‘When I came out 40 years ago, homophobia was the norm’

I had, figuratively speaking, put on some ruby red slippers, but this was a yellow brick road for which there was no map. Back then, there were no openly gay British Jewish communal figures. I knew of one British playwright, Martin Sherman, who had penned Bent, a play about LGBT+ persecution by the Nazis that featured a Jewish gay character. But there had not yet been an openly LGBT+ rabbi, and Colin had not yet kissed Barry in EastEnders. I was the first person in any elected or professional role in the Jewish community to publicly come out.

And of course there was HIV. That summer the tabloids had been full of pictures of an emaciated and very ill heartthrob movie star and TV legend, Rock Hudson. He was dying of AIDS, the so-called “gay plague”.

On a family holiday to Israel in 1980[Missing Credit]At the market in Israel, in 1980[Missing Credit]

This was a time when homophobia was the norm; when the police would charge people for kissing in public and lure gay men into honeytraps.

This was not just prejudice; it was sub-humanisation of gays and lesbians. In 1987, while I was working in Parliament, Margaret Thatcher’s government accepted into the Local Government Bill an amendment banning local authorities from promoting the “pretended” family relationships of homosexuals. The Tories argued that lesbians and gay men were incapable of forming true families. Any “pretence” by homosexuals represented a danger to public health and to British values; language straight from Germany in the 1930s voiced by British parliamentarians.

I was asked by Stonewall’s predecessor, OLGA (Organisation for Lesbian and Gay Action), to lead the lobby of non-Labour MPs and Peers. Although hundreds of thousands of LGBT people and their allies participated in the biggest LGBT+ rights campaign in British history, we failed and Section 28 was passed.

Meanwhile, I knew dozens of my friends in their 20s who died because of HIV/AIDS over the ten or so years before a combination treatment had an impact. Whilst some families valued

friends and lovers, that was not always the case. As depicted in Channel 4’s It’s A Sin, often, out of stigma, fear and prejudice, and after years of estrangement, bereaved parents would cut all access to the person’s chosen family of LGBT+ loved ones and friends.

In America and then in the UK, families of choice would create a memorial on a cloth panel. Each one celebrated how an individual lived and who they were, not what caused their death. Collectively, they became known as the AIDS Quilt.

This June, for the first time in over 20 years, the UK AIDS Quilt was put on public display in London, filling the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. For five days, it became the ersatz burial grounds for a lost generation. It included Stars of David and Hebrew names, often sewn by non-Jews. May all their memories be as blessings.

In the 1990s, some of us chose to stand up publicly and demand respect for diversity in the British Jewish and LGBT+ communities. This was another first. At the forefront was the Jewish Lesbian and Gay Helpline (JLGH), together with the first openly LGBTQ+ people to be ordained rabbis in the UK, Sheila Shulman and Eli Tikvah Sarah, alongside many other Jewish LGBT+ individuals and allies (some senior professionals, lay leaders, and rabbis). Rabbi Lionel Blue became a much-loved and openly gay religious broadcaster.

By 1993, alongside the oldest Jewish LGBT+ group in the world and the helpline, we also had a youth group, Hineinu, and Rabbi Shulman’s Beit Klal Yisrael synagogue, both set up by people intent on building communities and exploring their own connection to Jewish life.

We were part of an international movement linking LGBTQ+ Jewish organisations across the globe, the first of which London’s Jewish Gay Group (now Jewish LGBT+ Group) in the 1970s.

Across Europe, North America, and Israel, the taboos were being challenged, Jewish communities were talking, and making steps between to integrate  their lesbian and gay brothers and sisters into communal life. And Israel was leading the pack. 

In Britain, the decade had started with the JLGH being banned from a cross-community walk for Jewish charities in Hyde Park and, later, with this newspaper’s first use of the G-word in a headline: “Youth to Chief lift gay ban”.

By the end of the decade,  the late Lord Sacks, then Chief Rabbi, had made plain that homophobia was a sin. At a Holocaust Memorial Day  ceremony, he declared: “It is not just for Jews to fight antisemitism or Muslims to fight Islamophobia or gay men to fight homophobia; we all have to fight these hatreds together.” I am fairly sure no other non-Jewish British religious leader has ever said anything of the like.

I am proud of the steps we have taken inside and outside the Jewish community, but work remains. There are today Jewish children growing up learning to hate themselves, and Jewish LGBTQ+ people who are threatened into forced marriages. There are still Jews who treat LGBTQ+ people as other.

With Mo Mujahiid, a trustee of the LGBT+ Muslim charity Imaan and Rabbi Mark Solomon, at London Pride, in 2012[Missing Credit]

These days, Jewish LGBT+ charity Keshet UK is doing a lot to combat these things, helped by Chief Rabbi Mirvis who has endorsed their guide for addressing homophobic and transphobic bullying in Jewish schools.

Far from being a threat, as Margaret Thatcher and then Chief Rabbi Lord Jakobovits would have had us believe, this work strengthens the Jewish family and community.

For my part, I continue to believe that one should be the world one wants to create. And it is my view that the changes we have seen in the Jewish world and wider society came from ethical transgression, rather than by imposing new orthodoxies, which, to my mind, suffocate diversity of thought and identity.

What’s more, our experience as Jews and as Jewish LGBTQ+ people after October 7 has made plain just what a gesher tzar meod (a very narrow bridge) the world is.

Today, Jewish LGBT+ people feel unsafe as Jews at public events such as Pride or Eurovision in LGBT+ venues. Decent, gentle trans men and women who I have known decades, now fear going out in case they need to use a public bathroom.

The world has become a place where Jews and trans people are othered almost without thought.

The writer at London Pride with Malcolm Torz, a friend he met at BBYO[Missing Credit]

Equally, gender-critical Jewish LGB people, especially older lesbians, say they feel sidelined.

To which I say, in part, we are ever a fractious people. I have not forgotten that in 1987, at the first world LGBTQ+ Jewish conference hosted by Sjalhomo Amsterdam, there were no fewer than six different Shabbat morning services! (Although we did, thank heavens, all come together for kiddish).

As Jews, we know from the seder that liberation is both a personal and collective memory. I think the Jewish approach should be to foster intergenerational LGBTQ+ understanding and respect  within our own community, and strive for language and practice that respects all. For example, for the younger generations, the word “queer” is both a personal descriptor and a convenient umbrella term, and I celebrate this. But there are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people who came out in the Sixties and later who do not like the word “queer”.   From where they’re sitting, the enormous sacrifices they made for visibility and social change, can feel overwritten and disrespected.

Pride is much more than a party. Its purpose is also to raise awareness of injustice, to turn internalised shame around, to feel strong, empowered, and celebrate diversity. It is also a time for understanding the past, for honouring memory, and for guarding against complacency.

So how Jewish LGBTQ+ people organise collectively hereon? Maybe we need to explore new ways of to bringing established groups together. This is key to addressing our presence at Pride in London.

While I too felt unsafe individually going to an LGBTQ+ venue for Eurovision, Pride is different, surely. There must be a certain safety in numbers, in organising ourselves with assistance from CST and London Jewish Forum with its connections to the Mayor and Deputy Mayors.

And let’s not forget that antisemitism among a vocal minority of the LGBT+ community is not a new phenomenon and has been faced down before, most notably in the 1990s.

This year there were a record number of Pride Shabbats and other Pride events hosted by synagogues and Jewish organisations. For many, Jewish LGBTQ+ life is now in the mainstream. Let us give thanks for the changes in just over one generation.

Never ask permission to be different. Still as true now as it was 40 years ago.

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Jack Gilbert is a member of the Steering Group of London Jewish Forum, and Chair of the Met’s LGBT+ Independent Advisory Group