Episode 290: Leah Lax

Coming Out Pod

Health & Fitness, Sexuality, Comedy, Mental Health

4.9 • 584 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2024

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Author and librettist Leah Lax ("Not From Here: The Song of America") shares a series of incredible stories in a truly one-of-a-kind episode of the podcast! Leah grew up as a Jewish genderqueer lesbian in Northern Texas, and struggled with the fact that she didn't understand how to "be a woman" in the intuitive way that all of her (straight) friends seemed to. So when she was approached by members of the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community at the age of sixteen, Leah felt "like somebody handed me a bulleted list. And all I had to do was follow it, and...I wasn't marginal anymore at all. I was completely accepted." Leah was matched with a man at eighteen; she had seven children in a ten-year period and spent thirty years with the Hasidim. Leah shares what ultimately made her leave the only community she had ever known, and explains the unlikely path that led to her writing down the life stories of over a hundred American immigrants for a new opera! It's a truly beautiful episode, and a reminder of why, to quote Leah, "we all need to be dangerous."

"Not From Here: The Song of America" comes out on March 28th! To find out all about it (as well as Leah's memoir "Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home"), go to leahlaxauthor.com. And don't forget to preorder on Amazon! You can also follow Leah on Instagram at @LeahLax120, and on Facebook at @LeahLaxAuthor. Lastly, check out therefugemusic.com to hear snippets from Leah's opera!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey y'all. Welcome to Coming Out Pod. Okay, today is Queer Root. Shout out to you. Shout out to you. If your queer root is Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
0:18.8	Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an extremely formative show for many of us.
0:24.9	One of the very first queer female characters ever to be shown on television.
0:32.1	Now, that character was not Faith.
0:34.2	That character was Willow.
0:35.4	But Buffy, known for having a wide variety of characters
0:40.6	for people to have obsessive crushes on. And Faith was like the bad girl of the show. Faith was
0:48.5	played by Eliza, I think it's Dushku. Dushku? I don't know. She famously also played a very like,
0:57.1	how is this character, not queer character, and bring it on.
1:01.1	But yeah, I want to honor her for the work she has done throughout her career
1:06.3	for burgeoning queer women to perhaps find their way.
1:10.9	Shout out to you if she is your queer root.
1:15.0	Y'all, okay, I want to welcome my guest today.
1:18.8	I'm very excited to speak to this person.
1:21.2	I am here with author and librettist Leah Lex.
1:25.8	Hi, Leah.
1:26.9	Hi to you. Excited to be here. I am so, I'm very excited to speak to you.
1:32.6	So you have quite a resume. So first off, Leia is the author of the first gay memoir to ever come out of
1:42.0	the Jewish ultra-Orthodox world. That book is called Uncovered,
1:46.0	How I Left Hasidic Life and finally came home. We will certainly talk a little bit about that.
1:52.2	That is a huge portion of Leah's coming out story. But also, Leah has a book coming out very shortly
2:00.0	on March 28th.
	...

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