Pride

Friday night, June 9, 2023
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA 

The 1950’s were not a good time to be gay in America. While Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting hearings seeking to uncover communists in the US government and military, gay men and lesbians were listed as security risks by the US State Department. A 1950 Senate investigation noted that “all of the government's intelligence agencies are in complete agreement that sex perverts in Government constitute security risks." During the four years between 1947 and 1950, 4,380 people were discharged from the military, and 420 were fired from their government jobs for being suspected homosexuals. 

The 1960s were not a good time to be gay in America. During that decade, when I was a boy growing up, the FBI and police departments across the country kept lists of known homosexuals and their favored establishments and friends; the United States Post Office tracked addresses where material with homosexual content was mailed. State and local governments shut down bars catering to gay men and lesbians and their customers were arrested and exposed in newspapers. Cities performed "sweeps" to rid neighborhoods, parks, bars, and beaches of gay people. They outlawed the wearing of opposite-gender clothes and universities expelled instructors suspected of being homosexual. 

Until 1974, when I was 17 years old, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental disorder. It’s no wonder that in those days I did not know a single person who was open about being gay or lesbian. What person in their right mind would choose to identify themselves, to the government, to their employer, to their community, their friends or their family as a sexual deviant? All of the gay men and women in my life were in hiding…and the idea of men falling in love with men, or of women falling in love with women, was utterly and completely foreign to my experience.  

The young rabbi at our synagogue, who had such a profound influence on me, many years later came out as a gay man and lived the last decades of his life happily married to another man. But when I knew him, he was married to a woman and I had no idea that he was gay. Even during my four years at college, from 1975 to 1979, I did not have a single friend or even acquaintance who I knew to be gay. You might be justified in saying that I did not want to know that anyone was gay. The fact is that the 1970’s were not a good time to be gay in America.

Having said that, while I was at the time completely oblivious, there were the beginnings of change, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and in New York City. The change began, as it so often does, with things getting worse. Before the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. launched a full-scale campaign to clean up the city’s image. Gay bars were raided regularly by police and homosexual men were entrapped and arrested by undercover police officers. For gays in New York, it was a time of intense fear, danger, and hiding.

Then on June 28, 1969, at 1:20 in the morning, something new happened. There was a raid on the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. It was a rundown place, with no running water and toilets that overflowed, but it was a place where gay man could come to meet and to dance. At 1:20 in the morning, much later than raids usually took place, the police raided the Stonewall, and a riot began. Bottles, garbage cans, rocks and bricks were flying, and the Tactical Patrol Force of the NYPD arrived.

The rioting went on all night, and then continued a second night. The Stonewall Riots did not end the oppression of gay men and lesbians in America, but it was a night of liberation. In the words of Michael Fader, one man who was there: "…mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined… And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way and that's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air, freedom a long time overdue and we're going to fight for it."  

One year later, Christopher Street Liberation Day, on June 28, 1970, marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots; with simultaneous Gay Pride marches in Los Angeles and Chicago. These were the first Gay Pride marches in US history. The next year, Gay Pride marches took place in Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin and Stockholm. The march in New York covered 51 blocks, from Christopher Street to Central Park. In 1994, Stonewall 25 was attended by over a million people. In 2009, on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, President Obama declared June National LGBTQ Pride Month. And in 2019, over 5 million people came to New York City for the largest gay pride gathering in history. So much has changed in my lifetime, since I was a boy and did not know even one openly gay person.

During these decades of change, things were changing in the Jewish world…in my Jewish world. When I was ordained in 1985, my rabbinic school Hebrew Union College would not grant ordination to openly gay students. But we all knew that some of the smartest and most talented students in our class were gay. The school changed its policy four years later, in 1989. Ten years later, in 1999, an orthodox Rabbi, Steven Greenberg, came out publicly as a gay man and in 2005 published Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, which won the Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought.

Now let me pause for a moment to touch on this week’s Torah portion, in which Moses sends 12 spies into the Promised Land, to scout out the land and to bring back a report to the people…a report from their future. The spies return after 40 days and tell everyone that the land is indeed flowing with milk and honey, but that it seems dangerous. Hearing that report, the people lose heart and cry out against Moses, and God and the whole idea of the journey to the Promised Land. They cry: Halo tov lanu shuv Mitzrayima. It would be better for us to go back to Egypt! 

This story is at the very heart of the Torah. It is the most human, most understandable, and most devastating story in the Torah. It is about our fear of the future. Our very natural, very human longing for the past. Even a past that was very, very bad. In that night, frightened of the future, our ancestors pleaded to return to slavery.

Today, as our nation celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride Month, there are many people who, like me, grew up not knowing a single openly gay person. We are the generation born in slavery, and many of my generation, like our ancestors standing on the border of the land of the future, are longing for the past. It is a deeply human, completely understandable, natural impulse….this longing for Egypt. 

Those protesting at the meetings of the school boards, in cities not far from here—Temecula, North Hollywood, Glendale—are longing to return to the past, even though they know that for the millions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and other members of our communities and our families, that past was a time of fear, of hiding, and of oppression. 

Three thousand years ago, our ancestors peering into their future were overcome with a frightened longing for the past. In the end, only two of that entire generation born in slavery were able to enter the promised land, the two scouts Joshua and Caleb who contested the report of their fellow scouts. They said: Haaretz asher avarnu bah, latur otah…the land that we passed through, to see it with our own eyes…haaretz hi tova m’od m’od. The land, they said, is very, very good. God is with us. Do not fear!

May God give us the faith and the courage to say, like Joshua and Caleb, “our future is very, very good. It is a land flowing with milk and honey. Come, let us go up.” Shabbat shalom.