Megaphone

Have you ever walked around a bookstore and thought about the stacks of books as the people who wrote them. The insecure nerds trying to tell their version of whatever it is. I think about it, passing the displays. Staff recommendations. What did they recommend? Their own mirror? When I think about all the pen-wielding searchers writing their pages, I think about why; what did they want to prove? Did they want to possess something?

Narratives - who do they belong to? Maybe they belong to the best storyteller to write them. I wrote so many people’s stories, handling each with care — they would tell me how perfectly sketched they were, in a way they’d never been; with complexity, levity, no shortage of details they hadn’t noticed. I had the edge to judge them just enough while handing them the reins to gallop forward. I was the best they ever had. I wrote them better than anyone will. Yet, some subjects become scared of their own shadow. They hide in plain sight. They lose dimensions. The caricature is easier to control. You don’t break any more bones that way. When someone really writes you, it can crack your spine.

I realized this weekend that I came out ten years ago, and it got me thinking about narrative, becoming and falling in love; about the places we hide when we’re naked in the world again; about how we relate our new stories.

My lesbian gaywakening collided with my last attempt at a male musician - or rather his attempt. An overly prolific, recently divorced, famous singer-songwriter was praying my latent realization wasn’t true. He would FaceTime me from hotel rooms on tour after creeping on my Instagram: why are you hanging out with lesbians again… you don’t kiss them do you. What a waste. Wait, do you?! Kidding! Do you think I’m a pervert? Send me a selfie. Not for anything weird!!!

It was like babysitting. The Grammy nominee: You’re a TOTAL babe!!!!!! You’re like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, specifically the sequel. Am I being too much? I’m sorry. It’s just - you have noooo ideeaaaa.

The older they get, the more they regress. Benjamin Button. They idealize you like they’re 13, speaking fan-fiction aloud. Your multitude of layers, your contrasts, your particularities no longer exist. You Barbie. He Ken.

Ghggjdkgjhdshjkdh… you’re so hot… djkhkfhsdkfhkjsdfhj… I can’t believe this is happening to me… djsghjskdfhjkdshfsjk.

Anyone got any Xanax.

I was saved by my own pen. My editor at [redacted] asked me to profile him. I told her I knew him to the level of having his personal phone number. She didn’t mind and trusted me not to fawn. I wrote him better than anyone. I nailed him. He never contacted me again.

The lesbians I met never spoke to me like men did. That was sort of the point. At first, they didn’t speak. They just watched. They didn’t see me in two dimensions or even three. Their eyes went through my skin. I was living in the leftist equator – located midway between Sunset Junction and Broadway DTLA; a progressive colony known as Echo Park. Echo Park was somewhere you wouldn’t venture 15 years ago, but since the wokes settled there to invest their trust funds in $8 matcha lattes, it became the headquarters of everything beyond the binary.

It was there that I fully understood I was not even close to a straight person. Maybe I had my eyes so focused on my own keyboard for so many years – I had never looked up to see so many women move in the way they moved there. They were wild, like cats, not answering to anyone, lying on their backs, stretching out their stomachs, dangling over rooftops, brushing up to strangers. One of them worked from the same bookstore as me. She was shy, like a girl, but walked around a Leonardo-DiCaprio-in-The-Basketball-Diaries level heartthrob. Apparently she’d dated my roommate’s friend, and would in future date my friend who would turn around to me upon hearing I was at one point her unrequited crush and say: “well you’re a fucking idiot.”

There was a show at the Echo. I was due to go for work on a Saturday afternoon to interview this new local band in the green room. I had to bang out this piece for the band’s press kit - a bio for a future record label that they weren’t yet signed to. There were three of them. So lesbian they sounded Swedish like The Knife, but in person they were entirely American.

I went up the familiar steps at the back of the venue. Only one of them was there. The singer. She had on these jeans that split from the waist down, on both sides. I think she cut them up herself. And industrial combat boots. She had an asymmetrical haircut that even Vidal Sassoon could not have imagined. I said hello. “Are you from Glasgow?” she responded, fast. It was like she had already met me. We had never met. That’s how it goes.

The hour I spent in that green room was like a tennis match. We loved playing it. They invited me to hang after the show later, so I was obliged to return. Who am I kidding? I was so intrigued to see them perform. They played half a dozen songs, each one came over like it would fill future stadiums, and each member of the crowd behaved like a fan. They were special. I was discovering. I told their manager to send me a copy of the song they played that wasn’t on my press kit link.

Sometimes you fall in love with a band.
Sometimes you fall in love with a song.
Sometimes you fall in love with people.
Sometimes you fall in love with a movement.
And sometimes it’s bigger than the sum of all those parts.

I went out with these three lesbians to the bar across the street afterwards. Three dirty martinis later, I was staring off into the distance. She told me after that she was wondering if I was staring at her. Maybe I was, but I don’t remember. It was a real instant connection. I remember belonging. I remember them feeling the same. It was familial. Our lives would merge. And just as fast that connection began, it turned to constant escapes into abstractions. Marching in protests, going to parades, clinking pints of beer over bratwurst, and heading to gay clubs like The Abbey. I wondered if that was just what being gay was about. Busy iCalendar saving humanity.

It was more than a community – it was about mission, and narrative. That band’s music was uncomfortably intimate, so raw it hit every nerve. Trauma, rejection, self-loathing, resilient pride. The songs were more cathartic and informed than 300 pages of Bessel Van Der Kolk, put it that way. “Somebody hurt me, but I’m staying alive,” went the lyric of the one I earmarked as the future anthem. Because it was so intimate, it was wrapped up in the political to protect it from standing alone, undressed onstage.

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I was reflecting on these memories this weekend, contemplating the banishment of Jews like us from the spaces that brought us home, wondering for the millionth time how the LGBTs could expel us in favor of their new Gaza sexuality.

And I think I got it. For the collective, it may well be the pain. They’re hurt. Trauma is endemic in the LGBTQ+ community. It’s so much of how so many people arrived there to be anointed with their pride flag so that they could turn tears into rainbows. Trauma often wires people to seek safety in the abstract – ideologies, manifestos, identities that feel larger than the messy vulnerability of true connection. Ideas don’t reject you the way people can; the way love does. Ideas don’t demand the same risk of real openness. Dissociation and deflection become survival tools, and a “save the world cause” or a list of 200 books to read if you’re queer feels like belonging without the terror of heart-jolting intimacy. The sort that forces you to blurt out something that’s unrehearsed, that could result in rejection. That could break the cycle.

It makes sense why spaces that start as celebrations of love or identity sometimes get colonized by rigid ideologies that prioritize purity tests over genuine care. There has been a marked shift from a joyful, creative community to something more prescriptive and factional – where the personal gets subordinated to the political, and dissent or nuance is treated as betrayal. But criminally it’s become an escape hatch from love itself. We used to campaign for our rights because love happened to us, and we wanted to protect that love. Now it’s as though the political advocacy has superseded built-to-last connection and replaced it with cult belonging and ritual.

Ask any queer Zionist and we’ll tell you: they were infatuated with an idea of us, until we became incompatible with the cause. Sharing a utopian manifesto with someone is no replacement for the emotional weight and work of life-altering love. It’s a place to disappear. To weaponize shame. It’s the opposite of pride in partnership, in self. Ideas can be seductive anesthetics to a crippling fear of vulnerability, but how sincere is an engagement in ideologies that expels some of us before allowing room for debate?

That feeling of being truly seen evaporated. I was reduced to Barbie again. Lesbian Barbie; a symbol for a cause that would murder me.

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One of my best friends - gay - revisited an old tryst of his last week, and reached out. The response he received flattened him. To find that someone he once loved so tenderly had become disgusted by the proud Jew he is today. “They think we’re the radical ones,” he said. “I was thinking of the tweets he could have seen and I thought, ‘I genuinely can’t think what is so offensive’.” I responded: “The offense is who we are.”

That’s what’s so suffocating about the betrayal. It’s not just about individuals. It’s about a community. It’s hard to leave. But when they rejected a part of me I can’t separate from, it was a re-traumatization that went straight to the original wound. That same rejection that led us there to the queer space in the first instance, happening all over again, yet again for something you can’t change. The rest of them don’t yet know how insecure their warm collectivism actually is.

I don't hate anyone I used to know. I have no expectations of them. They were wonderful people at one point who shared an empathy with me for the world. Given their capacity to think deeply, I would hope that the day they find out they were wrong about Jews, and Israel, they might behave like the people I once loved. It doesn't matter that they no longer love me. Plenty people do. But it makes me sad for the world that so much has been broken by ideological capture. The joy I felt in that venue ten years ago had no political agenda. It was pure. So while our former friends explore their options with Gaza et al, they don’t yet know that the real hearts they broke, they are never winning back.

The stories they are penning cling tightly to the fantasy they wish to be true. There is nothing brave about writing that kind of possessive fiction. To protect that fiction, they erased the truth in all her wondrous entanglement, including those of us who speak it despite the consequences. My voice is not a liability. It is the asset. I never edited my soul for public consumption. I am proud and unafraid to stand in the light.

To read my manifesto for how to bring back Zionism to queer spaces, and re-orient the global fight for LGBTQ+ rights, please read my highly praised essay in this quarter’s issue of SAPIR.

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