A few weeks into her freshman year at Oberlin College, 19-year-old Rebekah Levin developed a crush on a woman about 10 years older.
“I was crushed out on someone,” says Levin, now 52. She had never dated anyone, boy or girl, as a student at Oak Park and River Forest High School.
“It took me by surprise and my response was, ‘Oh, my gosh, I guess I’m lesbian.’ It wasn’t a gradual process of coming to know it. It was all of a sudden. I was attracted to somebody very strongly and I realized I was lesbian.”
At the time, she was at home in Oak Park on a fall break. She couldn’t wait to tell her folks. “I remember being just really very excited that I had discovered this, this component of myself – this part of myself that I had no idea was there.” She wasn’t nervous.
“The next day, I called my parents in to talk,” Levin recalled one recent afternoon, detailing the story in the living room of the Oak Park home she shares with her partner, Sophie Kaluziak, and their two teenagers.
“My parents worked at a place called the National Institute for Human Relationships and they did a lot of work in the area of human sexuality,” Levin says. “I had met my first gay people through them, so I had learned from them that it didn’t matter what the gender of the person was: It was the quality of the relationship.”
Upon hearing the news, her father, a psychologist, said, Mazel tov – Yiddish for congratulations. Her mother was supportive, too, but restrained:
“Now that your father has said Mazel tov, let’s be grounded here. Oak Park is not Oberlin. You’ve got to be careful, because people are not going to react to you necessarily in a positive way,” Levin recalls her mother saying. This surprised her.
“On some level they were fine with it, but I think they still would have liked to have the daughter who got married to the nice Jewish boy and lived, you know, the traditional life.”
Levin wound up giving her parents the news separately because both weren’t around when she called them over to talk. “They told me if I ever have something like this to say again, please tell us together.”
Coming out for parents
When a child comes out, it’s also a coming out for the parents, Levin noted.
“It was difficult and took them a fair number of years to work through it: all the implications of what do their friends, what do their colleagues, what do their associates think about them as parents of a lesbian.”
Levin quickly came out to other people. She told her three brothers. It was no big deal.
Her openness became a family matter when she was in graduate school and living at home. “For the first few years it was fine, but once it looked to my parents like I was really going to continue to be involved with women … I had to leave,” Levin recalled.
She went off to Israel for an internship and to be with a woman she had met when her father brought her to the U.S. to study. Levin spent about two years in Israel.
“You’re out in Israel in a far more subdued way and a far more protected way than you’re out here,” Levin says. “Everyone I worked with knew that I was a lesbian, but my partner and I were very discreet … it was taboo to be a lesbian or gay person in Israel.”
Back in Oak Park, Levin could be open again. She joined Lavender Bouquet, a lesbian social group based in Oak Park. It was from this group that in 1989 the men organizing a local gay activist group tapped Levin to attend a planning meeting. She was one among six women who joined the ranks of the 17 founding members of OPALGA (Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association). Levin became the influential group’s first female co-chair.
Coming out as parents
Through Lavender Bouquet, Levin also met Kaluziak. They’ve been together for 20 years. According to the registry that OPALGA fought so hard to establish, they’re domestic partners in Oak Park.
They also are the parents of two teenagers, Ben and Ari, whom Levin gave birth to and Kalusiak adopted. As the kids’ two moms, Levin and Kalusiak have had to let a wider circle of people know about their couplehood. “When you’re a parent, you have to come out right away, and in a very deliberate way, from the get-go,” Levin says.
“We both went to the first day of school,” Levin says. “We both went to orientations for everything. Everyone was absolutely fine and extremely supportive. We never had anyone treat us inappropriately or the kids inappropriately.”
They told their children’s teachers that if they had any concerns, or ever wanted to talk to them, they were open to talking about anything. Levin says other Irving parents made a point to tell them how happy they were that she and Kalusiak were part of their circle.
“We also learned that the way we portray ourselves, the way we carry ourselves, the way we deal with our own identity, is the guide for everybody else as to how they’re going to deal with us,” Levin says.
In her work life, Levin is a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Having pulled back from OPALGA when she became a mom, Levin more recently took on another activist role: She’s a founder of the Oak Park-based group Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine. Among the speakers the group brought to Oak Park for a peace walk in May were Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“For me, it was easier to come out as a lesbian than it was as a Jew working on human rights issues for Palestinians,” says Levin, whose mother had worked at West Suburban Temple Har Zion in River Forest. “I lost my religious community. I became a pariah.”
No comparison to the closet.
“Coming out for me was not anything particularly difficult,” Levin says. “It was no big deal.”