Note: Apologies for anyone seeing this for the second time. I recently changed servers, and two posts got lost in the process. This was one of them.
First things first: Apologies for being quieter than usual on the blog/social media front lately. Traveling, it turns out, isn’t really conducive to long stretches of time connected to a computer. Even in London, where I had 3G the entire time, my Twitter ended up being fairly neglected. I can’t promise that it’ll get better until I’m back in Oxford, but rest assured that there will be many exciting post-holiday stories to share. Here’s one:
I went to visit my grandparents in Haifa yesterday. The trip itself was fine, mostly with the exception of the train ride, which was a perfect example of the “Israelis having no courtesy” hypothesis I’ve been testing since arriving this weekend. For one, there was nowhere to sit. Literally, there were no seats. Even standing room was hard to come by. I ended up standing in a hallway next to the toilet, which led to every single person who walked by shoving me into a wall. One lady, in protest of the no-seats situation, locked herself in the bathroom and, I shit you not, started screaming at anyone who requested that she vacate the toilet so they could use it for its intended purposes. To describe it as the train journey from hell would be an understatement.
Anyway, during the course of a protracted lunch with my grandparents, I made a number of Hebrew vocabulary mistakes, one of which was particularly problematic.
Me: “Chavera sheli sipra li sheh…” (“My [female] friend told me that…”)
My cousin: “Chavera? Hi mechaka lecha b’Artzot Abrit?” (“Girlfriend? She’s waiting for you in the US?”)
Me: “Lo. Hi lo ha chavera sheli. Hi echad mi ha chaverot.” (“Girlfriend? No, she’s one of my [female] friends.”)
My uncle-in-law: “Yedidot. Ha mila ze yedidot.” (“The word is ‘yedidot.’”)
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the nuances of Hebrew vocabulary and grammar are occasionally lost on me, mostly because I don’t have that many opportunities to use Hebrew outside of my family, and my parents never bother to correct me when I make mistakes. But I still don’t have a clear understanding of the chavera/yedida distinction, except insofar as I used “chavera,” apparently, to tell my family that I have a girlfriend, and when I tried to amend my statement with the use of “yedidot” (the plural form of “yedida”), I sounded like I have many women that I string along simultaneously.
Ultimately, I’m not that concerned about what cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents do or don’t know about me, but it raises a reasonable question, which is: is it ever possible to finish coming out of the closet? A few months ago, I read the hilariously-titled Epistemology of the Closet for my gender theory tutorial, where the author (a heterosexual woman) made the argument that being gay is existing in a perpetual state of open secret, wherein you (collectively) are constantly, whether intentionally or not, closeted to someone. Short of introducing yourself with, “Hi, I’m Yoel, and I’m gay,” to every person you meet, it’s seldom possible to be completely “out.”
The issue is further complicated when I’m with my family in Israel, because I have to factor in generational difference. My grandparents, I suspect, don’t know that I’m gay, mostly because I imagine that my parents haven’t told them. My cousins, however, who I’m friends with on Facebook, probably do know that I’m gay. Has the information trickled upwards to their parents and then to their grandparents as a result of that? Unclear. And so, I’m in a position where I have to worry, when I make a simple vocabulary mistake, that I’m inadvertently putting myself back in the closet with my family, from whom I have nothing to hide.
It’s a problem that, I suspect, won’t be easily resolved. I’m not about to have the formal “I’m gay” talk with my grandparents because I think it’s a stupid conversation to have anyway; but I also don’t want to have to tiptoe around the issue with the “No, I don’t have a girlfriend…” half-truth, either. I thought those days were over when, my freshman year, I came out to my parents. Being in Israel suggests that that’s not really the case.