I’d like to give this interview as a follow-up
to my “Berkeh’s Story” that was posted here a short time ago.
I was born in Dallas, Texas in 1956, into an
immigrant family—my grandparents had lost all their money in the Depression and
then drove down to Texas with everything they owned in their car. They were
Russian Jews with an orthodox background, although we were all Reform by the
time I was growing up. We were a tight family. We met every week for a big traditional
meal.
I was a dreamy girl, artistic and edgy and
idealistic. In adolescence, I found it painful when the other girls began flirting
with boys. I didn’t understand how to do that, and knew I was different. I had
friends, but somehow still felt terribly lonely. In high school, I fell in love
with a girl but it was socially dangerous to even name what I felt. I wrote
long letters to her, I obsessed over her. But it didn’t have a name. I didn’t know anyone else who felt
like that, either.
When I met the first Lubavitch shluchim to
come to Dallas, I was still full of desire that easily became a dissociated
floating desire to bind my soul to a great mystical other. I believe that for
me, religion was where I put physical longing.
I’m interested in the interrelationship of spiritual
and sexual desire. They both go to the core of who you are.
I never told the girl I fell in love with
how I felt. She was a straight girl and I wouldn’t dare. One weekend, we had plans
to go camping, but it looked like rain. This was 1971, and I was sixteen and
had just graduated high school. I’d come across this poster about a
shabbaton (weekend learning event that takes place over the Sabbath). Because it was raining, we
went to that
shabbaton instead and I
fell in love with religion! My life changed by a caprice of the weather. The
hassidim promised me unqualified love. They promised me G-d! I was swept away.
A young Rabbi Moshe Feller was there. I
call him the consummate salesman. He encouraged us to come to his new institute
in St. Paul, Minnesota. I didn’t have money but he said he would take care of
me. I was going to college in the fall but I went off that summer to St. Paul, to
Bais Chanah Institute for Women, and talked my girl friend into going with me.
After a while, my friend left. She said she
really hated it. I grieved losing her terribly, but it didn’t stop my headlong
fall into frumkeit (Orthodox Jewish religion). I soon had the worst case of “baal tshuva
syndrome” (returnee to Judaism)—spouting mystical lines, obsessively attending to every detail in
halacha with no compromise and no common sense, the kind of baalas teshuva that
embarrasses lifers. That was me at sixteen.
But the shluchim in Dallas were thrilled
because I was their first. When I left the Institute, I went to their home
every couple of days of what remained of my summer, just to help me cope with my
parents, who were so upset about my new frumkeit. I moved out and on to
college, since I had a scholarship and thus means of support. I had little
contact with them after that, and would not for years. I was lonely and
confused, too young to be on my own, and the more unhappy I was, the more I
clung to yiddishkeit. I began to study chassidus to dispel all the rising doubts,
and fear, about my new Chassidic life. I studied a lot.
I used to dream I was a yeshiva boy. I
would lose myself in learning, live in those gorgeous books, apart from the
huge world that was looming too soon on my young life. I became reasonably
fluent in learning, for a baal tshuvah. Then, when a new Chabad House opened in
Austin, I transferred to the university there.
But I was a girl. I was told clearly that I
could attain all those religious goals, and God’s loving approval, not through
study but through marriage and children. I wound up with a shidduch (arranged marriage) at eighteen,
and got married a month after my nineteenth birthday. The shliach in Austin
made the shidduch. By that time, I was a Chassidic soldier—I just wanted to
please G-d and do “the right thing,” and I would do anything to that end. I
never thought about loving my husband, or desire. Nobody asked.
I had seven children in a ten-year span,
and I fell in love with every one. That’s what my life became. I also became,
of course, a day school teacher, and I was good at it. But no matter what I
did, I lived with terrible loneliness, in the middle of so many people always
around me! My marriage was empty. I watched the burden of supporting a big
household and the inexplicable lack of anything vital between us wear him down
over the years. We got so we rarely spoke, slept apart, and he lost interest in
sex (can I blame him?)
He worked
and worried about money, and turned always back to his learning. Today, I think
it is a crime against non-homosexuals for gay people to marry them and steal
their youth, waste their love. It’s not just about us.
 |
not the actual family
I was always sick with low-grade stuff, allergies, mild persistent asthma, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue. I had gay dreams I didn't dare tell anyone about, developed insomnia, then panic attacks in my sleep. This went on for years. I never talked about these things.
|
My last child was a preemie, and I quit
teaching. As he got older, and I got older, and had more quiet time, I simply
became more conscious. But at the time, it felt like something had happened to
my hormones and I started feeling like an adolescent, as if I’d frozen in place
at age sixteen for years, and then, when I unfroze, felt…everything. Natural physical
longing settled over me. I would lie alone in my separate bed and pray that I
would get to hold a woman in my arms and feel her healing love and touch, just once in my life.
Then I became intensely, briefly attracted
to one woman in the community and this alarmed and scared me. So I went to a
therapist to try to put it in its place.
All of this was taking place in Texas, in a
small Chabad community. I thought I was the only frum gay woman in the world.
The last thing you do in the frum community
is share your secrets. I had friends, and found the frum community loving and
supportive of its own, if you met their criteria, but even friends did not
confide in one another. Secrets, once released, can hurt your children, hurting
you in your most vulnerable place. So, I began to write, a way to finally talk,
then I hid my writing under my bed. But as soon as I started doing that, I realized
I wasn’t the only one hiding stories.
When you live in the frum world, you have a
group identity and a group voice. Like everyone, I had accumulated my secrets
over the years. But I wrote many stories through those sleepless nights, all of
our secret stories. I hid them all.
Our Houston community had no high school because
the shliach there felt it was important to send teenagers away from the pervasive
secular influence. I found sending my kids away one at a time devastating. The
yeshiva in many ways replaced us as parents. But at yeshiva, my sons sat long
hours, were forbidden to speak of girls or talk to girls, and were constantly
exhorted with very final answers to cosmic questions before they could even
formulate their natural young questioning. I remembered being young and dreamy
with that adolescent grandiosity that makes a kid feel they can choose any
path, accomplish the world, and my kids didn’t seem to be allowed that. I could
see what I hadn’t seen in myself, that they were being stamped onto one path
and pushed quickly past their adolescence, and I began to feel terrible about
the whole yeshiva thing.
Old dreams of making love to a woman
returned. In the daytime, I would say to myself, why am I dreaming I’m a man,
because I refused to imagine in the daytime that I was a woman making love to a
woman in that dream. Panic attacks in my sleep returned, and sleepwalking, and
insomnia. I wrote and wrote through those nights.
When I wrote “
Berkeh’s Story,” I didn’t
imagine myself to be Berkeh. I wrote the story purely as an act of empathy. Only
now, years later and with a more educated eye, I can see why so many who read
the story once it was published presumed the author was gay. But at the time, I
wouldn’t allow myself to
think the
word lesbian or gay, and I thought I could hide behind the label of “fiction.” I
wrote it, and hid it under the bed with the others.
I had a friend in Crown Heights, a kind,
deep person, who did “spiritual counseling.” Because she was so naturally un-judgmental,
one and then a stream of secretly gay women started showing up, like an
underground railroad of chassidishe women from Crown Heights, Boro Park,
Williamsburg. She told each one that there is nothing wrong with them, that
despite whatever they thought and felt, they were good people, and they should
go back to their husbands. I think this is what most of them wanted to hear and
they were simply grateful for her unqualified acceptance of them as whole and
good people. She was the first person to whom I admitted these feelings.
I shared “Berkeh’s Story” with this friend
and she told me to submit it to a
Moment Magazine short story contest. There
were nearly a thousand entrants, and Berkeh won the competition! Moment
Magazine had the second largest circulation of any Jewish periodical, and for
five minutes, my story was everywhere—very exciting and
very scary. One story had come out from under the bed.
My husband was a graduate of an Ivy League
school. He worked in IT. He had suppressed a great deal of his interests to
become frum and he was quietly proud of me for writing, though he wouldn’t read
what I wrote because it would take time away from learning Torah. He decided he
wasn’t worried about Moment Magazine because he didn’t think there were any frum
Jews who read it.
Then one day, the Rav called me. I was
scared to death. I had been taught, “If a Rav says black is white, it is
white.” You make yourself a
rav and
you only ask a
sha’aleh (question about Jewish law) when you are
ready to accept,
b’kabolos ol (with innocent and complete acceptance), one
hundred percent of what he says.
Now
he was calling
me. He said, “Is that
Leah Lax? I thought you were a
fruma
veiber mit a sheitl,” (a religious woman who covers her head with a wig). Suddenly
I felt dishonest saying yes. Instead I said, “That’s what they say about me.” He
asked how I dared to put such a story in a magazine. People had come to him
about it. He said, “You‘ve hung out our dirty laundry.”
I was shaking hard. That was the first and
only time I ever talked back to a Rav. It was the first time I argued. I argued
for Berkeh. Berkeh is a good boy. He is many of our boys. All I did was show
his real feelings. The Rav hung up on me.
I am NOT dirty laundry.
Thanks to Frum Satire, whose picture this is
I had been taught that halacha is a whole package, a contract with God. I didn’t know how
to take just some of it. With that conversation, I felt the contract break
within me. And it was pivotal.
After that, inside me, it was all over. In
time, I let myself fall in love with a woman. I divorced my husband. I left the
community. I stopped keeping halacha
gradually because it was embedded in me, but I could never find a compromise. How
could I continue to honor a contract that implied that the love that I have to
give is dirty laundry?
I had never met an out lesbian. It would be
years more before I met anyone else both gay and frum—I still felt like the
only one in the world. But I had heard of this one Jewish lesbian that
intrigued me. She wasn’t frum, but I wanted a friend, someone who might
understand. I went to meet her, determined to try to forge an honest connection
with someone at last, thinking no one in my community will know.
Falling in love with a woman the first time
was amazing. The most glorious thing! It all happened hard and fast and I
couldn’t sleep or eat from the rush of hormones that left me half nauseous and
dreamy. I was forty-six years old going on sixteen, amazed that love could be
the most natural thing in the world, and that without knowing, I knew just what
to do.
But once we got involved, I was followed
and people even took pictures of me pulling into her driveway.
I thought, H-shem gave me this gift that
feels like a spectacular celebration of the life He gave me. Halacha judges me,
people judge me, but H-shem gives me this amazing part of myself that halacha
and rabbis want me to shut down. I’d say that, in a way, that first love experience
was a big part of my separating halacha and rabbanim from G-d in my mind, and deepened
my faith in G-d.
Still, I wish I’d had the courage to tell my
husband and children “I’m a lesbian,” complete the divorce, and move out, all before getting into a relationship. The
style of our parenting had always been to protect our children by keeping them
innocent, so I never told them I was gay or, G-d forbid, that I had fallen in
love with a woman, even though some of them were grown. Years later, they would look back on my
“protection” and the little lies I used to build it, as simple dishonesty. As
betrayal. From your own mom. Whom you always loved and trusted.
Lashon
hara (slander) was flying. People confronted my children and husband
and never me. My younger kids began acting out. I stayed on too long, trying to
at least make the bar mitzvah of my youngest son for him. That event, when it
finally came, was a false show of togetherness that makes my son wince today to
remember.
A while after I moved out, my husband insisted
I come and speak openly to the children. I did a terrible job of coming out to
them. I planned what to say for days, but I never got a word out. The kids didn’t
let me speak, and all spoke at once. They were very hurt, not nearly as much
about my being gay as my having an affair and hurting their father.
Being gay? Well, that part didn’t surprise
them at all. Sigh. Nobody knows you like your kids. Some didn’t speak to me for
months afterwards.
My two youngest wanted to stay with their
father. They were thirteen and fourteen. That was hard. We lived in the South
where there is less tolerance for issues of sexual orientation, and my lawyer
said, “Don’t even try to get custody.” So I moved less than a mile away, and I
saw my kids very often. Their father supported that.
After I left, the community treated my two
youngest like orphans, with great pity, and they hated that. That pity drove them away from yiddishkeit (Jewish life). They said, “They act like you are dead!” They told me,
“How can people reject you and at the same time say they love me, when you are
a big part of me?” Kids really hate hypocrisy.
I lost my community, my friends, my family,
in part my kids. I started over with nothing, alone. Gradually I found my way,
and through it all, never stopped writing. I went to a university and developed
my craft. Writing forced me to stay honest with myself. I got a job, new
friends, new community. When I met my partner, what drew us together was how
very much we shared in the present, not the past.
My life with her is peaceful, affectionate,
funny, endlessly interesting. Having this good whole life has helped me
enormously in my relationship with my kids, like a great pool from which I dip
and share patience, strength, and good humor with them. I didn’t let my kids reject me. I just showed up
and said, “I’m still here. I’m your mom.”
There’s some damage, on both sides. The
healing continues. A few just don’t include me in their lives as much as
before. I struggle terribly with their reticence about my partner, and so does
she. She came into my life ready to play grandparent, with no children of her
own. But all the grandkids are in frum homes, and she has had to gradually face
the reality that they won’t open that door.
Years have passed. When I go to my kids’
houses, they have stopped being embarrassed, even the ones in Crown Heights. I
arrive in my pants and uncovered hair and my son walks with his arm in mine
down a busy street. We are close.
Not long after I left, I went to my ex-husband
and said, “I never wanted to hurt you.” But he said he had forgiven me a long
time ago. He said, too much was in H-shem’s hands, not ours. “We didn’t get to
choose that you are a lesbian.” We’ve been on good terms ever since. Not everyday
friends, but amiable co-parents. The others in that community shunned me,
walked on the other side of the road, wouldn’t talk with me. He was the only
one who stayed the same. Really, he got better. Warmer.
All those years of my marriage, I took
women to the mikvah (pool for ritual immersion), since we didn’t have a mikvah lady. I thought it was a
very spiritual and beautiful thing to do. I wasn’t conscious of any attraction
to any of those women. But when I read the earlier interview with the mikvah
lady posted on this blog, I cried. After the divorce, I heard that my community
was freaked out that a lesbian had taken their women to the mikvah for years. At
the time, I thought they were horribly wrong and unfair, but eventually I saw
why they were upset. I can understand.
The last time I went to the mikvah, I felt
my whole Jewish life was there, the kallah about to marry, all the times I
immersed just before and after the births of my children, all the other months through
twenty-seven years of marriage.
I co-created an exhibit called
The Mikvah Project
and it has been traveling around for fourteen years. I made it with a
photographer and interviewed women talking about mikvah. The women knew they
would remain anonymous. The photographer didn’t show their faces. So they
opened up. It felt good to listen and to allow them to show their true feelings.
It was the first time I’d heard frum women talk honestly about their inner
lives.
But one woman I interviewed made me look at
myself like never before. It probably snapped my last connection. She said she
fell in love with other girls throughout her young years, then had her shidduch
and married. She kept on saying she was happy, but emptiness was written all
over her. Her shoulders slumped. Her clothes hung on her. Her face was lined
and sad. But I’m happy!
I knew she was gay when she said, “I just had
to make a kind of surgery on myself.” I flushed red and had to stop her and
walk away to catch my breath. Finally I saw myself through all those years. She
had cut out her sexuality so she could be the good wife and mother—a violence
to her soul.
These days, I don’t need anything from the
frum community. I don’t need acceptance. I am free. I can say what I think and
not worry that I’m not complying.
But if I could, I would ask things for my
frum children. I would ask for them to have the freedom, within the community,
to have real friendships where you can admit doubts and sins and other normal
human things you don’t talk about in the frum world. I would ask for women to
be paid according to their skills and important qualities, and equally to the
men, since my older daughter was a marvelous talented teacher but had to leave
it because she was hungry and had no medical insurance, while the full-time
male employees had a salary and benefits. I would ask for the frum community to
erase that overarching pressure on all of them to conform, because that crushes
everybody indiscriminately when, really, we’re all different.
Today, I will only live in a community that
is as diverse as possible, one in which the only criteria for belonging is to
be an individual. In that kind of community, I can be wholly present. I can
offer all of myself.
My partner, Susan, and I travel a lot. And I
keep on writing. Writing is my lens for discovering, late in life, this
awesome, varied amazing world from which I was hidden for so very long.
