NEW
YORK (JTA) — For my bar mitzvah, my parents got me a laptop. For what I searched
for on it, they got me a shrink. CyberSitter informed my computer-savvy parents that their son was searching gay porn.
On the ride to my first therapy session, I stuck my head out the car window wanting to be anywhere else. We caracoled along northern New Jersey’s winding streets to a shoddy home office.
The rabbi turned doctor had me sit in his living room as he lectured on what was and was not natural. The dry scent of gefilte fish filled the ungapatchka house, his decor as convoluted as his arguments. Where there should have been DSMs – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a row of Babylonian Talmuds sat collecting dust.
Every Wednesday when I returned home, I had to wash myself of the sticky experience.
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.
One night, pitching his theory of gay as a phase for the umpteenth time, my shrink let slip that my condition was “not uncommon to boys in our community.” I sat on my excitement, but inside I was a loose spark plug. There were others? I hoped I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought.
In public, not a single feigeleh 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’s 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 – Jewish Intermittent Guilt – my adolescence darkened beneath storm clouds of loneliness.
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.
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 “phase” grew longer. Like a forgotten houseplant, it was ugly. It was something I could not control.
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.
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