I have brown hair, I’m right-handed, and I’m gay.
Being gay isn’t a big part of my identity; it’s just a part of who I am. It’s one of the natural ways of being. So, to me, Pride Month isn’t about the rainbow flags or parades or shouting your sexuality from the rooftops. It’s not really about pride. It’s about something simpler, more understated than all of that; it’s about love.
So that’s what I want to talk about, love; times when I felt loved by my communities.
The first thing you need to know is that I didn’t come out to my parents; they very gently took me out of the closet. I was thirteen and terrified, even though I had no real reason to be – I mean, my dad wrote a script and it started with “we love you unconditionally” – but it was one of the first times I let anyone see that part of me, and that’s always scary.
But even when people love you unconditionally, there’s still a learning curve.
I’ve had some disagreements with my mum about the appropriate language and tone to use when talking about the LGBTQ community; she never says anything out of malice, it’s usually just because of the generational gap. But there was one time when she said something that upset me. And when I get frustrated, I write. So that’s what I did. I wrote an essay, and it was published. I wrote about how it felt to hear someone you love reject a part of you. She cried when she read it. And the next week, what showed up on our front wall, the first thing you see when you come into the house, was a rainbow mosaic.
People aren’t perfect. We can’t expect them to always say the right thing. But all that matters is that they try. Try to understand us, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard.
I have a distinct memory of my grandpa meeting my first girlfriend. He mustered up all of his English vocab to speak to her over dinner. When she made a joke about soccer – his favourite thing in the world – he laughed. His real laugh. I had convinced myself he wouldn’t speak to me again when he found out I had a Jewish girlfriend and not a Jewish boyfriend, but here he was, laughing with her!
He referred to her as my “friend”, but he still hugged me the same. And that was enough.
When I got my heart broken by a girl, my uncle asked me if there was anything I needed. Pasta bolognese, that’s what I needed. After work, he dropped it off with a hug and no useless rhetoric that there were plenty of fish in the sea. I ate it as he held my hand and talked to my mum. He’s never mentioned it, probably because he thinks it wasn’t a big deal, but it was. It was the biggest deal because my uncle dropped everything to help me. Because he loves me.
My sister is a force to be reckoned with. She is smart and strong and always has my back. Before I came out to my grandparents, I would breathe and let slightly homophobic remarks roll off my back (they’re in their 70s and were raised in a different time, but are doing very well in learning how to talk about these things in the 21st century). But she never did. She would call them out, quietly protecting me.
At first glance, my two best friends and I don’t have much in common. They’re straight boys and I’m a gay girl. But we’re all Jewish, we go to the same Jewish school and we all like girls. We do have more in common than that, but those three facts seem to cement our friendship. We’re always making fun of each other for one thing or another – me for being gay, and them for being blonde and always talking about protein. My sexuality is just this natural thing we can talk and joke about without it being deep or awkward. I don’t think they know how much that means to me. That they see this part of me as something normal, like how I see it.
I wish it always felt this way.
There is one space where I find less love, and that is where my communities – queer and Jewish – intersect. I can only recall one moment when I felt loved as a Jewish girl in the queer community.
I was at this party last year, and someone brought up the Israel-Gaza war. It was an off-hand comment about how Israel hated Palestinians and it pissed me off. In hindsight, I should have spoken directly to the kid who commented, but instead, I turned to the people at my table and vented my annoyance. And there was this one person who was so interested in all the history and facts of the conflict. And they were queer. That was the first time I spoke to someone who is queer and not Jewish about Zionism. And I loved that someone from my community cared about all of the components that made up my queer and Jewish identity.
As beautiful as that was, I can think of 100 other instances where I have felt unsafe as a Jew in the queer community. Like having a girl drape a Palestinian shirt over her shoulders at a lesbian artist’s concert. Or all the times anti-Zionist gay content creators have infiltrated my Instagram algorithm to tell me my identity isn’t valid.
But I refuse to believe talking to that person was an isolated incident. I refuse to believe acts of solidarity between the queer and Jewish community don’t exist. Because they do. Maybe I just need to look harder for them.
And I will. Because I believe that fundamentally, we all want peace and connection. We want to love each other. So in the spirit of Pride Month, let’s do just that.
Let’s love.
