Antisemitic Gay Pride

Gay Pride Week

While I've always looked at this as a civil rights application, I may be a minority.  Always could be challenged too, as the opinion has remained static but the experiences that reinforce them have not.  This week, what I perceive as civil rights has encountered a clearly antisemitic interface from within and external animus from people who are running out of groups to hate without reprisal.  I may be more of a centrist though probably not a good umpire if it means accepting the antisemitic components.

My own history arrives in packets, there being no ongoing reason to revile anyone or protect anyone.  The first exposure that I remember involved a few snickers among friends.  A junior high teacher had been unexpectedly suspended and amid rumor, homosexuality emerged as the reason.  Never confirmed.  He was never my teacher so I lacked any incentive to say he does his job well or that this is as convenient an excuse as any to remove a man who lacked professional skill.  I think he disappeared.  This being my teen years of the 1960's, out of site, out of mind.  Everyone I knew had some interest in girls though my crowd tended to begin dating more in college than high school.

I did not know any gays in college either.  Not that there weren't any but they escaped my attention.  As I proceeded onto medical school we had one effeminate professor who we wondered about but for all I know he was married with a family.  The subject never arose again.

One turning point came at about mid-residency.  I thought I would have to move out of university housing at the end of my second year.  In anticipation I scheduled vacation for the final two weeks of the contract year.  My expectation proved correct and I arranged for a new apartment to which we moved in June.  That left me with two weeks of vacation and my wife between the end of her visiting professorship and the start of her post-doctoral position.  At the time, airlines, whose fares were first being deregulated, started advertising bargains to the west coast so my wife and I agreed to take advantage of this.  We flew to Los Angeles, enjoyed the glamour of the entertainment industry and the mansions, drove along the coastal highway to San Simeon and to extraordinary scenery, settling in Berkeley which gave us easy access to San Francisco by public transit.  It was there, for the first time that I encountered openly gay male partners.  Some were effeminate with smooth faces, some make-up, attended hair but male clothing.  There were partners walking on the streets holding hands as I did with my wife.  In the restaurants the servers were similarly effeminate.  I had no emotional reaction, to my surprise, perhaps.  It was not quite like going to the zoo to look at biological specimens, more like visiting a foreign culture that I had read about but never actually seen.  Little did I realize that what would become AIDS was beginning in that place at that time.

As a VA hospital physician on the east coast, AIDS made its appearance in the mid1980's, a lethal disorder with opportunistic infections.  The VA had its share of gays, perhaps even more infected from shared hypodermic needles.  This now became part of history taking.  Yet, unlike San Francisco, had I seen any of them at the mall, none would stand out.  My role was clearly to treat infection and its end organ involvement so I really did not involve myself in much social history other than some drug abuse referral.  Not long after, I began fellowship.  There are some subtle endocrine features of AIDS but they are generally subordinate to the more dramatic infectious, pulmonary, and oncology events so I really didn't see any.

On to solo practice.  Even covering colleagues on the weekends, no AIDS, no visibly gay people.  It changed forever, though, when I signed up for a Facebook account.  I had read about this fad-like opportunity as a feature in the NY Times when visiting NYC for a weekend.  I jotted down the information on how to sign up, and did as soon as I returned home.  My attraction, as that of many others, was to reacquaint with the old friends from years back, mostly high school, a little college.  Many of us had been chums since kindergarten, separated by college, and never expected to contact each other at any subsequent event other than a high school reunion.  Facebook changed that in a week.  Within a short time I had sent a share of "friend" requests and received a similar share.  The service, once the high school was identified on my profile, would select out potential people who might be familiar and we would offer each other contact.  The flurry continued about a year, then hit a steady state with minimal additions, though some deletions for death or irritating political postings that appeared in excess.

One old friend, literally a fellow kindergartner, had achieved a distinguished career, including his name on the credits of some TV shows that I watched regularly.  He had some interesting educational experiences, retired from his primary occupation a little earlier than most of us, started a post-retirement business with equal enthusiasm, and had established household with a male partner which he maintained for about the same duration as my traditional marriage.  I had no reason over our entire childhood to detect any social difference between him and anyone else in our group.  He was still one of us, a schoolmate, a cub scout with his mother who took her turn as Den Mother still alive and functioning as she approached 90.  Instead of his name appearing on the credits, as his new business entered a popular niche, he would appear on the screen or as a guest in a widely trafficked location.

That was likely my transition point.  I would never do anything to hurt this kind, accomplished friend.  As AIDS moved from lethal to chronic and gay expanded from discrete outside a few metropolitan centers to a more open LGBT pride that we have now, the presence also moved from don't ask/ don't tell to something more contentious.  We have protected age, religion, race, gender in the workplace, housing and military.  Running out of people to look down upon never really happened, but the ability to deny them public access did, except for the gays.  Equal access and opportunity is something conceptual.  Steadfastly refusing to participate in any activity that would incur harm to a personal friend resets the position differently.  Torah is subordinate to Derech Eretz.  I miss enough of the mitzvot, that I can forgo any that might require me to harm a friend, let alone other people's friends.

Since my first visit to San Francisco, I've been there a few additional times, including once after reconnecting with my only known personal gay friend.  The community is still there and with steadfast support of a population that while mainstream would also never betray a friend.  These men, and probably women, seemed less visibly on visits there subsequent to my first time there.  I don't know why.  But they are no longer a curiosity.  They are people who contribute economically, engage in charity and in religion, probably shop at better stores than I do, take good care of patients if they are physicians, and advance science.  On behalf of my friend, who I would never harm personally, I would never harm these people collectively either.  Though for the same reason, I discourage antisemitism from any source, particularly one that diminishes itself by taking the position it did,