Whenever one speaks of the strides made towards LGBTQ acceptance, there is an asterisk needed, and I don’t mean the one that sometimes accompanies the acronym as an inclusivity gesture towards additional subcategories. I mean the bit about how these days, it’s no big deal if you’re gay, unless you happen to come from a traditionalist community, in which case yeah, still a whole thing, still a possible source of ostracizing or worse.

It can be tempting, contemplating all this from the perspective of someone who isn’t religious, to say, takes all kinds, and land on a kind of relativist position where you figure, this is what works for this community, who am I to judge? That position becomes harder to sustain when you hear testimony from people who are or were in such environments, and for whom mandatory heterosexual marriage with a mandate to be fruitful and multiply really, really doesn’t work.

Sara Glass is one such person. In her new memoir, Kissing Girls on Shabbat, Glass describes growing up in Brooklyn (with stints in Toronto and Jerusalem) as a member of the Gur Hasidic community—strict even by Hasidic standards—only to realize something about herself that I believe the title makes clear. “All love, except the love of God, was suspect, but one kind of love was singled out for extra damnation: loving someone of your own sex.” Where did this leave Glass, whose exclusive attraction to women was clear to her from a young age?

At 19, Glass was already “terrified of becoming one of those ‘older singles’ I’d heard gossiped about throughout my youth.” In her community, matchmaking that she herself likens to Fiddler on the Roof is the norm, along with an expectation that after ten dates, it’s time to start planning the wedding. She’s in the throes of puppy love with a young woman named Dassa who is not her first girlfriend, but it’s all very covert, and all must stop in a matter of days because there is Yossi and he is from a nice family and “find me a find, catch me a catch” and all that.

When Yossi makes his first appearance, and it’s clear he sees something in Glass, and was also really into gender segregation purity stuff, I wondered if maybe it would turn out that he was inclined like a certain cinematic Yossi, and hoped for her sake that this would be the case. That they could somehow pop out some kids but otherwise keep things companionate and each do their own thing discreetly, on the side.

‘Twas not to be.

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It can be difficult to parse what’s Yossi being a bad husband and what’s merely evidence that this marriage was doomed from the start. “For my 24th birthday,” she writes, “Yossi bought me a toaster oven and a bread machine. It was confirmation of all that I had already known. To him, I was not a woman. I was a vagina who could cook.”

Once he has agreed to her request for a divorce—hard-won, in this world, and in this situation specifically—he calls her therapist to request that Glass sleep with him one last time, since he’s not sure when he will next get to have sex. Men!

Yossi’s complaint when........

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