LGBT Stories

….Annise Parker, the chief executive of LGBTQ Victory Fund, which supports L.G.B.T. candidates and endorsed Mr. Polis, stumped with him during the last month of his campaign. “I have great respect and affection for him but he’s not the most exciting guy in the world,” she said. “He’s very low key; he’s a policy wonk. He just wants to work for the citizens of Colorado. And that clearly came through.”

A candidate’s sexual orientation, she said, was “not a reason for people to vote for you.“

“Someday,” she added, “it won’t be a reason for people to vote against you.”

….

“The reality I think is that 10 years ago this was an issue that detractors could bring up to harm a candidate,” Mr. Reis said. And Mr. Polis has been subjected to slurs and threats; in his first campaign, he received so many pieces of hate mail that he began to tack them up. “It filled up a whole wall,” he said.

More of the attacks were anti-Semitic rather than homophobic, Mr. Polis said — he is also Colorado’s first Jewish governor — and the vitriol diminished over time. But it is not gone. Mr. Polis mentioned the anti-gay sentiment he faced during last year’s campaign: sign defacings in Eagle County, letters to the editor in Walsenburg, homophobic slurs written in shaving cream on his car.

He shrugged it off. “It just looked out of touch and weird and it didn’t cost any votes,” he said. “People have said far worse in politics.”

But the cookbook was Susan Unger’s brainchild. “I was a young adult living in San Francisco in the 80’s, and the HIV epidemic was really coming at us full force and I wanted to do something….Had the AIDs crisis not been going on, I’m not sure I would have thought of the idea,” Unger said.

From start to finish, the project took about 12-18 months. The process involved queer members reaching out to the families they had been alienated from, for traditional family recipes to fill the cookbook. “The project provided a way for young people to reach out to their parents and grandparents,” Unger told me.

The Sha’ar Zahav congregation wanted to do more than just brunches. “The cookbook gave us a sense we were doing something,” said Ogus. Three dollars from every purchase of the cookbook went to the Food Bank of the San Francisco AIDs Foundation. A total of $13,000 went to the San Francisco Food Bank (about 51,607.28 in today’s dollars).

Read more: https://forward.com/life/406937/during-the-aids-crisis-this-gay-jewish-cookbook-kept-a-community-together/

Skir recalls meeting a friend of his, a former yeshiva student from the Lubavitcher Hasidic community, whom he had persuaded to join them:

“Two weeks ago, I had said to him, ‘You can cure yourself. In a day, a minute, a second, with three words, with six. I’m-not-sick—three words. Three words more: I-love-myself.’ And now he’s beside me (magic!) though he told me two weeks ago that he couldn’t, just couldn’t, come out in the open. And now he can and he is SO happy. He’s clutching his book of poems (Anna Akhmatova, translated), marching along. Alone now, but not for long. Now we are together.”

It’s almost Hanukkah time! Autostraddle has put together some lovely suggestions on how to celebrate and feel included this year. 

P.S. We’ve got some pretty sweet rainbow Hanukkah menorahs and cool gifts available in our Museum shop.