Queer Jewish love is beautiful. Queer Jewish love is healing and holy and creates wholeness. Queer Jewish love is sunlight shining through the cracks, it is divine, it is right.
We deserve to feel it. It is not our yetzer hara, it is not from our animal soul. It is pure and holy and healing and it is from our neshama. It is not a challenge to be overcome, it is a gift from Hashem. It is not something to hide, it is something to celebrate.
Queer Jews deserve to not only be in Jewish communities — all Jewish communities — but we deserve to be in them proudly, as ourselves. We deserve to lead them. To counsel them and pasken for them.
And we deserve to do that while experiencing queer Jewish love. We deserve to have our beauty seen, our scholarship acknowledged, our capacity to lead recognized. We deserve to have our contributions to the Jewish community valued.
Our love does not diminish us, it uplifts us. It should not disqualify us, it informs us. We are beautiful, scholarly, and deserving. Not in spite of our love, but because of it.
Some shots from Instagram page in tribute of Steve Ett (they can all be found here)
The first is from slides from when Beastie Boys & Run-DMC played with Aerosmith! There are reels on the Instagram feed that show more- went too fast to capture them all.
Beastie Boys in Montreux, credit Starstock/Photoshot
These are by Steve Douglass (thx @rhyme-the-rhyme-well ), taken in Belgium, May 1987