Growing up queer in a Hasidic Jewish community, Sara Glass shares her journey of survival
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As 19-year-old Sara Glass sat across from a stranger in a hotel lobby in downtown Manhattan, she knew the rest of her life would be decided for her.
Both raised in the Orthodox Gur sect of Hasidic Judaism, the pair had been set up by a matchmaker, who assessed their piety, financial assets and family standing. The meeting was almost entirely scripted and Glass, who was called Malka then, had no say in the matter.
“We were sitting at this little bench — he in a black fur hat and black suit, me in a long dress, very little makeup, low heels — across from each other,” she recalls.
“I was taught by my teachers to order Diet Sprite because then if you spill it, it won’t stain. He was taught to tip the valet. We had these rules about how to behave.
“If you looked around the hotel lobby, there were 10 other couples that looked just as awkward and stilted as we did, ordering the same drinks.”
Glass’ prospective husband, Yossi, was 26 and considered an ageing bachelor. Their courtship comprised six awkward dates in that same lobby.
“We had never touched. We had never lived together. We didn’t really even know that much about each other,” Glass says.
“But he proposed and I said yes.”
Glass knew that marriage meant she would be expected to play the part of the obedient wife, bearing children and honouring God as per her orthodox teachings.
She also knew it meant burying the part of herself she feared most: her attraction to women.
Glass — who has just published a memoir called Kissing Girls on Shabbat — describes her upbringing in her Hasidic community in Brooklyn in the 90s as like “a black and white film from the early 1900s”.
“Everything in the world was banned … We couldn’t watch TV or movies, we didn’t have any screens in our home, we couldn’t listen to pop music, anything that would involve engaging with the secular world.”
As a teenager, Glass would rebel in small ways, like painting her toenails or wearing thigh-high socks instead of full-length stockings.
But at 15, she fell in love with a girl and knew it was an unforgivable transgression.
“I realised that that would be a battle I would have to fight really, really hard in order to overcome,” she says.
“And I thought I would be able to, that it was a test from God and I could control the desire.”
But though she “prayed, repented, fasted”, she fell in love with another girl at 19.
Content retrieved from: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-06/queer-ultra-orthodox-hasidic-judaism/105360072.
