Many of us left families of origin to form families of friends. Many of us brought children into the world in complicated and creative family arrangements – with multiple adults, exes, friends, all playing a role in raising children who will never have cause to doubt just how wanted they were. Yes, those of us in queer families know the difference between kinship and biology, and that is something we can teach the Jewish world.
Read moreReturn from Brigadoon (Report from Rabbi Land)
I just got back from Brigadoon. That’s how I’ve begun to think of the annual Ohalah conference. It’s the winter jamboree of Jewish Renewal rabbis from around the world. The week felt like being at a yeshivah, not of the old kind, but a yeshivah as you might imagine it in Olam Haba, in Paradise. Rabbis and students of all ages and genders. All of them with a hand in the old texts and an eye on the future of the planet. Progressive people, creative people, mystics and musicians.
Read moreAt the Rebbe's Gay Tish
And then the participants began to roll in. Like Chasidim would pour into Bratzlav or Berditchev or Lublin, to spend the Jewish holiday at the shtibl and table of their favorite rebbe. Instead of Yisroels and Motls and Shmuels, we instead had Davids and Steves and Marks and Sams – several of each, in fact. Instead of gabardines and shtreimls we had shorts and tank tops and, by the pool, nothing at all.
Read moreFire, and the Prairie
We drove ten blocks south to the old Oak Woods Cemetery. We looked at its burial mound of Confederate prisoners upon which someone had scornfully (I presume) placed an empty bottle of Southern Comfort. And then we looked for graves of trailblazers who rest there. Ida B. Wells, the radical turn-of-the-century African-American journalist; Jesse Owens, the African-American runner whose prowess shamed Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; and Hyde Park's own Harold Washington, Chicago's first black and first progressive mayor, whose ethos made possible gay rights in that city, and whose election so rocked the world that while I was on a 1983 visit to Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia, the mere mention that I came from Chicago, which would have once produced an Al Capone pantomime, now elicited the amused observation, Ah, Chicago. Negri Burgermeister.
Read moreReflections of a Retiring Drag Queen
Winnie and I have stuck together for 21 years now. She’s seen me through a lot: legal practice, new love, marriage, children, the boomeranging of a long cast-off rabbinic calling, and the loss of both my parents. And she’s no picnic either. I’ve seen her through meltdowns, relationships, hairdos, artificial insemination, Republicanism, cleaning obsessions, and even prison (trafficking in Julia Child pornography, if you don’t recall). But sometimes it is time to say goodbye, and you may be surprised (or relieved, or sad, or indifferent) that Winnie and I are, at long last, bidding each other farewell.
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