Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  But co-parenting was a life-altering decision. So like any nice Jewish girl from Chicago, I made a PowerPoint presentation analyzing all the pros and cons of our various family options under discussion. Then before I could even decide, Michael and Adam moved to Denver—making the whole issue more complicated. Did I want to be a single lesbian mom in San Francisco? Did I want to act as a surrogate for Michael and Adam to have and raise a baby in Denver? The idea of being a womb factory seemed even more unappealing. If I moved, would I ever find a suitable girlfriend in Denver (and would it finally close that revolving door of recovering alcoholics and emotionally needy cat lovers I had been dating in San Francisco?). Could I live in a state without a Trader Joe’s?

  I spent a year exploring a move to Denver. It was a gamble to leave behind a well-paying job, my beloved city and a seemingly endless supply of inappropriate lesbian dating choices. I reasoned that we would either figure it out or not, and if the whole plan didn’t work, I could always move back to California and learn to love cats.

  As research, I interviewed lesbian moms and gay dads who were doing this already. “Just make sure you have all your agreements in writing in case people split up!” advised one solemn lesbian mom who was battling her ex-wife in court. “Try to find a duplex to make daily logistics easier,” said a happy gay dad who lived with his partner next to his lesbian co-parent and kid in the Castro.

  A year later, I moved to Denver and rented an attic owned by two notorious gay leather daddies who applauded my moxie and family plans. Michael, Adam and I began to spend a lot of time together, essentially weaving ourselves into a family even without the presence of a kid. After six months of intense conversation, we decided to seal the deal.

  We had worked through all the usual things that straight couples negotiate (except the sex), like values, money and which families we’d visit for Rosh Hashana and Passover. We also considered our legal options, given that Colorado law wouldn’t know how to handle a family with three parents. I think we all felt giddy about the prospect of trying to get pregnant, and our plan was to start inseminating at the beginning of the school year. All our parents began buying baby clothes as soon as they heard the news. Life was ripe with possibility.

  Then things got messy. I met and started dating Jared, a formerly Catholic female-to-male transgender person. Jared was a single parent of an 11-year-old son who he had given birth to before his gender transition. My parents and sister wondered out loud whether I was still a lesbian if I was now dating someone who, although born female, now basically passed as a straight guy.

  As if life weren’t already complicated enough, I decided to buy the town house next to Jared’s only four months into our relationship. I began spending lots of time with Jared’s son, assuming the role of stepparent. But I was much more hesitant about Jared becoming intimately involved with my own co-parenting plans, because I knew that would require a whole other level of negotiations. Initially Jared said he was fine with a minimal level of involvement if/when Michael and Adam and I had a kid. He didn’t want the added financial burden of another child.

  But six months into our relationship, Jared changed his mind—he wanted to become a full and equal co-parent with me, Michael and Adam, and for me to become more of a co-parent to his son. Michael and Adam were completely opposed to the idea so I proposed a series of Sunday brunches to explore our options. At our first brunch, Jared suggested that Michael and Adam sell their house so that we could all buy a duplex in a suburban development on the edge of town. Awkward and astonished silence ensued. Adam could barely speak for the rest of the meal.

  For the next few months, I shuttled back and forth between the town houses and the boys’ house, in fruitless negotiations that rivaled Middle East diplomacy. I realized that I was in two separate and mutually exclusive relationships—one with my lover and his son, and the other with my gay boyfriends. I tried valiantly to please everyone, which of course pleased no one, least of all me. My relationship with Jared began to plummet, and not surprisingly, my relationship with the gay dads suffered as well. In fact, they were almost ready to walk away from our whole agreement that we had worked so hard for years to create.

  After several months of conflict, I realized I had two options. I could forgo having a kid with my gay dads and remain with Jared. Or I could end my relationship with Jared and get back on track with the primary reason I had moved to Denver: to become the lesbian co-parenting mom I had wanted to be. After much agonizing, many crying sessions and some useful therapy, I chose the latter option. When I really listened to that small voice inside, buried underneath lots of fear, it became obvious that what I wanted most of all was to become a mom with Michael and Adam, not a stepmom in Jared’s already formed family. It was a decision that engendered intense sadness, some lingering regrets, but also a quiet clarity. So once again I became single, and now this time with a town house to sell.

  Eight weeks after that horrific and messy breakup, I got pregnant. Who knew it would have been so easy and so quick? (If only it had taken that little time to sell the damn town house!) I wouldn’t have chosen to experience the insomnia and hormonal lunacy of pregnancy as a single person, but in a sense, I wasn’t really single. I had the support of not one but two excited future dads who watched with fascination and awe at the growing blob in my belly that waved and gurgled on the ultrasound machine.

  Almost three years later, I now have a delightful daughter named Sasha who happily runs around after Michael and Adam’s infinitely patient dogs. Seeing Sasha laugh, and watching how gently her dads hold her in their arms, I know this was the right decision, even if the pain, disappointment and uncertainty seemed insurmountable at times.

  When straight folks ask me how we do it, I tell them, “Think of a divorced family in two houses.” Their eyes light up with clarity, but in many ways, the analogy is completely wrong. Unlike divorced families, we intentionally created a family with lots of love, without much legal recognition and without any of the acrimony or rupture that often accompanies divorce. Clearly, we need to find a better analogy (and perhaps we gay folks should stop relying on straight analogies altogether to describe our families). For me, my gay dads and hopefully for our daughter, Sasha, the family we’ve chosen to create makes perfect sense.

  Lesbians at Temple

  By Lisa Kron

  I’M TRYING TO DECIDE WHAT TO DO for the High Holidays. For the past few years, I’ve been a member of B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side and my dad, who lives in Michigan, comes to services with me. But this year, my schedule got screwed up and I forgot to send in my renewal. So I’m now trying to figure out what to do. And my friend Leigh said, “Well you should come with us to the gay synagogue.” And I said, “Oh, OK, um… I don’t really know if I can do that.” And she said, “No, you know it’s really nice.…” And I said, “I know, I’ve been.”

  I had kind of a bad experience at the gay synagogue. My father started to come out of me at the gay synagogue. It was kind of a bad thing. To explain what happened, I need to tell you first about the synagogue I grew up with in Lansing, Michigan. It was a very progressive synagogue and it was very important to me, my Jewish identity, very important to me as a child. Growing up in the Midwest you have to assert your identity in a way you don’t need to do if you grow up, say, in New York. The thing about being a Jew in the Midwest is that even when people know you’re Jewish they just assume that you’re also a Christian. In the Midwest, Judaism is considered a sort of accessory that you wear on top of your Christianity. So you really have to work to establish your Jewish identity. Like when the High Holidays come and you go into a store and all the Jewish things are out because they think: “Jew holiday. Let’s put out the Jew things.” And you think, “Oh, good, it’s September. And here are the Hannukah candles.” You walk into a drugstore and there’s the matzo. You think, “Thank God, the matzo’s back! Because we didn’t get enough of it at Passover.” Oh good, more desiccated Manischewitz brownies. I
really want more of those. I haven’t had all the moisture sucked out of my mouth since last spring. (They’re quite extraordinary, actually. One box serves 72. It’s like the miracle of Passover.)

  Anyway, the point is, when I was a kid in the Midwest it was very important to me to establish my Jewish identity, and what this meant was going to services with my father. Now, my dad had grown up in Germany and his father was a chazzan, a cantor, and what this meant was that nothing about the way services were led in Lansing, Michigan, was correct. So my experience of going to services with my father was that I would sit next to him while he muttered things like, “Why are they chanting that melody? That’s not the correct melody for this holiday.” “Why are they going so slowly? What makes everyone in this country think slow equals holy?” On and on like that. He had it all figured out and he was always mumbling about how it should be. And I was Jewish but I was also a Midwesterner, so my bottom line was that nobody should be raising their voice. And I was always whispering, “Dad!” And he’d answer me in his full voice, “What?” And I’d say, “Dad, shhhh!” and he’d say, “Why are you whispering?” And I’d look at him like, “Dad!” And he’d say, “We’re Jews! We’re allowed to speak out loud!”

  So when I was about six or seven there was a major schism in the Lansing Jewish community where one group broke away from the main synagogue to start a new synagogue. (It was like that joke you’ve probably heard about how if there’s one Jew on a desert island there will be two synagogues so there’s one he can refuse to go to.) This breakaway group thought the main synagogue was spending too much money on the building fund and they wanted to concentrate their efforts on the Hebrew school so they broke away and formed the new, progressive synagogue. We didn’t have a rabbi or cantor and all the services were led by the members of the congregation—which was perfect for my father, of course. He got to lead services his way. And his favorite service to lead was Ne’ila, the final service for Yom Kippur.

  On the High Holidays the setup was that services were led by two members of the congregation—one was the “cantor,” who basically led the service, chanting all the Hebrew parts, and other was the “rabbi,” who just announced page numbers and told people when to stand up and when to sit down. Needless to say my father had very specific ideas about how Ne’ila was supposed to be done. And there were no shortcuts involved. Now, Ne’ila is the very last part of the service before the end of a 24-hour fast. And everyone is really hungry and they’re tired and they’re ready for it to be over. But this year, my father has transported himself into a state of religious ecstasy and he sees no reason to rush—this is a man also locally famous for the phrase “As long as we’re in the car we might as well go to Ohio.” So he’s chanting, chanting, chanting, chanting. He’s got his tallis over his head and it’s going longer, longer, longer. And this was making one of the members of the congregation, Murray Edelstein, who was a very tight little man to begin with, very tense. Murray needed the holiday to be over and didn’t like the way my father, in his mind, had hijacked this service. Everyone’s ready for it to be over but Murray’s really hungry and he starts to basically lose his mind. He starts pacing up and down the aisles in a pointed, angry way. My dad’s just davening away. And now it feels like it’s been dark for about five or six hours. You can smell the food in the other room. The women who are setting it up are like, “You know what? Screw them. The gates are closed. I’m eating.” But my dad is still chanting away, oblivious. And Murray Edelstein starts to stalk around the bima, banging his prayer book around, trying in the most passive-aggressive way to signal to my father, “Wrap it up.” Everybody’s getting tenser and tenser and tenser. Murray is truly losing his shit and it’s going to go on forever because my father is forging on, apparently oblivious—until, finally, from under his tallis, the irritated voice of my father comes, yelling, “OH FOR GODSAKES, MURRAY! WOULD YOU JUST SIT DOWN!” I think some people fainted.

  So growing up in the Midwest I was all Jew-Jew-Jew and then I came to New York and I was all lesbian-lesbian-lesbian. But after being in New York awhile the Jew part started to resurface. And at some point I thought: “I’m gonna go to services at the gay synagogue.” So I decide to go to the High Holiday services at the Javitz Center with my girlfriend, Peg, and our friend Moe, both of whom grew up Catholic. And they’re just loving their big Jew adventure. They walk in and everyone’s saying, “Good yontif, good yontif,” and they keep responding, “Good pontiff, good pontiff.” And in the service, you know, there’s that unison response to the first few words of a prayer where everyone in the congregation mumbles together, “Baruch Sh’mo.” And Peg said, “What does that mean?” And I said, “What do you think it means?” And she said, “Well, I think it means, ‘Sorry ’bout that.’ ” And I thought, wow, yes, that’s what a Catholic would think that meant.

  (One time I asked my friend Moises why people talk about Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt like they’re the same thing. I said, “It doesn’t feel the same to me but I can’t figure it out.” And he said, “Okay, here’s the difference: Jewish guilt is that you feel like it’s your job to save the world and you just haven’t done enough. And Catholic guilt is that you just shouldn’t be here at all.”)

  So anyway, we’re at this very nice reform, gay, High Holiday service at the Javitz Center, and I start to become crankier and crankier. What’s happening, although I don’t know it at the time, is that, slowly, I am turning into my father. And I start muttering things like “Good lord, not another responsive reading!” Peg keeps shushing me (but in the Catholic way of seeming like she’s smiling and nodding at me affectionately but has sprung a small leak while doing it—a habit I call, “shush-laughing”). And I’m ignoring her and my grumbling is getting louder, and she’s getting more nervous and digging her fingers into my arm while continuing to smile/shush me. And I say, full voice, “What is it? We’re Jews here. We can talk.” And Peg shrinks into a tiny, mortified ball. But I’m headed in the other direction. Pretty soon I decide I know when to stand and when to sit and it’s not when everybody else is doing it. I’m getting more and more irritated. I decide the service is actually over. They’ve done all the real parts and what’s going on now is just some bullshit American Jewish filler. So I stand up and say to Peg, “We’re leaving.” And she’s shaking her head and looking at me with large, terrified eyes and she whispers, “We can’t leave!” And I say, “We’re going.” And she says, “No, we can’t.” But I have now fully morphed into the persona of my father and I announce in my fullest voice, “Of course we can leave. We’re Jews. We do not have to sit here like a bunch of PROTESTANTS!”

  But you know, as I think about it now, I realize that what came out of me that day at the gay synagogue was not exactly my father. In the Unitarian church, they don’t use the phrase, “Please rise.” Instead they say, “Stand as you are able.” You never have to say, “Stand as you are able” to a group of Jews. If you said, “Please rise” to a group of Jews and there was a little old Jewish man in that group who wasn’t able to stand up, you’d hear him announcing, loudly, to the group: “I can’t rise! Halachic law forbids me to rise! Because I have a bowel obstruction!” And what I’m realizing now is that it was him that I turned into at the gay synagogue. That little Jewish man lives in all of us.

  Mama Ann

  By Joel Stein

  AS THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN got close to the end, it became clear that the most important demographic for Barack Obama in November were the old Jews in Florida, and that the most important old Jew in Florida was my grandmother. That’s because Mama Ann voted twice in 2000: once normally and once when she sneaked into a booth to help a friend who couldn’t see well and she punched the ballot for Al Gore. At least she thinks it was Gore.

  But Mama Ann was thinking about voting for John McCain. And she wasn’t alone. The situation with old Jews in Florida turning away from Barack Obama was so bad, a political action committee called The Jewish Council for Education and
Research organized The Great Schlep, in which hundreds of Jews traveled to the Fort Lauderdale area, visited their grandparents, organized political salons in their condos and ate incredibly bad food. (The grandkids also met up at a bar one night, which—if the psychological impact of spending a few days with frail, elderly, widowed relatives is taken fully into account—may do more to repopulate the world’s Jews than the creation of Israel.)

  A few weeks before the 2008 election, I made my own pilgrimage to Margate, Florida, to convince Mama Ann to vote for Obama. I was in the Miami area anyway to interview a rapper named Flo Rida.

  Before I got there, I had called Tennessee’s Jewish U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, an early Obama supporter, for his advice—not so much about etiquette on making it rain at Diamond’s Cabaret, but how to talk an old Southern Jew out of a big mistake. Cohen’s first suggestion was to appeal to the classic Jewish-grandmother soft spots by telling her what terrific schools Obama went to and that he was a lawyer. Then Cohen started working on the commonalities between Obama and Mama Ann. “Barack grew up in Hawaii,” Cohen said. “They have lots of beaches.” If Cohen really thinks Mama Ann has left her condo to go to the beach in the past 20 years, he clearly hasn’t spent any time with old Jews in Florida. Because Jews had been targeted with anti-Obama e-mails, he thought Mama Ann might believe false rumors that Obama was a Muslim. Again, if Cohen thinks Mama Ann is using a computer, he needs to get to Fort Lauderdale more often.

  Armed with these powerful arguments, I asked Mama Ann to explain her concerns about Obama. “First, the man hasn’t got the experience,” she said. “I also think he’s a Muslim.” When I tried to convince her that he was a Christian, she said, “There are good Muslims and bad Muslims—just like there are good and bad Jews.” When I cautiously reminded her that Obama went to church, she still wasn’t convinced. “He went to Muslim schools.” I told her that Obama only went to school in Jakarta through the third grade, which meant at worst he wrote cursive in a Muslim style, or used Muslimy fractions, or he knew the Muslim names for dinosaurs, which I assume are close enough, like Abu Brachiosaurus. But Mama Ann told me that those people still “have his ear.” The fact that Mama Ann thought friends from third grade were still in close contact with Obama made me deeply suspicious that she somehow knew about Facebook.