ABSTRACT
When it comes to homosexuality and Jewish orthodoxy it is as though rabbis believe that being exposed to gay people and ideas will infect the community and cause its collapse.
The notion of an orthodoxy not keeping up with change gives me a feeling of déjà-vu, because I’m a lesbian psychoanalyst who went into psychoanalytic training in 1991, many years after the American Psychiatric Association had de-pathologized homosexuality.
Based on my own experiences I would encourage orthodox clinicians who treat gay and lesbian orthodox patients to support them in coming out, organizing, and being heard.
I feel sympathetic toward orthodox therapists who are caught between two vastly different paradigms, the orthodox one that proclaims that homosexuality doesn’t exist or is, at best. a pathology, and the “new” psychoanalytic one that recognizes sexual diversity as normal.
In my opinion, gay and lesbian orthodox Jews carry their devotion to God into every sphere of their lives, including the sexual.
Orthodox rabbis and communities need to be familiarized with the fact that Jewish men and women who are gay are committed to their marriages and families in the same way that heterosexual Jews are.
