My (First) Coming Out
It took all the courage I could muster at age 20 to call Gay Montreal and stammer "I-I think I'm gay" into the phone, then take the bus downtown and purposefully talk about it, face-to-face, with a gay man.
That was my first coming out; there would be four more: at 39 when I reluctantly dropped the "gay" label, at 43 when I married a woman and came out as no-longer-gay to my gay friends, at 50 when the "married" label was snatched away from me, and at 54 when I came out all over again as a gay man.
But the first "coming out" is always the toughest. Here's a version of that story, adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir (which also chronicles my other coming-out stories).
Downtown Montreal's Peel Street, site of the Gay Montreal organization back in 1975. Photographer unknown.
One evening, with my mother and stepfather safely out and my bedroom door firmly shut, I again dialed the number for Gay Montreal. This time, I forced myself to stay on the line.
Good evening, Gay Montreal,” a pleasant male voice answered.
“I-I think I’m gay,” I stammered after saying nothing for what seemed decades but was likely little more than a breath.
Charles was a pro, expertly navigating me through my fears, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone and inviting me in for a counseling session.
“Thank you,” I breathed out in relief.
Next afternoon, freshly showered and looking my twenty-year-old best, I climbed up Peel Street, both frightened and excited by what was waiting for me.
Charles was dark, heavyset and in his late thirties, unkempt in blue jeans and a rumpled white sweatshirt, not at all my PlayGirl fantasy. But then, I wasn’t his. Compassionate and to the point, he looked me up and down and asked, “Are you Jewish?”
Having been born into a generation of Jews with a contemporary knowledge of the Holocaust, family memories of Eastern European pogroms and firsthand experience of anti-Semitism, I couldn’t help but react to Charles’s question with a genetic spark of paranoia. “Is it good for the Jews?” my mother would always ask in response to most world and local events. For her, it generally wasn’t.
Trying to wipe my upbringing from my mind, I nodded.
“Then you’ve got to meet Roy Salonin!” he exclaimed.
I raised my eyebrows.
From an early Naches brochure
“Roy Salonin. He runs a gay Jewish group. It’s called Naches.” He pronounced it NA-kiss. Charles scribbled a phone number on a scrap of paper and shoved it across the desk at me. “Call him,” he insisted.
Next I knew I was back on Peel Street, Charles having already faded into some recess of my past. Cars pushed past me up the steep hill. Crushes of McGill students swallowed me up and spit me out as they rushed to class. I was oblivious to it all. A gay Jewish group? A gay Jewish group? Called Naches? Talk about chutzpah! Naches is a Yiddish word that expresses the joy a parent only gets from children. For a moment, I wondered how much naches I would bring my mother when I told her I was gay. Only for a moment. With my next breath, I felt calmer and more alive than I had felt in months.
A gay Jewish group!
For the next eight years, Naches formed the cornerstone of my gay experience. I attended weekly meetings and became one of the group’s organizers. I wrote and produced its newsletter. I demonstrated with fellow members to protest police raids on gay bars and bathhouses. I wrote provincial and national legislators on behalf of the group to press for equal rights. I manned the Naches booth at the city’s earliest Gay Pride celebrations. I let my name be used in articles in the Montreal Gazette and Canadian Jewish News, then sifted through the resulting answering machine messages — all ugly or obscene.
The hateful comments didn’t matter. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged and was comfortable with who I was. No one was going to take that away from me.
Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir
© 2012, 2013, 2019 Mark David Gerson
• Get your copy of Acts of Surrender today! Look for it in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller, or order here and let me sign copies to you!
A version of this Acts of Surrender excerpt was juried into a 2019 Pride exhibition at Portland’s Multnomah Arts Center. I write about that in Pligrimage: A Fool’s Journey.
In 2023, I was interviewed by a researcher from the Museum of Jewish Montreal about my early experiences with Naches and the Jewish community. The result was Not Going Anywhere, a zine whose title came from a comment I made during the interview: “All these institutions and individuals needed to be reminded that we were out there… and we weren’t going to go anywhere.” This article in The Canadian Jewish News talks more about Naches and the zine.