Being gay and Jewish: negotiating intersections of ethnic and sexual identities.

Due to the emphasis on 'traditional' gender roles, the 'nuclear family,' procreation and conservative religious values, many gay and lesbian Jews feel a sense of alienation from the Jewish community and develop an ambivalent or conflicted relationship about their own Jewish identity. In addition to the difficulty of homophobia in the Jewish community, gay and lesbian Jews cannot presume full acceptance from the broader queer community, as movements that focus on sustaining a collective identity for an oppressed group sometimes overlook the concerns of sub-groups found within the larger movement. As a result, gay Jews often struggle to find ways to successfully negotiate their ethnic and sexual identities. Based upon in-depth interviews of thirty gay Jewish men in Toronto, this work offers a case-study to empirically explore the varied experiences of these intersecting identities. Recent research on other ethnic minority gays and lesbians tend to simplify this question by suggesting that the minority gay individual will simply choose to prioritize one of these identities while repressing the other. Working within theoretical frameworks that stress more fluid, dynamic and evolving approaches to identity construction (social constructionism and queer theory), this paper underscores the complexity and variability of this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]