Standing At the Crossroad of Jewish Heritage and Gay Pride Months

And To Be Honest, The Latter Is a Total Drag

Tel Aviv Pride. No contradiction here.

Tonight is the last night of Jewish Heritage Month. In an hour, Gay Pride Month begins.

The bewitching hour lands on a full blue moon peeking through the Jacaranda trees as I sit in the comfort of my bohemian Beverly Hills home, thinking lovingly back to when Gay Pride was prideful for me as opposed to whatever the fuck it is now.

I often joke that I’ve been grateful to be a refugee from New York City because I was there when it was still interesting. The 1970s drug-fueled, disco era. Ahh, the good old days.

As the clock struck midnight, I wondered if I had to make a decision about which month meant more to me.

Hands down, the answer was a no-brainer.

I am a proud Jewish Zionist before I am gay.

It’s who I am, not what I am, that matters most, especially since I no longer recognize much of what passes for the LGBT community today. What began as a badge of honor has devolved into something I barely recognize.

These days I like to say:

Homosexual? Yes.

Gay? Not so much.

Because what started out feeling like a political party has become less of a party, and more anxiety-producing nonsense. What was once a movement grounded in liberation is now increasingly consumed by causes that have little to do with the struggle that brought us here.

In fact, there’s a term I’ve coined for where I find myself these days.

Homosecular.

Homosexual. Jewish. Zionist. Secular.

Somewhere along the way I realized there wasn’t really a word for people like me anymore, so I made one up.

No, it won’t be a new letter in the ever-expanding alphabet mafia. It has the potential of being an entirely different tribe. So, if you’re someone who feels a stronger connection to family, heritage, history, and common sense than to the latest ideological fashion show, perhaps you’re homosecular too.

Thinking back to 1978 when I officially came out.

I am twenty-two years old, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when it was still like “West Side Story”—Dominican grocers, Puerto Rican families, a neighborhood that had not yet been gentrified to within an inch of its no-longer-diverse life.

I was a Studio 54 club kid, and for the first time in my life, felt completely and utterly free.

Gay liberation was not an overused hashtag yet.

It was not a land acknowledgment.

It was bodies and music and the radical, almost incomprehensible joy of not apologizing.

The whole city was broke and graffitied and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and somehow that made it more alive, more creative, not less.

Nothing was precious.

Especially Times Square.

I’ll never forget my first Gay Pride march.

A warm and breezy Sunday morning. A group of us walked arm in arm down streets at a time when doing so still carried risk.

That’s what the rainbow flag meant when it was new.

When I saw it unfurled for the first time on Fifth Avenue, it wasn’t a corporate rebrand. It wasn’t a Crayola collaboration. It was our declaration.

We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.

We ain’t going anywhere.

Interestingly enough, that’s what my Jewish identity feels like today.

We’re here. We’re Jews. Get over yourselves — then get used to it.

The flag has exploded into a mélange of mismatched colors and competing identities. I’ve long joked that the rainbow flag didn’t match a single thing any of us wore, but we overlooked the clownishness because it meant something greater.

Now I see a flag trying to represent everyone and everything at once, including my enemies — and in the process it represents me less and less.

Judy Garland and Dorothy are spinning in their graves at what has been done to our pride.

It looks less like a liberation movement and more like a collaboration between a pride committee and a corporate marketing department, with the marketing people winning.

The flag is the least of it.

What has happened to the movement itself is something else entirely.

I mean…Queers for Palestine???

Sit with those words for a moment.

Think about what it means to march in solidarity with movements and regimes that would criminalize, imprison, or even execute you for being exactly who you are.

The contradiction isn’t merely ironic. It’s bewildering. It’s the antithesis of what we marched for.

And perhaps what troubles me most is not the activists themselves but the willingness of so many institutions to pretend the contradiction doesn’t exist.

The same goes for the Jews who line up behind movements that openly oppose the existence of the world’s only Jewish state. Ladies, gentlemen, and whatever you are — I give you the pathetic Democratic Socialists of America.

I have run out of patience for the performative nonsense of guilt masquerading as virtue — the cringiest signal of all time.

When New York’s mayor skipped the Israel Day Parade this year, ending a tradition observed by every mayor for more than six decades, it felt emblematic of the moment.

Frankly, he was better off not being there. Who needs him stinking up the joint?

What I want is to live in a world that makes sense.

What I want is to walk arm in arm down a street and have it mean what it meant in 1978.

Defiance. Joy. Truth.

What I really want is for the gay community to remember it exists because people like me linked arms on streets when it meant something real and special.

The blue moon is out tonight.

Fitting.

Buy now.

Happy Whatever You’re Proud To Be!

If you haven’t read my memoir, this might be the best time to do so. Click here.