Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories Book

For many years, Jewish gay men have often felt isolated from their religious background or have had to remain in the closet, leading many to feel as if they were wandering alone in a spiritual or emotional desert, cut off from both the present and the past, in an exile that was sometimes self-imposed out of fear of rejection or was, more often, actively enjoined by the community. Today, no longer necessarily forced to hide either their sexual or religious identity, Jewish gay men are finding space and acceptance within both the Jewish and gay communities, in addition to creating their own communities that are both queer and Jewish.

The 17 personal essays in FOUND TRIBE offer a type of Midrash, the commentary and interpretations of men who grapple with this question of sex and sexuality, and other parallels and differences between the identities of gay and Jewish: questions of assimilation, of gay activism and the Jewish sense of tikkun olam, of defining oneself and one's family, and much more.

Contains essays by David Bergman, Gabriel Blau, David Ian Cavill, Edward M. Cohen, Rabbi Steve Greenberg, Daniel M. Jaffe, Arnie Kantrowitz, Gabriel Lampert, Andrew Martin, Jesse G. Monteagudo, Julian Padilla, Lev Raphael, Andrew Ramer, Phillip Ritari, David Rosen, Lawrence Schimel, and Jonathan Wald.


About the Author

Lawrence Schimel (born 16 October 1971) is the author or editor of over 50 books, including among others: TWO HEARTS DESIRE: GAY COUPLES ON THEIR LOVE (with Michael Lassell), SWITCH HITTERS: LESBIANS WRITE GAY MALE EROTICA AND GAY MEN WRITE LESBIAN EROTICA (with Carol Queen), THE DRAG QUEEN OF ELFLAND, BOY MEETS BOY, THINGS INVISIBLE TO SEE: LESBIAN AND GAY TALES OF MAGIC REALISM, HIS TONGUE, and one previous collection on Jewish gay themes, KOSHER MEAT, also published by Sherman Asher.

His book PoMoSEXUALS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER AND SEXUALITY (with Carol Queen) won a Lambda Literary Award in 1998, and he has also been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for six other titles. The German edition of his anthology SWITCH HITTERS: LESBIANS WRITE GAY MALE EROTICA AND GAY MEN WRITE LESBIAN EROTICA (with Carol Queen) won the Siegesseuele Best Book of the Year Award. He has also been a finalist for the Firecracker Alternative Book Award (twice), the Small Press Book Award (twice), and the Spectrum Award (twice).

His work has been translated into Basque, Catalan, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish.

For two years he served as co-chair of the Publishing Triangle, the organization of lesbians and gay men in the publishing industry, responsible for National Lesbian and Gay Book Month, BookAIDS (a program which delivers over 40,000 books free to PWAs each year), an annual awards series, and numerous other programs and events.

He is currently the Spain Regional Advisor for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. He has given workshops and lectures at many conferences, such as the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Melbourne Writer's Festival, and at numerous universities, including Princeton University, Yale University, Brown University, Wayne State University, The University of Cádiz, and Rutgers University, among others. Born in New York City, he currently divides his time between New York and Madrid, Spain.

2002 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Spirituality.