Come out, come out, wherever you are. It’s a slogan-turned-mantra to urge lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to break down their closets and celebrate who they are.
But it doesn’t stop with queer folk. Nowadays, parents and family members are encouraged to “come out” as having LGBT loved ones they are proud of.
Enter Laura Siegel, a Pacifica mother who still has yellowed clippings of the Bulletin, circa 1989, detailing the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis quandary over gay and lesbian ordinations. Among them, a former Young Israel rabbi used the commentary pages to vent his perception that homosexual behavior was being recklessly sanctioned in the Jewish community.
“It angered me so much and just filled me with emotion,” recalled Siegel, co-editor of “Out of the Closets, Into Our Hearts: Celebrating Our Gay/Lesbian Family Members.” Responding to the Orthodox rabbi, Siegel wrote a published letter to the editor, incensed that one of the people he implicated as deviant included her son, Stuart.
That letter was not all she wrote.
But her essays do not merely call for tolerance. Instead, Siegel writes to shep nachas over things typically only celebrated within queer culture. For instance, in her poem “Just Like Everyone Else,” she kvells over her son’s flair for gender bending and his involvement in ACT UP protests.
In 1985, Stuart, then 19, arranged to meet with Siegel in Golden Gate Park. She thought it odd, and didn’t know what to expect.
“What he did was show me his journal — he didn’t actually come out to me — and it was filled with pages and pages of anger and angst,” Siegel recalled.
“I didn’t know where it was directed, and I was shocked and pained; that was my first thought,” she continued. “And then out of my mouth just popped, ‘Are you gay?’
“I don’t know where that came from.”
Yes, Stuart responded, I am. And then Siegel did what every gay son prays his Jewish mother will do when they disclose who they are: She said, “I love you.”
“I could see him visibly changing right before my eyes, more relaxed, smiling. He said, ‘I can drop my shoulders and let my voice raise an octave!'”
Overwhelmed, Siegel readily admits she cried when she got home that day. But other than fears over AIDS — then considered a “gay disease” — and the homophobia he would be exposed to, Siegel was determined to be proud of Stuart for who he was, and not “despite” his homosexuality.
At the time, PFLAG and Betty DeGeneres were hardly on anyone’s radar screen.
By 1987, Siegel and her husband, who attend San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Israel-Judea, were marching in gay pride parades and were Castro District regulars. (Once they coincidentally found themselves sitting a few rows behind their son while he was on a date at the Castro Theatre.)
And then on a listserve she met Nancy Lamkin Olson, another mother of a gay son past the point of needing a support group. The two bonded over her unique philosophy: “issues, not tissues.”
Out of that came the idea for an anthology filled with anecdotes about sharing stilettos with your son, motorcycle rides with your Dykes on Bikes daughter, and being the first straight chick editor of the gay rag your brother reads.
After putting out a call for essays that specifically honored loved ones’ queer lives and lifestyles — instead of lamenting them — the mothers-turned-editors were pleasantly in over their heads. Submissions totaling more than three times the size of the final collection poured in.
Several of the selected contributors are Bay Area Jews. Siegel and other locals will read from “Out of the Closets, Into Our Hearts” Wednesday evening, Oct. 24 at Lavender Dragon Bookstore in Menlo Park.
Ann Davidson will be among them.
Though you wouldn’t know it from her piece, the writer and retired speech pathologist revealed in an interview she wasn’t always comfortable with her son’s homosexuality. The longtime Stanford Hillel member used to wonder what had made Ben gay and agonized over whether she or his father had something to do with it.
But that was years ago, before she started her “journey,” educating herself “to get accurate information.”
“I’m not interested in ‘why’ anymore,” she says. “[LGBT people] are a valuable part of our families and communities.”
That epiphany, she believes, could very well have something to do with being Jewish.
“We have relatives in Israel; my husband’s family has Holocaust survivors. I feel very close to the experience of targeted people — that has always fueled my interest in what I choose to take on.”
Or pass down.
A few years ago, Davidson interviewed her three young grandchildren about their uncle Ben — her son — and their uncle Greg — Ben’s partner. Celina, Rasa and Antar (at the time, ages 8, 3-1/2 and 11 respectively) shared stories about trips to favorite taquerías, a special book allowance and the silly names their uncles called them.
Davidson feels fortunate that she found PFLAG, the familiar acronym for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and now runs its information hotline.
“As a Jewish person,” Davidson says, “I am very sensitized to rejection and discrimination of any sort.”
Ditto for Lauren Hauptman.
“Hineni,” Hebrew for “here I am,” details why it was imperative she enlist in the fight against homophobia: her brother, Michael.
She was raised Conservative — “but egalitarian!” she’s quick to add — by a family that valued social justice, which had already fueled her feminist leanings. So when Michael came out to her nine years ago, tackling homophobia was logically the next thing to do.
“I was really worried about how he would be treated. He was my little brother, and it was my job to protect him,” she explained.
Hauptman then helped her brother disclose his identity to their parents, who now are leaders of a PFLAG group in suburban New York.
From then on, Hauptman’s activism epitomized another gay (friendly) slogan: “Straight, but not narrow.”
Hauptman’s closeness to her sibling was a large part of her decision to leave New York and join her brother in San Francisco four years ago.
Interestingly, Hauptman, who works for Golden Gate University, found that her need to combat invisibility shifted when she swapped coasts.
In Jewish New York, the 33-year-old recalled, “I wore rainbow rings everywhere I went.” In queer San Francisco, by contrast, “I feel I have to wear a Jewish star.”
But upon arrival, she did land a top editing job at Frontiers, a gay newsmagazine based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hauptman was the first and only heterosexual married woman to hold the post.
Sound odd? Perhaps the first sentence in her essay will clarify: “Because the sun rises and sets on my little brother.”