This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

My brother-in-law’s mother collects photography, and the walls of her Park Avenue apartment seemed to be decorated solely to underscore the event that is about take place. A dark-eyed six year old in a purple parka sits against a tree trunk, clutching her knees to her chest. A woman with David Bowie cheekbones (and a haircut to match) covers one eye in shock. A teenager with pale skin and freckles gapes on as if he has just witnessed the apocalypse.

My three year-old niece is the only one in the room with the metaphorical balls to give voice to the worry expressed in these snap shots, and I’m relieved that someone is pointing out just how bizarre the whole thing is.

“What are they doing to brother?,” she screams before my sister’s best friend whisks her into the other room.

“Brother,” my eight-day-old nephew Simon, is wearing a blue cardigan and what appears to be lace pantaloons. He is sitting on my father’s lap surrounded by everyone in the world that finds him important. He only sees as shapes and shadows if he can see anything at all, and so he has the most peaceful expression of anyone in the room. When the man in the white coat finally disrupts his reverie, it is almost relieving that he’s stopped looking so unspoiled.

My dad has been given the dubious task of holding the baby’s legs up, and the man in the white coat whips off the pantaloons to reveal a disconcertingly erect baby penis. “It is normal!” the man bellows , sheepishly, in a Woody Allen accent so stereotypically, capital-J-Jewish that I had until that moment thought it to only exist in the realm of off-color jokes.

He whips out a pair of forceps and does something very insensitive to a very sensitive part of my nephew. There are tears, for a moment, until the baby is given a Manischewitz-soaked piece of paper towel to suckle on.

But then the positive things happen. He is announced to the room by his new Hebrew name of Chaim Moishe and lofted, Lion King style, to be admired in his new found person-hood to the eyes of his adoring new family. His covenant with God left ironically intact by his recent severing, he joins not just the family in that room, but a rich network of Rosens, Shapiros, Baskins, Alwswangs and a million other surnames across the globe that are linked by a tapestry of religion, culture, overeating and loud-talking that has marked the Jewish experience for millennia.

He’ll be taught by his family, and later by Sunday school teachers, what this culture means. He’ll learn how he got here and who came before him and what rituals and behaviors are normal in the subset he now calls his own. No matter how much he may question this identity, or outright reject it, he can always look around him at his family and see that they are cut from the same Semitic cloth.

He has it easy.

While my experiences coming out as gay were in some ways similar to Simon’s coming out as Jewish — wine is consumed, a man with a beard touches your penis, the general smell and texture of smoked salmon —  there is one main difference that I couldn’t articulate until now. He is born into his new culture under the smiling eyes of a dozen well-wishers. He may have to find his own way in every other aspect of life, but there will be a million unseen hands guiding him towards the ultimate meaning of being part of his storied Jewish heritage.

Me? Just like every other fag out there I had to stumble in the dark with my hands out and my fly down, with a beer in both hands or alone in my room, wishing I was doing when I wasn’t and wishing I wasn’t when I was, just to parcel out a tenth of what it means to be an out gay man in the 21st century. I still don’t know. I have actually vocalized in the past how useful Gay Sunday School would be for me, how nice it would be to go into a sun-dappled room and have a genial octogenarian with bifocals and wattled upper arms tell me about the hard cruise, and how to find gay friends that don’t suck, and explain the story of Stonewall with a hushed reverence usually reserved for the miracle of Hanukkah.

It’s really hard to be gay while just sitting at home on your couch. You have to go out and be gay (whatever that means to you) to have an idea of what culture you’ve actually been born into.

I’d gladly trade another superfluous body part for a lifetime of lessons and a sense of who I’m going to be when I finally grow up.

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