Anonymous asked:

heya, i just found your blog, and it's awesome! i was wondering if i could ask a question. see, i'm a jew living in an orthodox household, & unfortunately, was raised to be homophobic, and to believe that being gay is against the torah. i realized about a year and a half ago that i'm bi, and honestly, sometimes i kind of feel guilty for being bi, due to how i was raised. i was wondering, do you have any sources or anything that could assure me it's not bad for me like the same gender? thank you!

Hey anon!

It took me a long time to answer this because I wanted to reach out to queer Orthodox people I knew first to see what they said, because I thought their voices might be more helpful than mine.

As I probably should have expected, they had a lot of different answers. The key point they all made, though, is this: nowhere in the Torah is attraction prohibited. It’s that simple. Nowhere in the Torah is attraction prohibited. If someone is trying to tell you that it’s bad for you to like the same gender, they don’t have anything close to a foot to stand on. (Also, I will fight them for you.)

In terms of further discussion - for example, saying attraction is okay works, but people tend to feel the need to express sexuality - I would recommend talking to people one-on-one. There are a lot of answers that speak to different people. On tumblr, a few people offered to talk to you over private-message, whose blogs I can tell you if you message me and I can connect you to other people as well off tumblr. (I won’t give anyone else your information, if you’re worried about that.)

One last thing: being queer and Orthodox can be hard and lonely. I don’t like that that’s the case, and I hope that will change over my lifetime. I just… hope that you know that, no matter what, there are frum people who will fight for you, who will accept you without a second thought, who will share your simchas, no matter what your gender is and what gender you love.