Every Wednesday when I returned home, I had to wash myself of the sticky experience.<\/p>\n
For a month, I saw the shrink weekly. I wondered what qualified this lanky rabbinical school graduate to be offering such sessions, until it hit me: He went through it, too.<\/p>\n
One night, pitching his theory of gay as a phase for the umpteenth time, my shrink let slip that my condition was \u201cnot uncommon to boys in our community.\u201d I sat on my excitement, but inside I was a loose spark plug. There were others? I hoped I wasn\u2019t as alone as I\u2019d thought.<\/p>\n
In public, not a single feigeleh<\/em> (Yiddish for “gay”) swished across the wooded streets of my Modern Orthodox Jewish corner of New Jersey. Thanks to shul, everybody knew everybody and her grandmother. A social circuit of Shabbat lunches kept us all abreast of each other\u2019s goings-ons. There was no way of locating others like me, and I, like my parents, kept my secret hidden. Without a laptop or role models, and suffering from JIG \u2013 Jewish Intermittent Guilt \u2013 my adolescence darkened beneath storm clouds of loneliness.<\/p>\n During high school, my parents stopped asking how my days were. They feared me. My Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school was a blend of traditionalism and selective modernity with an ambiguity that left me stuck in the closet door, neither of one world or the next.<\/p>\n The 10-hour dual curriculum of Judaic and secular studies afforded me little time to socialize. Despite toilsome efforts to succeed, nothing I did overshadowed the lot life had given me. My gay \u201cphase\u201d grew longer. Like a forgotten houseplant, it was ugly. It was something I could not control.<\/p>\n When I was 15, my parents switched me to a second therapist, a tepid old man always in a three-piece suit who asked me to explain my sexuality as I saw it. As a minor, anything I said to him could be relayed to my parents. I learned to practice silence.<\/p>\n The girls in high school called me mysterious. I found it odd how fond they were of my reserve.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are you thinking about?\u201d a few would ask in a cloud of giggles at breakfast or during a free period.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything and nothing,\u201d I would reply, pushing my nose further into my notes.<\/p>\n By December of my junior year, I wasn’t the only one who noticed my budding handsomeness, reminiscent of my father\u2019s glory days. Soon I was invited to my first New Year\u2019s Eve party, an all-Jewish shindig. It was there that I met my first other gay. He had goofy ears and a crooked smile. He attended another local Jewish high school and told me that I gave off \u201cvibes.\u201d We talked in generalities, and he hugged me goodbye when no one was looking. A few weeks later we were at the movies. As \u201cThere Will Be Blood\u201d flashed onscreen, I had my first kiss.<\/p>\n Soon I had my pick of colleges and left that boy, my parents and my closet to start life anew at a Midwestern university. There, in the dappled light of academia, I quit my hermit-like ways. I joined a gay pride group, went to lectures on queer politics and made a group of like-minded friends.<\/p>\n There were the others in my community. Before I knew it, I was dating a gentile, going to drag bars on the weekends and still calling my parents to fill them in on everything I\u2019d studied that week. I never once mentioned my social life; I had caused them enough pain already.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd this Judith Butler, she\u2019s a nice Jewish girl?\u201d my mother asked during a phone call. Judith Butler was an author and queer theorist whose work I was studying.<\/p>\n \u201cNot really,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n I came home that winter break in bleak December. Snow was falling. I was driving with my older brother when he asked me about my plans for New Year\u2019s.<\/p>\n \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t like it,\u201d I told him.<\/p>\n \u201cTry me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m going to a gay club,\u201d I said, my voice cracking like a Bar Mitzvah boy\u2019s, \u201cbecause I\u2019m gay.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat makes sense,\u201d he responded, matter of factly. \u201cI\u2019m going to a straight club because I\u2019m straight. In case you were curious, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the next few weeks I came out to all my friends, riding the euphoria of having someone in the family on my side. But when I faced my mother and father, my excitement came crashing down. How could I tell them that my sexuality was not a phase but a person desperately seeking acknowledgement?<\/p>\n It took me seven years from my Bar Mitzvah to come out to my parents, this time not accidentally, vocalizing my identity to finally become a man.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m gay,\u201d I said in the summer of 2010, \u201cand plan to be proud and public for a lifetime. If you don\u2019t like it, should I ever have a wedding, the two of you Negative Nancys won\u2019t be coming.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNow say it slowly with me,\u201d I said, holding my mother\u2019s hand in her breezy home office. It took her two tries.<\/p>\n \u201cMy son is gay,\u201d we said in shaky unison.<\/p>\n It felt like a step in the right direction, but for my Jewish mother it was a leap of faith.<\/p>\n Coming out was not a private journey. After years of therapy, I had finally found my voice; using it, I began to show my parents that they could love me without guilt. The path to self-acceptance begins and ends with the accepting of others.<\/p>\n (Isaac Lobel, a student at New York\u2019s New School, is working on a collection of humorous essays.)<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Share](\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\")