Remembering Gay Jewish Heroes

“We gather together tonight as a community to remember the bondage of our ancestors and the struggles of those that continue today, so that we may be inspired to cherish the freedom we now have, to recognize the bondage of those who are not yet free, and to encourage our collective call to help in the struggle to free all people and to value all people equally. On these evenings, the bond of friendship, love, family and community reaches out from within - as from this gathering – to unite all humankind in remembering our collective history in hope for tomorrow.”
From the JQ International GLBT Haggadah

OUR QUEER JEWISH HISTORY TOWARD FREEDOM:
A TIMELINE OF A FEW OF OUR MANY GAY HEROES

1897: Magnus Hirschfeld, a prominent Jewish doctor, formed the world’s first homosexual rights organization in Berlin with the goal of repealing the laws criminalizing homosexuality in Germany. By 1912, 3000 doctors, many of them Jewish, had joined him in urging the laws’ repeal.

1922: Kurt Hiller, long-time collaborator of Hirschfeld in Germany, publishes “Paragraph 175: The disgrace of the century!” Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code criminalized homosexual activity. Hiller was an influential writer in the early German gay rights movement in the first two decades of the 20th century. In 1933-4, he spent time in concentration camps before fleeing to Prague and London. In 1955, he returned to Germany, where he lived and wrote in Hamburg until his death.

1939: Gad Beck, a gay Jewish teenager living in Hitler’s Germany joins the Jewish underground smuggling food, arranging housing and helping Jews escape from Berlin, often by bribing German officials.

1945: As labor and death camps were liberated in Europe, thousands of homosexual inmates who had survived were not considered in the years to come by East and West Germany as well as Britain, US and USSR to have been unjustly imprisoned, since in all those countries, homosexuality remained a crime. Many ‘liberated’ inmates were in fact once again imprisoned were forced to serve out their terms. Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code from 1871 to 1994 that prohibited sex between men.

1950: Jewish refugee and fashion designer Rudi Gernreich along with his lover, activist Harry Hay, co-found the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, CA. The Society is the earliest, sustaining, gay liberation organization in the US. Organizing principles called for creating a service and welfare organization devoted to challenging anti-gay discrimination and building a gay community.

1950: Robert Friend, considered one of the most prominent figures among English language writers and translators, moves from the US to Israel. Friend becomes a professor at Hebrew University. Some described his poetry as “preeminently a poet of desire” and “bold in portraying, not without humor, the darker, lustful side of love.” His sexuality found expression in his poetry well before the Stonewall era. Throughout the 20th century, gay writing becomes more visible and begins to articulate gay experiences.

1955: Alan Ginsberg authors the poem “Howl,” which contains gay sexual imagery. He is very open about his sexuality and is an early proponent of freedom for men who loved other men.
"who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
"who let themselves be f--ked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
"who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
"who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,”
Gay poets were voicing new explicitness of tenderness, rage, rejection of convention and sexual hedonism.

1965: Frank Kameny organizes the first gay demonstration/march outside the White House. 70 demonstrators show up. Kameny refuses to quietly accept his fate for being fired by the US government for being a homosexual. He spearheads a new period of militancy in the homosexual rights movement of the early 1960s. Kameny helps form a Washington DC chapter of the Mattachine Society. He continues to challenge the negative images of homosexuals for more the 50 years. In 2009 the federal government apologizes for firing him 1957.

1969: Stonewall Rebellion in NYC. On that night the police set out to raid a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, on the pretext they were just enforcing state law that made it illegal to serve alcohol to known homosexuals. The riot that ensued is often cited as the first instance of American gays and lesbians fighting back and taking a stand for gay liberation. Beginning that night, the lives of gays and lesbians, and the attitude toward them in the larger US culture began to change rapidly. People began to identify in public as homosexuals, demanding respect.
Alan Ginsberg appears on the second night of the Stonewall Inn riots to tell the crowd, "Gay power! Isn't that great!... It's about time we did something to assert ourselves." One month after the riots, NYC’s first ever “Gay Power” rally was held in Washington Square. Marty Robinson and Martha Shelley spoke. The speeches were followed by a candlelight march to Stonewall Inn. Five hundred people showed up.

1970: Marty Robinson, Jim Owles, Arthur Evans, and others form the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) after breaking away from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Robinson popularized an activist tool he called “zaps”. Zaps were direct, non-violent actions to confront oppressors. It forced gay and lesbian concerns onto the public agenda for the first time. Among its early achievements was stopping the routine police raids on gay bars and having the first gay rights bill in the world introduced into New York City’s Council.

1971: A gay Jewish activist couple, Marc Rubin (a school teacher) and Pete Fisher, walk into the City Clerk’s office of New York with a large wedding cake and along with other Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) members, took over the office and declared that the City was now offering same-sex marriage licenses. Their courage and act of liberation inspired one local politician, David Dinkins, who remembered the event after becoming mayor, and subsequently ordered New York to register same sex “domestic partners” and grant them some of the benefits offered straight partners in the City.

1972: Morty Manford, who was at Stonewall Inn the night of the riots, marches in the Gay Pride Parade with his mother, Jeanne. He has become a pivotal figure in the growth of the gay movement after Stonewall as an ideologist, public speaker and organizer. A few months after the parade, both of his parents become outspoken movement activists, and were co-founders with him of Parents of Gays, the first support group of its kind and forerunner of the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)

1972: Two gay men and two lesbians decide to form their own synagogue in Los Angeles. Beth Chayim-Chadashim holds its first service in July, 1972 and is chartered by the Reform Jewish movement in 1974 as not only the world's first gay and lesbian synagogue but the first gay religious organization of any kind to be officially recognized by an American national body.
Today there are about thirty gay-specific synagogues in North America. Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in NYC was founded in 1973. South Florida's Congregation Etz Chaim in 1974; Philadelphia's Congregation Beth Ahavah in 1975 and Chicago's Congregation Or Chadash in 1976. Congregation Sha'ar Zahav was established in San Francisco in 1977.

1974: David B. Goodstein buys the LA Advocate, building it from a local newspaper into the largest circulating gay magazine in the world. He was instrumental in attaining the passage of California's consensual sex legislation in 1974, and, together with Steve Endean, founded the Gay Rights National Lobby in 1976, and HRC in 1980.

1977: Harvey Milk becomes the first openly gay man elected to a public office in the United States. Milk didn’t get involved in politics, gay activism or become open about his sexuality until after age 40. Yet, Anne Kronenberg, his final campaign manager, wrote of him: "What set Harvey apart from you or me was that he was a visionary. He imagined a righteous world inside his head and then he set about to create it for real, for all of us."

1978: Rabbi Allen Bennett allows himself to be outed in the San Francisco Chronicle, becoming the first out gay rabbi in the US. He was Congregation Sha'ar Zahav’s first rabbi. He delivered Harvey Milk’s eulogy.

1979: Martain Sherman’s play “Bent” opens on Broadway and is nominated for a Tony Award in 1980. This play is the first to deal with the treatment of homosexuals by the Nazis during World War II. The play was the first time that popular culture had acknowledged the fact that the gay men were victims of the Holocaust.

1980: Larry Kramer, playwright, author, public health advocate and LGBT rights activist, witnesses the first spread of the disease that became known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) among his friends, and he co-founds the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which has become the largest private organization to assist people living with AIDS in the world. Later, when he felt GMHC was not doing enough to stop the epidemic, he founded ACT UP in 1987.

1981: Dr. Joel Weisman, a Southern California gay doctor, writes a report with immunologist Martin S. Gottlieb about their male patents, all gay, suffering from similar symptoms (drastic weight loss, pneumonia, and fevers). Their findings in the Centers for Disease Control's “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report”, was the first to describe this new pandemic in the medical literature that would eventually be known as AIDS. Dr. Weisman became a national advocate for AIDS research, treatment and prevention.

1981: Harvey Fierstein's “Torch Song Trilogy” debuts on Broadway and runs for almost three years. The play introduces theatergoers to a world in which gay people make and keep commitments to one another instead of despairing over their homosexuality. It champions a gay man’s longings for love and family.

1983: Richard Berkowitz, a former SM hustler, in conjunction with fellow activists Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and the musician Michael Callen, publish “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach,” which is widely acknowledged to be the first “safer sex” material on record. Berkowitz dared to suggest that a gay lifestyle of excess was not liberating us but killing us. He called for safer sex practices without giving up on sex altogether. “He made safe sex sexy,” despite being criticized and despised by the gay community at the time.

1987: Barney Frank comes out and is the first gay congressional representative to do so on his own volition. He has become one of the most prominent openly gay politicians in the United States. Frank is one of the brightest and most energetic defenders of civil rights issues.

1989: Jonathan David Katz becomes the department chair of the first Gay and Lesbian Studies Department in the US at City College of San Francisco. He was the first tenured faculty in queer studies in the country. Katz was the first artistic director of the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco and has published widely in the United States and Europe. He continues to work in both fields of queer history and art history.

1992: Tony Kushner, playwright and screenwriter, receives the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play, “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”. New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called it "a searching and radical rethinking" of American political drama and "the most extravagant and moving demonstration imaginable" of the artistic response to AIDS.

1992: David Geffen, a powerful and wealthy self-made Hollywood media mogul, comes out after years of hiding his sexuality (including dating and almost marrying Cher) when being honored for his extraordinary financial contributions to the fight against AIDS. Geffen has developed a reputation as a prominent philanthropist for his publicized support of medical research, AIDS organizations, the arts and theatre.

1995: Michael Tilson Thomas is appointed the music director of the San Francisco Symphony. He is one of the most prominent American conductors of his generation. And is the first gay conductor to achieve such distinction without masking or hiding his sexuality.

1999: Rabbi Steven Greenberg challenges tradition and becomes the first Orthodox rabbi ever to publicly declare his homosexuality. This has made Greenberg a focus for criticism and praise, as well as a symbol of the growing voice of the Jewish gay movement. He was featured in the acclaimed 2001 film "Trembling Before G-d."

2002: Uzi Even is sworn in as the first openly gay member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. He had been kicked out of the Israeli army for being gay. In 1993, Even led the successful campaign to end Israel’s ban on gay and lesbian service members. Even and his partner adopted a teenage gay son whom they are raising together.

2002: Mark Leno, former rabbinic student, is one of the first two openly gay men to be elected to the California Assembly and the first elected to the state senate. In 2005 and 2007, he authored bills that would legalizing same-sex marriages. These bills became the first of its kind to pass a legislative body in the United States. But each time the bill was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger.

2002: Paul Colichman and his straight business partner, Stephen Jarchow, found HERE!, America’s first LGBT dedicated cable TV network and Regent Entertainment. In 2008 they completed the acquisition of the "Advocate" and other gay media publicatons and websites. Colichman said, "Gay liberation started in 1969 in New York with the Stonewall riots. There came a point in history where we said enough is enough. We're going to start to fight. It's been a 30-year fight. It is the civil rights movement of our generation."

2008: Jared Polis, internet entrepreneur, becomes the first openly gay man elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman for the state of Colorado. “I think it’s important to live one’s life openly and honestly, and I certainly do that. I treat it as I would my religion. If people ask, I’m happy to tell them about it,” said Polis in a recent interview.

Activists, artists, businessmen, doctors, poets, politicians, rabbis, teachers, and writers. What an amazing Seder table it would be to have these men around it. In reality, there probably is not a room big enough to hold them and their egos, agendas and attitudes. But they all exemplified Jewish values in a gay context of giving back to the community and working to make the world a better place.

Honorable mention – A few more of my favorite gay, Jewish playwrights and theatre composers: Howard Ashman, Jon Robin Baitz, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Busch, Fred Ebb, William Finn, Richard Greenberg, Lorenz Hart, Moss Hart, Jerry Herman, William Hoffman, Moisés Kaufman, Arthur Laurents, Craig Lucas, Paul Rudnick, Marc Shaiman, Stephen Sondheim.

[A list of some prominent LGBT Jews.]