"Come shopping," said the SMS I got early in the evening from my friend Fabulousina, just as I was about to get into bed with a hot gas station attendant. The dilemma, as you can see, was essential: On one hand, a shopping spree with an expert, and on the other, a sexual session with a guy who specializes in filling people up.
When I finally arrived to the mall, after 30 long minutes, Fabulousina's male hormones were on the edge. "I've been waiting for five seconds!" he yelled as we made our way to the nearest Castro branch. I love malls, and my friends frequently laugh at my capitalist habits. "You never buy a thing, why do you like it so much?" Fabulousina asked. "I have no idea," I answered and dragged him to the piercing shop.
Hours later, I was aching from pain in my right side, and had a hard time recovering from Fabulousina remarks on my new nipple piercing. Fabulousina was showing his lack of sympathy when he spotted a group of Ultra-Orthodox men around the corner. Sadly, I found myself being dragged to their improvised stand.
Haredi encounter
"Hello boys!" a nice haredi approached us.
"Hello nice haredi," Fabulousina grinned.
"Would you like to put Tefilin?"
"What for?" Fabulousina acted like a good Jew.
"It's an important mitzvah!" the haredi replied.
"Are we going to go heaven?" Fabulousina said. I saw it coming, but the poor haredi, who never met Fabulousina before, couldn't even imagine what's coming.
"It will open the heaven's gates for you," he promised confidently.
"Even if we're gay?" Fabulousina said.
Silence.
We left.
When I asked him why he did it, Fabulousina explained: "What do you mean? If he would've told me that god is willing to accept me, I would put on Tefilin. But god's angels, whom landed in Tel Aviv wearing black clothes, couldn't even answer the question."
Suddenly, I felt a weird discomfort. It's not that I need some divine faith or approvals for who I really am. It's that to many people can't look me in the eyes because of it. It was because no one is trying to bridge the gap that began thousands of years ago and is no relevant to our life today.
People, in general, are disturbed by moral problems. Not their own, of course, but others. For that reason, one biblical sentence prohibiting male-male sex validated the murder attempt during the gay parade in Jerusalem last year.
Few months ago I asked Yonatan, my religious gay friend, how he combines between his deep faith in God and his even deeper affection to men. "It's very simple," he answered. "If god didn't want gays to exist he wouldn't have created them. But since we all were made in god's shape, apparently god himself has a little gay part in him."