Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America

Mass, Lawrence D. "Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America". Cassell, 1994 Looking Within Amos Lassen and Literary Pride Yes, dear readers, I am on my Jewish bent again but there are reasons for that. Let me just say this--being Jewish and gay can be a double blessing or a double hardship, depending on how you choose to look at it. But then the same is true for being gay and anything so I ask that if you have problems with my Jewish writings, substitute the word(s) of your choice--"Catholic", "Pentecostal", "Irish", "African American"--they all fit. Hardships and blessings are the same for all people. It just happens that I am Jewish and it is what works for me. It also works for Dr. Lawrence Mass and he says so much that we can all identify with that it is worth looking at his book. Twenty something years ago, Mass was a young physician, gay activist and writer living in New York City. In his walls were five pictures of Richard Wagner, one of the most notorious of Jew haters of all time. While Mass was doing research on what was later to become the first feature article to be written on what was to become an epidemic, AIDS, Mass was forced to confront his own mortality as well as the his first confrontation with anti-Semitism. When the spread of AIDS forced all gay male adults to think about the meaning of life, Mass found it more necessary than ever before to face the reality that his own life had been victim of an internalized anti-Semitism, a self-hatred even while he was coming to terms of his own identity as a gay male. His "Confessions" are autobiographical essays in which he examines his own life and the life of others as they affect his own. He looks at politics and religion, he looks at world issues and world personalities and he looks at the arts and at AIDS. And he does all of this against the background of hatred for the Jewish people and in doing so he begins his own quest for identity and understanding. What he discovered was not pretty but very real. His book is a journal of self discovery--of understanding himself and the world in which he lived and it is deep, profound and extremely meaningful, I read this book years ago and as I reread it now, I find so much that I have missed. Maybe because before I moved to Arkansas I lived in a different world. In New Orleans, I did not feel self-hate and in Israel there was no ant-Semitism but there were once strong anti-gay feelings. I realized it was all a matter of self-acceptance and Mass gives the tools to achieve that end. "Confessions" is a very brave book but it also is a bit edgy. It is very personal and I have to admire Mass for using his own life to tell us about ourselves. He writes about being a double minority that has for so long had to be invisible. I did find a danger here however--after reading the book, one can either connect or reconnect with humanity or disregard it altogether. In many cases our history has been a history of hatred. The