Some Family Stories
Our (Straight) Son
When our son was about 7, he came home one day, telling me how kids had called some other kid a “faggot.” Matter-of-factly, I told him that was a bad word, one he should not use in the future. He asked me what it meant. I explained that some people fall in love with people of the same sex. As we were having this conversation, I was thinking to myself, “Hmmm, if our daughter ends up being gay, I’m going to be really glad I had this conversation with our son.”
At that point, our daughter, 13 years older than our son, was in college, and increasingly, my husband and I were suspecting that she might indeed be gay. We had had enough gay friends to have developed a certain “gay-dar” – that sense that enables you to recognize when someone is gay.
A few years later, after our daughter had come out, her brother became an articulate and passionate defender of gay rights. Pity the kid at his Jewish summer camps who uttered anti-gay slurs. “My sister’s gay; wanna make something of it?” our son, now over 6 feet tall, would say, towering over the culprit. Later in high school, he engaged in long political arguments with one of his teachers about civil rights for gays.
Our (Straight) Daughter
Our younger daughter got married a couple of years ago, in California. It was an outdoor ceremony in the mountains, with the local Hillel rabbi officiating, and many of the participants barefoot. Near the end of the ceremony, our new son-in-law stepped forward to read a statement prepared by him and our daughter. Only a couple of people knew this was coming. He said, in effect, “We want to acknowledge that, unfortunately, marriage is a right that is not available to everybody. We hope to see a day when all people, regardless of who they choose to love, are free to marry. We particularly appreciate that my bride’s sister and her partner are here to celebrate with us, even though they themselves don’t have the same opportunity that we do, to choose to marry.” Several guests told me that was the most emotional moment of the wedding; even my brother, the no-nonsense engineer, teared up.
Our (Gay) Daughter
When our daughter came out, she did so first to herself and some friends, then to a trusted aunt (my sister), and then to me and my husband and our other daughter. My first reaction was not shock, but also not exactly positive. Was she sure, I asked. Was this just because it’s easier to understand other women than to understand men?
I could best sum up my feelings at that time by saying it wasn’t something I would have chosen for one of my children. At the same time, there was never any question of us rejecting her or being ashamed of her; we never hid anything from relatives or friends. And if other members of our shul disapproved or were embarrassed, that was their problem, not ours. (If anyone had ever criticized her out loud, I’m sure I would have morphed into mother lion mode, defending my young.)
Now, some 10 years later, that initial reaction of, “It’s not something I would have chosen…” seems so distant. I can hardly even remember feeling that way. Now I simply feel grateful that my daughter knows who she is and is able to live fully, accepted by her family and her community. Moreover, in the past few years, she has found her life mate; they had a joint aliyah in our synagogue; they celebrated their union in their own synagogue where they are actively involved; and they have produced an adorable grandchild. Their gayness hardly seems an issue.
Why have I told these anecdotes? When the editors of CJ asked me to write this piece, I hesitated. Did they want a story about how a Jewish family struggled to accept their gay child? That’s not our story, and I can’t pretend that it is.
So my first approach to this task was to return to an essay I had written five years ago, “Thinking Jewishly About Gay Jews.” In that essay, rather than arguing a particular position, I had laid out a conceptual framework, a logical and Jewishly consistent way to think about gay Jews and how they fit into Jewish life. But now, re-reading that piece five years later, I increasingly felt that many of us have moved beyond discussions of gay Jews fitting into the community, because that is now largely a fait accompli.
But then I thought, maybe that’s the story, that, at least for our family, there is no longer a story? And surely this is the way it should be – that someone’s sexual orientation should be at most a relatively mundane topic of conversation, akin to what they do for a living, not something that rises to the level of being an “issue.”
That is the case for our family and, perhaps, our immediate community. But are we there in the Jewish community at large? Our fellow Reform and Reconstructionist Jews seem to be, whereas our fellow Orthodox Jews mostly are not. I hope and believe that within the next few years, in the Conservative movement we will no longer even need magazine articles devoted to gay Jews, except perhaps for the occasional historical piece. If Joan and Esther are active as a couple in our synagogue; if Daniel and Joel are raising Jewish children together – then their gayness has ceased to be notable. I hope the day will come soon when all Jews will have more important issues on their minds than worrying about the sexual orientation of other Jews.
Dr. Susan E. Hodge, a member of Congregation Beth Sholom in Teaneck, New Jersey, is a professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at Columbia University.
