever I saw the book in anybody’s hands on the subway I always wanted to say, “So the reason a million Tutsis were just slaughtered in Rwanda is that they didn’t ask the universe not to kill them?”
It was obvious as soon as David opened his mouth that he had never thought about such a question before. He kept talking and talking about how our only real need is to be in line with God’s will and He’s a jealous God and blah blah blah blah blah and I stopped listening and started toying with my spoon, wishing I could plunge it into his eye sockets and pop out his eyes. What I really wanted was to take an ancient Egyptian brain hook (a mummification tool), shove it up his nose, and yank his brains out through his nostrils, but all I had was the spoon.
Why is it, the small part of me not engaged in the contemplation of violence wondered, that I can listen to the ex-gays talk about the sin of homosexuality in the strongest possible language and not bat an eyelash, but that every word this man says about God makes me wish I had a butcher knife with me? Then the words “butcher knife” opened up a new vista of fantasy and I was off again.
When David finally stopped talking, I began gathering my things to leave, but he wasn’t done yet. “Do you mind if I pray?” he asked. I minded very much, but I had no idea how to say so. “O Father God,” David said, and I knew I was doomed. “Thank You for Joel, thank You for his open mind and his open heart.” I hated him so viciously I couldn’t even bring myself to feel bad that he believed my mind and heart were open. “From our conversations I understand he wants to see You and wants to find You. So please reveal Yourself to him as You desire, and if I’ve said anything that isn’t from You, please wipe it from his memory.”
Unfortunately this did not happen. I remember every excruciating detail.
When I got back to my room I called Mike and told him I had met an ex-gay Jew for Jesus, to which Mike replied, “Well, he’s a joiner.”
Every single person I met at the Exodus conference loved that I was a Jew. This was not because they believed, as many Jews fear evangelical Christians do, that the Jews’ return to Israel will hasten the coming of the Antichrist and the end times. “I wish I could know the love Jesus has for you,” said one woman I met. “You’re one of the Chosen People!” She said this in the same awestruck tone of voice in which I might address somebody who had made it through week eight of America’s Next Top Model.
The thing that seemed most difficult to grasp for a number of the Exodus delegates—many of whom, as far as I could tell, had never met a Jewish person before—was the idea that we don’t really pay attention to heaven or hell. “I mean, I think we might have an afterlife of some kind,” I said one evening in conversation with very very handsome Matt, hot Jon’s calendar-worthy friend from the First-Timers’ Oasis, “but nobody ever talks about it.” Upon my return to New York I did some research and discovered that we do in fact have hell, but it only lasts for a year, and then everybody goes to heaven.
“Then what’s the point of obeying the Torah?” asked very very handsome Matt, pronouncing “Torah” very carefully, as if he feared I would report him to the Anti-Defamation League if he got it wrong.
“The point,” I said, “is to be a good person here and now, not because you hope you’ll be rewarded for it later on but because it’s what you’re supposed to do.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense to me,” said very very handsome Matt. “If we didn’t have an afterlife to worry about, I sure wouldn’t be here. I’d be having group sex every night.”
For the record, modern Jewish attitudes toward homosexuality differ as much as modern Christian attitudes. There are fundamentalist Israelis who have stabbed marchers in the Jerusalem Pride parade; there is a GLBT synagogue in Manhattan whose rabbi has been named (by three different national publications) one of America’s top fifty Jewish leaders. When it comes to consistency, being the People of the Book doesn’t give us any advantage over the goyim.
An old couple gave the testimony at the session after my dinner with David; they talked about their son Sean, who had rejected them after going into the lifestyle. “But we kept praying,” said the mother, “and eventually he started to come around. He broke up with his lover, who was very dependent and needy. We got Sean to a therapist who had a good reputation for helping people change. But the night after he saw her for the first time, he was murdered by his ex-lover. The therapist called us the next day—she hadn’t seen the morning paper—to say she thought Sean was ready to roll up his sleeves and get to work.”
I shifted back and forth in my pew, unable to sit still. Every aspect of this story appalled me. The parents’ misplaced hope, the homicidal lover, Sean’s misplaced hope, the therapist’s discussing her client with his family.
The father took over the narrative. “I was so angry at Sean,” he said. “I was angry at all homosexuals. I said awful, terrible, hurtful things. And I pray every day for forgiveness for that.” Someone from the audience shouted “You are forgiven!” and I was filled with a white-hot rage.
This is one element of Judaism on which I like to think I am crystal clear. You have to work hard to be forgiven. Every year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews say the Kol Nidrei, asking God to pardon the sins we will commit against Him during the coming year. This prayer was written in Spain during the Inquisition, when the three choices open to Jews were to accept Jesus, to leave the country, or to burn. Those who feigned conversion to Christianity knew they would probably have to spend a lot of time eating pork or worshipping three gods or working on the Sabbath and decided to ask God to forgive these trespasses ahead of time in one fell swoop, annually.
But the Kol Nidrei applies only to sins we commit against God. To be forgiven for sins we commit against one another, we must follow a rigorous multistep process. Different descriptions offer different minutiae, but in the end you get something like this: First, after admitting that we have sinned, we have to feel remorse and resolve not to commit the sin again. Then we have to undo the damage we have done. And only then do we have the right to ask for forgiveness. If the person we wronged refuses to forgive us, then we have to go through the whole process over again, starting with admitting that we have sinned. And if the person we wronged refuses again, we have to do it all over again one more time. And if the answer is still no, then we’re forgiven anyway, because he’s being unreasonable. The only person who can forgive us is the person against whom we sinned; there can never be forgiveness from a third party. If the person we wronged is dead, we have to kneel at his grave and beg forgiveness in front of ten witnesses.
Forgiveness is not easy when you’re a Jew.
I know this because of a letter my father sent me one Yom Kippur, when I was twenty-two, about how badly he and my mother had reacted when I came out. “I have never asked you for forgiveness,” he wrote, after mentioning that he had just learned about the process of forgiveness in synagogue, “and I never could put my finger on why, except that I didn’t feel entitled to yet. While I have been racked with enough pai
n to feel that I have been working on step 1, I also know that what I did to you has not yet been undone, so my wrong has not been repaired.
“And, in failing you, I failed Mom. Instead of passively following her lead and shrinking from arguing with her, I should have been struggling with her for your sake and for her sake, to help her do the right thing which I knew she could not do by herself.
“Perhaps the way I make it right to Mom is to help do what she can no longer do, which is to make it right to you—which is what I didn’t do before, when I could have prevented so much of your pain.”
I still have this letter; there are sections I can quote from memory. So when some bumpkin in the audience in Asheville called out, “You are forgiven!” I was consumed with a vast, unquenchable fire of hate. I hated them all: I hated the father, I hated the forgiver, I hated everyone in the room. I wanted to develop psychic powers and explode their heads. I wanted them all to burst into flames; I wanted them to die long, agonizing deaths full of suffering, starting right now. How dared they presume to forgive this man, how dared they rob that right from Sean or his spirit or his soul or whatever part of him hadn’t rotted with his flesh? And how dared they forgive so cheaply? They didn’t know what the man in front of them had said. They didn’t know what he had done. They didn’t know how his love or hatred or ignorance or understanding had shaped or misshaped his son or anyone else he knew. He felt remorse; that much was clear. But he had done nothing to make it right; instead, he had come here and applauded a thousand people for loathing themselves so much it made them sing. I didn’t care that he felt this was making it right. Where was Sean’s grave, that he might go to it and kneel down in front of ten witnesses and beg forgiveness for being grateful that at least his son didn’t die gay? I wanted it to be Yom Kippur right now, so he could beg forgiveness of God, for believing Him to be so small-minded He gives a damn about who loves whom on this speck of dust.
And I hated myself for denying mercy to a grieving father. He had very clearly loved his son deeply even as he had probably fucked him up beyond all repair—well, now definitely beyond all repair, seeing as how he was lying in a box under the earth and would never be in a position to forgive anybody ever again.
On my way out of the session I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see hot Jon, who looked unhappy. “I want to hear more about your story,” he said.
“Fine,” I said, “but are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m okay. It’s just that last year I had such a wonderful experience at the conference, but so far this year I feel numb. I mean, if I’m here again and I’m not getting any new perspective on my life—well, it’s a problem.”
“That’s rough.”
“I look at my life, and I ask, am I happy? The first time I asked myself that was a year and a half ago, and I thought, damn it, I’m not. I mean, is this all there is? Make money, get rich, retire, live a life without joy?”
I didn’t know what to say to this. For the first time, somebody I’d met here was expressing doubt. For the first time, somebody was saying he wasn’t sure what his next step was.
Was this what they were all thinking?
“But I don’t want to go on about myself,” he said. “I want to hear more about you, why you came here.”
This time Rob wasn’t around to rescue me by telling us about the workshop he’d just been to. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just feel…an emptiness. Like, I wonder why I’m not filled with joy every time I see my boyfriend.” I have not been filled with joy under any circumstances since I went off Prozac in 1999. But it would have been one thing to acknowledge that I had bad brain chemistry; to depict Mike as being a lesser part of my life than he actually was felt uncomfortably close to betrayal. I blamed Jon for this, and I suddenly realized he was incredibly annoying.
And he wouldn’t let it go. He kept on asking questions. He asked about my boyfriend. He asked about my experience in the lifestyle. He asked about my childhood, and I talked about how my father had worked a lot and I had had to take care of my dying mother and I couldn’t complain because he was off saving the world. I talked and talked and talked. I did not wish to say the things I said to him, because they were true and because they were not things I felt comfortable revealing, but I was unable to make anything up. By now I found him extraordinarily unattractive. The more strongly he expressed sympathy the more adamantly I refused to let it move me. I apologized for talking so much, when in fact I was furious at him for making me do so.
Finally—finally—I was able to wrench the conversation around to him, and he revealed that, after the Exodus conference the previous year, he had walked out on Stacey on her birthday and spent the rest of the day in a gay sex club. Eventually, however, he had realized that the lifestyle was miserable and that he belonged with his wife.
“And now things are amazing,” he said. “I mean, okay, I’ve never gotten an erection looking at her, or at any woman. So when we have sex, we turn the lights off, she touches me, she scratches my back, and that’s how we start. No, it’s not the same excitement I get from sex with a man. But it’s so wonderful to wake up next to someone you trust and who trusts you and hear your seven-year-old daughter and your twin sons laughing, who love each other so much, and you.”
Your daughter? I thought. Your sons? You have children? I just met you, and I can see your marriage imploding before my eyes. What were you thinking?
“There’s one guy here,” he said, “who really triggers me. I told Stacey, and she said, what are you going to do about it? I said, I’m gonna get to know him. And I went and spent a long time talking with him. He told me all about his life, and I’m like, Whoa, you have some serious stuff going on. You have problems just like me. And I don’t feel inferior to him anymore.”
Fuck.
He was talking about me.
He had sought me out, without his wife. He had made a big deal of being interested in my story. All that insistence on finding out what was missing from my life—he hadn’t been grilling me; he had really wanted to know. He had needed to find something wrong with me so that he could keep believing that to be happy he had to be straight.
What damage had I done him by shoring up that belief?
The next afternoon Rob invited me and Jon to go swimming with him in the Asheville River. Jon declined, saying that he and Stacey wanted to go to the local crafts fair, but I was all for the idea of taking my clothes off in front of Rob. Unfortunately, before we left he acquired three other companions—Bill, the cute, bubbly twink; Louis, the hairdresser with bad hair; and Greg, the sullen deaf guy. But something about the river eased my spirits, and before long I was jumping from the log that hung from the tree, Wicked Witch of the West or no, and swimming back to shore, laughing the whole time.
And for the first time since the start of the conference, I didn’t feel like a con man. I don’t know whether it was the absence of a notebook that did it, or the fact that nobody was discussing brokenness or healing or father wounds, or the fact that I couldn’t see a goddamned thing because I didn’t have my contacts in, but I could almost feel my innards untwisting themselves.
I attempted a back somersault off the log, landed on my back, and got water up my nose, but I tried again and this time I went in upright. Bill followed my lead; Rob started to but he was too muscular to pull his knees far enough into his chest for a somersault. Louis was well built too—and well tanned, though his bronzed palms gave him away as a user of self-tanning cream—but he was sitting on a rock on the shore, not swimming.
I stood with Rob knee-deep in the water near the bank and talked with him and Louis. I kept losing my balance, but I was not sorry to have to reach out repeatedly and grab Rob’s arm to steady myself. Is he into me? I wondered, and couldn’t tell. I am an unskilled interpreter of nonverbal clues in even the clearest of circumstances; in murkier situations, when the people around me are stifling all their impulses, I feel moorless; and in murkier situations when the people
around me are stifling all their impulses and my vision is not corrected I might as well be clutching jetsam on the high seas. So in order to see whether Rob was indeed into me I climbed out of the river to put on my glasses, but when I did so everything came into sharp focus again, and I instantly felt severed from human connection with the four men fifty feet away from me. I had forgotten for a quarter of an hour that I was an outsider, and, now that I remembered, the feeling was excruciating. If this is what clear vision costs, I thought, I prefer not to see. I put my glasses back in my sneaker and climbed once more onto the rock.
Forty-five minutes later, dry and clothed, we headed back to the car, where we stood around uncomfortably; something didn’t seem quite right. Then Rob pulled a bottle of hair gel out of his bag and we all took some and everything was okay again. Rob and I walked along the river; twenty sullen feet ahead of us was Greg, with Bill and Louis in front of him. “Greg is frustrated with me,” said Rob. “I think he’s attracted to me, and that’s not what I’m here for. He wanted to touch my leg in the car.”
“What’d you do?” I asked, willing Greg to fall into the river and drown.
“I just moved it away.” Okay, Greg could stay alive.
I mean, it’s not as if I would actually have done anything with Rob had the opportunity presented itself. First, it would totally have fucked him up even further; and second, I already had a boyfriend, one who had no wish to be free from his homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ, one who could write me prescriptions for benzodiazepines.
“We’ll be there in a second,” Rob called to Bill, Louis, and Greg, who had returned to the car. Looking at me, he said, “What are your plans for when you go back?”
A flash of inspiration struck me. “I don’t think I’m going to try to change. But when I get back home, I’m going to be faithful to my boyfriend. I’m going to treat him better. I’m going to be a better person.” This, I realized, would be the end of the story I told the people here. And maybe by giving them an example of someone who had made a different choice, someone who didn’t hate himself—or at least who didn’t hate himself for being gay—I could at least keep questions open in their minds.