LIONEL BLUE

review of my first novel in an Irish paper captioned 'Coming Out a Bit Strong',
included an uncomfortable paragraph about my press release: '1 would prefer to
be able to see this highly intelligent and able young woman as a 'person' without
being reminded quite so aggressively that she is 'a lesbian writer'. {Notice how
the terms in quote marks are offered as mutually exclusive?)
Alongside this, here is a letter I recently received from the rural west of
Ireland. 'I am a 30-year-old lesbian. I live with my elderly parents who don't
know I am gay. My brother is my main supporter, alas my sister thinks it's all in
my imagination. It is only in the last two years that I have become comfortable
with myself... I watched you on the "Late Late Show" last year. I felt I had to
say thank you for speaking out for the majority of us who cannot.'
I quote this not to make myself sound at all heroic — compared to coming
out to my mother, coming out on national television was a doddle — but to
show the political impact of something as apparently shallow as giving a chat-
show interview. To the journalist who would rather not hear those embarrassing
words, my coming out was an act of aggression; to the lesbian watching TV, it
was a valuable statement, not a bit too 'strong'. In both cases, writing as a lesbian
turns out to be undeniably political. •

LIONEL BLUE

Gay and Jewish

\ T 7 ^ y * ^ ^ come out? Let me give you just three reasons.

Where there are higher slopes and lower slopes, it's no use going for the
greater truth if you couldn't exist on the lower plain: in the media age there was
no private life any more. And I felt that AIDS was coming up and it was wrong
not to be counted. And, finally, I'd much rather tell the story my way.
Many years ago, long before I'd come out, when I first told the rabbis I was
gay, there was a pronounced pause after I'd spoken. I was getting a bit paranoid
and, expecting them to be very stiff and aggressive against everything I'd said, I
was already beginning to raise the banner and shout and this sort of thing. Then
one of the rabbis just said: 'You know, if we're silent, it's because you've raised
an awful lot of questions about part of ourselves too, which we haven't applied
to ourselves, and it isn't easy.' I realised that heterosexuals, bisexuals —
everybody's got problems, and that people are very sensitive in this area and you
have to be a bit kind to them.
It wasn't really a shock for most people. It was a shock seeing it in print, but

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I've been living with someone all my life and I'm not married. I'd also given a
lecture many years before I came out, to a gay Christian group called 'Godly and
Gay'. That was then printed in a pamphlet and I spoke about the pamphlet to
various communal leaders. I also raised the whole question of the problems of
gay people, in rabbinic meetings. So when I finally came out publicly, it was the
last veil after I'd taken off quite a few already.
Because I'd already had a career in so many parts of the Jewish world before,
people knew there was more to me than sexuality. And though lots of people
didn't know publicly that I was gay, in fact privately many, many have known
it, because I've never been very secretive about it. I've been as 'coming out' as I
could, without being thrown out.
Judaism's emphasis on the family didn't really matter that much. The
difficulty was that I had to get used to an awful amount of covering up and
hr.ding because I was constantly being invited to meet someone of the other sex,
obviously for dating or that sort of thing. It was all a huge pretence. It was very
exhausting. It distorted all relationships as any dishonesty does and I didn't know
where I was.
I used to feel odd man out, because I wasn't married. And for that reason
p:ople invited me home on Friday night. But there are a limited number of
psople's homes you can go to for the Sabbath, and it was depressing coming
home, lighting the candles and saying the blessings with only my dog present. I
remember some festivals, after I lit the festival candles, I used to go along to the
launderette and sit there because there were always other bedsitter people there.
We bought chips and somehow became a sort of family.
The traditional Jewish point of view,
firmly embedded in rabbinic thought, was
that gays don't exist: gays were a gentile
problem. Jews had already been persecuted
as heretics and the church tended to regard
aJ heretics as going in for sexual fancy stuff.
The last thing the Jews needed was also to
be accused of perversion. To be Jewish was
bad enough; to be Jewish and gay, My God!
If you suggested that, you'd be something of
a masochist.
Nowadays the amount of room given to
gay Jews to be themselves within the
community is die same as in the non-Jewish
or Christian world. The gay contribution to
religious life has been seen; we're not there
to wreck the show at all. Often it is gay
people who have the greatest desire for
spirituality. Q

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