Click on the following videos to listen to interview excerpts. To enable Closed Captioning, please click on “CC” on bottom right corner of each video.
Alan Herbert Z”L: A Jewish gay man living with HIV becomes AIDS Vancouver’s Board Chair. Alan reflects back on his time at AIDS Vancouver in this video clip (Courtesy of AIDS Vancouver)
Jaye Beer: “Trans Day of Visibility is so important because visibility saves lives… I don’t know if I could have figured out how to come out… without the rise of trans visibilty”
Ann Daskal: ”I feel more accepted and safer and I hope others with the same sexual and orientation gender minorities do too”
David Keselman: “I’m sitting here… and I have absolutely zero issues telling people that I’m gay versus if I think 30 years ago”
Syd Lapan: “They’ve brought me back into my heritage, my roots… it’s not possible to separate out being Jewish and being a lesbian”
Susan Dempsey: “I don’t think there’s much fear anymore… the LGBTQ community has really become part of the mainstream Jewish community”
Hope Forstenzer: “makes me feel a tremendous amount of relief… but also a case of nostalgia kind of sadness… my life would have been so different if I were 10 years younger”
Karen Newmoon: ”I am aware that so many people have struggled far more than I have… for me, coming out as a dyke, was ‘I don’t have to pretend to be straight anymore?’ Hooray! ”
Jono Lerner: “there was really never a time that I was dating… and marriage wasn’t an option… but the generation before me didn’t experience that… and living through the AIDS crisis, they set the groundwork to make what I experienced possible”
Nancy Rosenblum: “being a lesbian kind of seems like it’s not a thing anymore… I hope people of your generation and younger know what lesbians and know what feminists went through so they could have what they have now”
Jack Huberman: ”there’s been a far greater awareness in the community at-large… no creation of awareness in ‘this’ community as far as gay Jews are concerned”
Marsha Ablowitz: “I’m very happy about it. I have dozens of gay and lesbian friends and we live pretty free lives”
Bayla Greenspoon: “I used to be on the cutting edge of language and gender, gay queer stuff… it just keeps changing and evolving… how I see things now is on a continuum… it’s not binary”
Caryl Dolinko: “There’s opportunities now where there weren’t before. There’s organizations to join… like JQT that have made it okay to be queer and to be Jewish at the same time and celebrate”
Lily Hoenig: ”the trans community is not afforded the same rights as the cis community, and so for me, it means that… I can never really be 100% sure about any situation or space that I go into”
David Steiner: “it’s certainly made life easier I think and the workplace has been easier. I’m at a stage in my life where I like to go to Celebrities and Pumpjack… but I don’t need to do that so much now”
Debby Yaffe: ”trans issues have really changed the social landscape in a lot of ways, the legal landscape, the political landscape… we’re not going to be living the same way in 20 years and really don’t know what’s around the corner”
Dorothy Elias: “there was discrimination that we needed to fight for our rights… I participated in political movements to get spousal benefits, to get marriage rights… for queers to be able to adopt kids”
Lauren Nackman: “I get to be a bit of a mentor to young people… I feel distinctly blessed because… acceptance has been great… being part of marriage campaigns… a number of bills… in marches”
Ira Rogers: “in general, has been a… happy development for me that I have lived to see the world change so radically for the better in just two decades seems unbelievable”
Julie Elizabeth: “I have a lot of internalized self hatred… a little bit more of the Jewish side than the gay side… if there’s no reason to come out on either fence, I won’t”
Marc Gelmon: “never have been so open and so comfortable about talking about my story than I have been in this last couple of years… not only helpful to me, but it’s also helpful to other people”
Glen Phillips: “I’m behind the generation that broke so many barriers… they were really closeted, which I haven’t had to deal with… my generation was really at the forefront… and fortunate enough to be able to get married”
Avital Jarus Hakak: “in 2006, the Supreme Court [in Israel] granted us adoption… and throughout that process… got positive recognition of not only being a queer family… but contributing to society”
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