It’s about 4 a.m., and I’m in what feels like an apocalypse. Everyone is in their pajamas, crowded around a television. Netanyahu is making his “special announcement.” Caitlyn Jenner is sipping Baron Herzog in the InterContinental mamad (bomb shelter). Twelve hours from now, the trip I had spent months looking forward to will come to an abrupt end. Little did I know that I’d be escaping Israel through a Muslim country.
A week earlier, none of this seemed possible.
I came to Israel for my sixth visit to take part in a Pride Solidarity Mission with Jewish Federations of North America. One hundred queer Jews from different walks of life came together to experience LGBTQ+ life in Israel — the only country in the Middle East with a Pride parade and broad legal protections for LGBTQ+ people. It was an experience I’ll never forget. I made incredible memories with old and new friends, and for one week, I never felt like I had to check any part of my identity at the door.
The mission ended on Thursday evening with the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen from the rooftop of the Sheraton. It was a moment of pure joy and pride in who I am and everything that had brought me there. The next morning was supposed to be my first Pride in Israel, something I’d dreamed about for years. After that, I was planning to spend another month exploring the country.
Instead, I woke up to war.
What sounded like an AMBER alert crashed in at 3:30 am.
“I swear if it’s the Houthis I’m going to scream.”
I picked up my phone, half-asleep. “Please stay tuned for a special announcement.”
Wait, that’s different.
The sirens immediately start blaring.
I rushed out of my room, headed to the stairwell, and made my way down to the mamad. Hotel guests were already gathered there, not knowing what was going on.
I got a call from my mom.
“There was an explosion in Iran,” she disclosed.
“Was it Israel or the U.S.?”
“They don’t know yet.”
Not knowing the severity, I dismissively said, “This’ll blow over in a few hours.”
Twelve hours later, Pride had been canceled. The Israeli airspace was closed, and all I could do was wait it out.
I quickly packed up and made my way to a friend’s apartment, where I was staying. That soon changed when I moved to her family’s house south of Tel Aviv because the ancient apartment building didn’t have a bomb shelter. The week and a half that followed was among the most restless, anxiety-ridden periods of my life. Sirens woke us up multiple times a night, not knowing if we would have a house 10 minutes later, let alone whether we’d still be alive. I felt the rattles of the cluster missiles. I had never seen Israelis so scared.
Eventually, evacuation became part of the conversation. Of course, the United States would get us out. We were Americans in an active war zone. Mike Huckabee told us to sign up for rescue. I did, but part of me knew it would take time.
That changed when the U.S. stepped into the war. Suddenly, the idea of waiting to evacuate didn’t feel like the right option. I knew the situation was escalating, and it wasn’t looking good. So I assessed my options. I could either take a cruise to Cyprus by myself or ride a bus with the people from my Pride Mission, who were also stranded, to Jordan and fly home from Amman. I knew the journey through Cyprus would take longer, so I decided to exit through Jordan.
A good friend of mine, a transgender woman, took the cruise. I asked her why she didn’t just come with us.
“You can hide. I can’t.”
That sentence has stayed with me ever since.
I cried on the way to the meeting point. My friend and her mom dropped me off, and I’d never felt more cared for than in that moment. I felt guilty leaving, which confused me. Shouldn’t I be happy to go home to physical safety?
I felt safer in an active war zone than I did in the streets of New York.
A place and a people I absolutely love were in turmoil, and I was picking up and leaving for the comfort of home. Why wasn’t I staying to fight alongside them?
Since 2021, I’d felt a massive shift in New York and the U.S. at large when it came to Jewish safety. Every day, I choose to tell people I’m Jewish. I could have easily taken off my Star of David necklace or tucked it away on the subway, but I willingly accepted the potential consequences. If I hid who I am, assimilated to people’s hatred and expectations, and cowered in shame, who would I be? How would the world change?
In Israel, I was in the only Jewish-majority state in the world. Most people around me were Jewish, so the antisemitism I experienced came from outside agitators. When Iran launched a cluster bomb, the entire country was affected. Everyone around me, whether they were Jewish, non-Jewish, Israeli, or non-Israeli, was living through the same crisis. There was a collective trauma, a shared sense of lived experience. Everyone knew what they were in for and what was happening. To me, that was powerful. I’d rather know what might kill me in a place where I didn’t have to hide than play a guessing game of whether I’d get pushed on the subway tracks simply for being visibly Jewish.
My 36-hour trip home began. I hopped in a cab to Jerusalem, journeyed through Judea and Samaria (commonly known as the West Bank), and made my way to the Allenby Bridge, just outside Jericho.
About halfway through the hour-long bus ride, someone made an announcement: “If you didn’t leave your Judaica behind in Israel, it might be confiscated at the border.”
I immediately went into panic mode.
I turned to a friend.
“I thought they told us to just shove it in our bags? What do they mean?”
“Judaica technically isn’t illegal in Jordan, but Jordanian border patrol has been confiscating tefillin recently.”
“But why?”
“Safety and security concerns.”
Earlier that morning, I hid my Star of David necklace in my backpack.
My mom had given it to me years ago. In that moment, nothing else mattered. They could take my money, my clothes, my phone, anything. But not my Magen David.
“Also, please keep a low profile. No mention of Pride, being gay, or Grindr. Keep it locked. You are going back home from Israel. Nothing more, nothing less.”
What shocked me came next.
“Ironically, it’s legal to be gay in Jordan.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, some obscure British Mandate law they never got rid of.”
That conversation stayed with me long after I got home. A year later, while reflecting on that border crossing, I decided to read the Jordanian Penal Code for myself.
Consensual same-sex relationships between adults have been legal in Jordan since 1951. But legality isn’t the same thing as protection. LGBTQ+ Jordanians still lack comprehensive anti-discrimination protections or legal recognition of same-sex relationships, and many continue to face significant social stigma.
That distinction, between something being technically legal and actually feeling safe, became the most important thing I learned from the trip.
We reached the border crossing, and I immediately shoved my necklace in my suitcase and hoped for the best.
The next two hours were among the most excruciating of the trip. We waited, along with many other tourists, under a metal awning in the 100-degree blazing sun to get through immigration. By around 5 p.m., we made it through the border with nothing confiscated.
We got on another bus with a Jordanian guide and drove about an hour to Amman, Jordan’s capital. We had dinner at this traditional Jordanian restaurant. At dinner, I found myself shushing people more than once — not because they were doing anything wrong, but because I didn’t know who might overhear the wrong conversation.
To be clear, nothing about the people I met in Jordan made me feel unsafe. My unease came from entering a legal and social environment where, if something did happen, I couldn’t rely on the same protections I’d taken for granted elsewhere.
That’s when the distinction between legality and protection stopped being theoretical.
Jordan doesn’t criminalize consensual same-sex intimacy, but LGBTQ+ Jordanians still lack comprehensive legal protections and continue to face widespread discrimination and social stigma. The message isn’t “don’t be gay.” It’s “don’t let anyone know.”
At King Hussein International Airport, I wasn’t expecting another security check before I could even check in. My stomach dropped when I was pulled aside. I thought they were going to inspect my luggage containing my Magen David, but they ended up searching my backpack, which had a forgotten bag of shekels. At that point, they could have all the shekels they wanted. All I cared about was keeping my necklace and getting on that plane. Soon, I boarded my flight to Abu Dhabi that would connect me to New York. For the first time in over 12 hours, I felt relieved.
A year later, I look back on this experience with a lot more knowledge, strength, and compassion.
Nothing happened to my group or me in Jordan.
And that’s exactly the point.
Before I even crossed the border, I was told to hide parts of myself because I couldn’t rely on the protections I had taken for granted elsewhere if something went wrong.
Sometimes we hide to survive.
As we close out Pride Month, I think about perspective. In the U.S., for the most part, we are afforded freedoms and liberties to be whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. Israel afforded me those same freedoms. In Jordan, that wasn’t the case.
So then why do so many conversations online flatten the Middle East into a single narrative? Why is Jordan deemed “OK” to be gay when it is quite literally not “safe” to be gay?
Why is Israel so often portrayed as uniquely oppressive toward LGBTQ+ people when, in the region, it remains the only country with broad legal protections, recognition of same-sex marriages performed abroad, and a visible queer public life?
Before last June, LGBTQ+ rights were largely an abstract political discussion for me. During those few days evacuating through Jordan, they became deeply personal.
Pride isn’t just about the freedom to celebrate who you are. Sometimes it’s about realizing where you can no longer feel free to be that person openly.
The parade never happened.
But the journey home taught me more about Pride than attending it ever could have.
And that realization has stayed with me long after the sirens stopped.
