For years, I spent the High Holidays in Fire Island. Beginning in the mid-1920s, this barrier reef about 60 miles from Manhattan has served as a haven for gay New Yorkers. Although it’s a raucous social scene from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the feverish party vibe dissipates by mid-September when Fire Island Jews—gay and …
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I am delighted to share with you, my AJWS friends, that I got married at the end of last year. For many of us, marriage sounds like a common milestone—but it was unthinkable for someone like me in most parts of the United States until 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states …
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As dusk turned to night in Chiang Mai some weeks ago, I felt adrenaline coursing through my body as thousands of people poured onto the streets of this city in northern Thailand for the country’s biggest LGBTQI pride march in a decade. At the same time, my mind was flooded with memories of Pride …
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“You may have heard that Thailand is a paradise for transgender people. We have the beauty queens. The cabaret shows. But you don’t see the negative side of how we’re treated. And I want to make sure my sisters don’t experience what I went through.” It’s a Saturday in central Bangkok, and Jetsada Taesombat, better …
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Naomi had only been volunteering with COMCAVIS Trans, an organization that defends the rights of transgender people in El Salvador, for about a month when she ran into trouble with the law. “Out of economic necessity,” she says, “I had a legal issue that led me to be incarcerated.” But as a trans woman in …
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