Closeted Orthodox Jews are more than contradictions in this classic queer documentary

Welcome back to Y2GAY, where we take another look at turn-of-the-millennium queer cinema. This week, a searing story of religious intolerance, and the people who rise above it.

In my hometown’s video store, I always saw Sandi Simcha DuBowski’s Trembling Before G-d featured in the “Gay & Lesbian” section. I never thought to rent it, maybe because I was too young. Maybe because I knew it would be depressing. To be fair, in 2001, the reality of being Orthodox and gay was pretty depressing.

How about we take this to the next level?

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In DuBowski’s film, subjects are shown in shadow; anonymous, guilty portraits recall tales of violence. It’s not a lighthearted romp about people who left the faith and found their community. Some subjects do find their way out of the closet, but the majority remain as they are: closeted, trapped in marriages they hate, forced to forget—or worse, see as sinful—the part of themselves that’s screaming to breathe.

All because of a few lines of scripture.

“I spent 12 years trying to change,” one woman tells us. In a time when gay conversion therapy was not only widely legalized, but the first course of action for Orthodox communities, several methods of “change” are attempted. Men snap themselves with rubber bands when they feel a “homosexual urge” coming on. Yeshiva boys sting themselves with ice cubes at an atonement ceremony for “sexual sins.” Women are forced into marriages early, only to spend the rest of their lives trying to atone for a “sin” they never got a chance to commit. Through it all, they ask: “why aren’t I changing?”

Some of the men and women interviewed know that change isn’t possible. For most, it’s not even desired. But for the people who earnestly see their lives and thoughts as sinful, the failure of these punishments hurts even more. No one stops to consider that being gay could be something God actually wants.

Throughout the documentary, interviewees talk about themselves in terms of contradiction and oxymoron. How can somebody be frum (Orthodox) and gay? One of the few unmasked talking heads, the first openly Orthodox rabbi Steve Greenberg, offers a way to reconcile both identities. Queerness doesn’t happen in spite of the Torah: it’s in the text itself.

“It’s not about God’s control,” he says. “It’s about God’s love.” In the Yeshiva, young men devote themselves to the study of Torah, they argue about the commentaries, pore over minor translation changes and footnotes.

For me, one of the wonderful things about Judaism is that learning and interpretation are essential parts of worship. We’re meant to pick apart the text, to argue different theories and attempt fresh understandings of scripture. Certain lines, however, won’t be crossed by even the most curious student. That’s when homophobia becomes more about the current social mores than anything God might or might not have said however many thousands of years ago.

It’s also the way all these people were hurt so badly. For Orthodox Jews who practice strict adherence to Talmudic law, there is no room for interpretation when it comes to being gay.

At least, that was true in 2001. Today, we have figures like Abby Chava Stein, a trans woman and ordained Orthodox rabbi who wrote about her experiences in 2019’s Becoming Eve. We got an erotic look into the Orthodox world of closeted lesbians in 2017’s Disobedience. We know that being queer and Orthodox isn’t a contradiction. But we’ve also seen how hard it is to be both at once, even at this late date.

“Many frum gay people are badly damaged,” we’re told. One young British man gets kicked out of his yeshiva for being gay. He runs away from his community and finds his queer chosen family, eventually coming to understand his queerness as a “chesed,” a gift translated as “love in action.” But he’s still full of doubts. He wonders: if he hadn’t left the yeshiva, would he have become HIV positive? “I’m ill and I’m dying,” he says, “but Ha Shem has given me good people around me. He’s given me a soul.”

In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Yentl The Yeshiva Boy, the title trans character is brought up by their learned father to learn Torah, a dispensation reserved only for men. When Yentl is curious about why their father broke the rules in this way, he tells his child that he believes they have a masculine soul. “Even God makes mistakes,” he says. There is, and has always been, a path toward understanding gay and trans identity within Jewish scripture and religion. You just have to find it, as the best writers and artists always do.

For Greenberg, it’s also in the text. “It’s not Judaism if it’s not responsive to the human condition,” he says. God wants to learn about himself through us, just as we want to learn about him through the world around us, he believes. Being queer is part of that world, not an abberation placed in us by the Devil. Some rabbis even agree. But enough, in 2001, can’t see it that way. It’s the same today, though we’re hopefully making progress.

Watching Trembling Before G-d, I wondered what would happen if the film had been made today. Would the interviewees still have to speak under cover of darkness? Would the loving lesbian couple let us see their faces when they cry? I honestly don’t know enough about the Orthodox world to be sure.

I just hope some of these people have found the light.

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