It Gets Better (7 page)

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.

NEW YORK, NY

 

 

 

L
ike 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, my 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.

It doesn't matter which of us said what. We were all working from the same script.

I was a spy in a hostile country. I had to be perfectly adept at its ways and customs, or my true identity would be revealed, and I'd be deported. I was nervous almost all the time.

I didn't come out until I went away to college. In college, it seemed I could be somebody new, and could befriend the outcasts and miscreants, the ones who loved David Bowie and who dressed extravagantly and went to the bars in San Francisco on the weekends.

It was, in a sense, the beginning of my real life.

But still. A beginning implies an end. I felt as if I couldn't go home anymore. I couldn't act like the high school boy I'd been, and I couldn't present myself in my new, mutated form, either. When I
had
to go back, over the holidays, I didn't see much of my old friends. They assumed it was snobbery. I'd gone off to a fancy college and left them behind.

What I wanted to leave behind, of course, was that perpetually frightened boy, that imposter.

I told myself it didn't matter. I had a new life, after all. My history started at the age of seventeen. Everything before that was more or less erased. The secret agent had gone to his true home.

Years passed. I published a novel,
A Home at the End of the World,
about a gay boy in love with his straight best friend.

I wasn't private anymore. I was taking it out into the world. Terry Gross, on NPR, asked me if I was a gay writer, and I told her I was.

I decided, after much debate, to send copies of the book to Craig, Peter, Bronson, and Rob. I didn't want an obliterated past anymore.

Craig called me a few weeks later.

We did. The five of us. Here we are on that night, in a local bar festooned with garlands and blinking lights
.