Six Young, LGBTQ+ Jews Get Real About Identity

As Pride Month comes to an end, we asked six Jews who are also in the LGBTQIA+ community to speak about the interactions among their many identities. It is daunting to describe your identity in a few words, but the people featured below have done so with radical frankness —telling stories of coming out, coming to terms with identity, and joining together as a community, all of which define their lives Jewish, as LGBTQIA+, and at the intersections between the two.

Rochelle, 22

I feel as though being Jewish prepared me for being queer. When I was a small child, I learned how to move through the world with my Jewish identity always present but semi-hidden, and how to gauge when was a safe time to reveal it. I hold my lesbian identity very similarly, though recently I have been struggling to find ways to make both more visible.