Diversity Rules Magazine

4 Diversity Rules Magazine November 2014 David-Elijah Nah- mod is a film critic and reporter in San Francisco. His articles appear regularly in The Bay Area Re- porter and SF Week- ly. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter. He is currently doing a monthly column in South Florida Gay News titled "If You Could Read My Mind: A PTSD Diary." David developed Post Trau- matic Syndrome Disorder (PTSD) after surviving gay conversion therapy as a child and has found that many in the LGBT community suffer from se- vere, often untreated emotional disorders due to the extreme anti-gay traumas they endured. JRK: Can you give Diversity Rules readers an idea of who David-Elijah Nahmod is -- where you are from and all that good basic information? DN: I'm an American/Israeli dual national. I was raised in Brooklyn NY, in an Orthodox Jewish com- munity where homosexuality is considered a disgust- ing abomination. e Rabbis were treated like kings and had the power to "excommunicate" people--I kid you not! e neighborhood was/is called Gravesend, and the community I was part of is Sephardic, descended from the Spanish Jews who were kicked out of Spain in the 1400s--their descendants now live primarily in the USA, Israel, Argentina and Italy. Our community in Brooklyn was a self-contained ghetto of Jews who had lived in various Middle East- ern & North African countries, primarily Syria but also other countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, etc. All four of my grandparents were born in Syria between 1889-1902. ere had been huge Jewish communities in Syria at that time, but by 1920 they had all left to escape religious persecution. To outsiders, we, as a community, must have seemed strange. Religiously we were traditional Orthodox Jews, but culturally, we were Arabs. I remember my parents and grandparents listening to Arabic music, and my grandma would belly dance at weddings and bar mitzvahs! We ate Arabic food--to this day I can order food in Arab owned falafel restaurants, and re- fer to the dishes by their Arabic names. But I never learned to speak Arabic even though the two genera- tions before me spoke it. e adults never spoke to me in Arabic, so I didn't pick it up. I grew up speak- ing Hebrew and English. I never fit in with the community, in part because of being gay, in part because of my "unhealthy" inter- est in secular culture like film, theater, TV shows and comic books. I left the community around 1980 and never looked back. JRK: You are currently writing a column in South Florida Gay News called, "If You Could Read My Mind: A PTSD Diary." It is based on your Post- Traumatic Syndrome Disorder that you claim de- veloped after the gay conversion therapy you were subjected to. Tell us what PTSD is all about and what it does to someone. DN: PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is an emotional disorder caused by trauma. Soldiers in combat and victims of sexual assault are among the best known sufferers. PTSD causes the sufferer to re- live the trauma again and again, which can lead to severe anxiety attacks and/or depression, even suicidal thoughts. My PTSD first developed after I was committed to a mental hospital at age 8. I was put on orazine, a drug now illegal to administer to children. I was given many other drugs--I can't recall what most of them were called. I had one session of electro-shock therapy that I can recall, and my psychiatrist in the hospital quoted the Torah to me--in Hebrew no less- -during "therapy". Years later my parents admitted to Combatting the Challenge of PTSD The Story of David-Elijah Nahmod An Interview By Jim Koury, Editor/Publisher

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