Pride Month and Being Visible
A few days before the Temple Sinai Halt Hate bus ads were to roll out, I got a call from a leader in the Jewish community asking me to postpone or change the signs. This person had heard from people who felt that it was wrong to address antisemitism without also addressing racism and transphobia on the signs. They also felt that drawing attention to antisemitism might make it worse, and it was better not to speak out about it.
I explained that as a gay activist, I had heard both these arguments many times. Some gay activists felt that issues of poverty and war should always take priority over LGBT issues. Others feared that by becoming visible, we were only going to invite more attacks and make things worse for all of us. In the 1950’s, when the Mattachine Society first began publicly advocating for decriminalization of homosexuality; they were attacked similarly by other gay men and lesbians. Many well-connected and influential gay people said the same thing when National Coming Out Day was first established. As a wealthy gay relative of ours opined one evening over dinner, “You are going to ruin it for all of us.” When AIDS began killing large numbers of our community, the argument about priorities quieted, but the fear that being “loud” would only make things worse was expressed often, especially by wealthy gay men. When the very Jewish Larry Kramer started ACT-UP, the direct action AIDS activist movement, first launched their now-famous “Silence = Death” poster campaign (which included bus posters), the shrieks of outrage were widespread. As one elderly gay man, we knew well (a retired Wall Street attorney) yelled at me, “all you’re going to accomplish by this is to get us put in concentration camps and killed.”
They were all wrong. ACT-UP and their in-your-face tactics were crucial in securing funding for AIDS research and an expedited testing protocol to get experimental drugs to those with AIDS. Regardless of our sexual or gender orientation, we all benefit tremendously from what we learned directly from the search for a treatment for AIDS. National Coming Day was an important shift in gay culture. Coming Out became a political act and a duty. Their idea was simple: if more people knew that their brother, their sister, their cousin, their coworker, their friend, etc. were gay, it would be much harder for them to demonize us. While the tremendous gains of the gay rights movement are due to many converging factors, one key factor was “becoming visible,” refusing to hide and speaking openly about what our community was facing. I suppose you could argue that it goes back to the Stonewall riots that were themselves a refusal to be silent in the face of hate.
Likewise, in the Civil Rights movement, there were many African-Americans who did not appreciate what the activists were doing because it drew negative attention to them and they were already struggling to survive. There were also fears of increased lynchings and other violent attacks, as occurred. African American leaders like Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King knew that speaking out might result in fatal attacks, but they believed that, as the writer Audre Lorde later said, “Your silence will not protect you.”
As Jews, I think we are also at times afraid of drawing attention to ourselves for fear of attack. This is, of course, for a good reason: multi-generational oppression and trauma. When Nachmanides in 1263, agreed to a debate with a Catholic Friar in front of the King on whether Jesus was the Messiah, the Jewish community begged him to stop. Instead, he won the debate and published his arguments. The Disputation of Barcelona, went “viral” for the 13th century. Zionism is itself one form of refusal by Jews to be passive or cooperative in the face of pervasive antisemitism. The State of Israel, for better or worse, is a refusal by Jews to be powerless because of our history. I wonder if one part of our discomfort with Israel these days comes from the fear that Israel makes us uncomfortably visible as Jews, so when it does things we don’t agree with, we feel particularly exposed and vulnerable.
This is PRIDE month for the queer community, and I think the Jewish community can learn a lot about pride from our LGBT brothers and sisters. The gay community, against all odds, went from being a community of hiding, fear and shame to being proud and celebrating who we were. Pride meant refusing to believe what people said about you, what religion said about you and history didn’t say about you. More than that, it was a profound spiritual shift toward loving ourselves in the face of oppression. It is a defiant sort of pride in a community that refuses to be pushed back in the closet by plague or by hateful legislation. As Jews, we need to do the spiritual work of loving ourselves as Jews and finding our own defiant pride in being Jewish.
If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?
And if we are only for ourselves, what do we become?
The Trans Community is under attack from some powerful parts of the right wing in this country, and it is becoming clear that this is also happening in Vermont.
On Tuesday of this week, an event took place at Vergennes Union High School entitled, “Reconsidering Transgenderism.” It was hosted by the local chapter of the group “Parents’ Right to Education.” They hope to build a movement in Vermont to pass regulations and laws to severely limit what schools can acknowledge when it comes to LGBT lives and specifically Transgendered lives. In a statement, the group claimed that, “Public schools are teaching minors controversial content without parent knowledge or permission,” and that parents have a right to “protect their children from controversial subjects.”
So far this year, 18 states have signed laws targeting transgendered people, and many more are pending. Right here in Vermont, there are currently two such bills in committee: H-183 would give physicians the right to refuse to do any treatment that violates their conscience and H-513 would prohibit trans women from participating in any women’s sports program in schools and colleges. While the issue of sports and gender is a complex one and I know transgender people on both sides of that question. Nonetheless, these bills are part of an orchestrated national attack on transgender rights in state legislatures and school boards.
Transgender people, already living which a much heightened risk of physical or verbal attack are living through a frightening time in which they have become the target-du-jour of the right’s culture wars. These attacks are not about people’s health needs; they are about fundraising and votes.
In this way, trans folk have a great deal in common with Jews, who have so often been falsely blamed for threatening the social order and therefore worthy of discrimination, exclusion, and violence. The students in Vergennes chose not to be silent but instead rallied to respond.
They organized a protest and PRIDE celebration which was attended by over 400 people. It began at the high school and then those attending marched to the town green.
As Frederick Douglass and Ida B Wells both said, liberty requires constant and eternal vigilance. In the coming years, we will need to be vigilant about the erosion of rights. Even though we have ensconced reproductive freedom in Vermont’s constitution, there is as I said above already a bill to allow doctors to refuse to perform any procedure that violates their conscience. The state standards for teaching about ethnic groups in our schools will be coming out, and at least up until now, there has been a consistent and pointed refusal to include Jews and the Jewish American experience in that curriculum. If other states are a model, we will also be looking at concerted efforts to take over school boards in order to remove LGBT-positive materials from libraries and classrooms. As Jews, we know what it is like to have our books banned and burned, and so we must allies to the gay community even when we don’t totally agree with everything they are working for.
May was Jewish American Heritage Month. At the temple, we have begun a wall of posters teaching us about Jews who have had a significant impact on American culture. There are SO many LGBT Jews that have influenced our culture but I’ve been thinking about two in particular this year.
One is Allen Ginsberg, the gay Beat poet whose poem Howl was labeled indecent and banned from publication. Howl is an astonishing poem; it is the cry of a deeply spiritual and ecstatic soul facing an industrial and mechanistic society. While a howl of pain, it ends in a transcendent Footnote that shows the profound influence of Hebrew prayer on Ginsberg. It is a litany that begins, “Holy holy holy holy” and ends “Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” Ginsberg fought the ban in court and won, a pivotal legal victory that has had a profound impact on our freedom to read, watch and hear things that some might find offensive. If you don’t know much about this, you might read Howl or Kaddish, or watch the film Howl, the 2010 film starring James Franco and Jon Hamm.
The other queer Jewish American I’ve been thinking about is Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk is one of my heroes. He refused to be silent about being gay and became the first LGBT person elected to a public office in America when he won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977 only to be assassinated by another member of the city council in 1978. It was 45-year-old Diane Feinstein that found him and the mayor shot in City Hall. I want to encourage you all to take the time to watch the documentary The Life of Harvey Milk. It is available on HBO and can be rented on Amazon Prime or YouTube. I have watched it many times and am always moved to tears by Milk’s refusal to silence himself or hide who he was.
“Hope,” Milk said, “will never be silent.”
At the 25th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, Tim and I were part of the march that went up 5th Avenue to Central Park as the original march did. At the top of the glorious steps to the New York Public Library, a large banner hung advertising their big exhibit that year. As we marched by, under that banner a muscular man wearing a blonde wig and tiara, no shirt, and a giant white skirt was spinning over and over, his arms raised up toward the sign above him. On that banner, above a huge pink triangle was written:
