“My first kiss was in front of a haredi event hall in the middle of Jerusalem. We stood there, he and I, in a slightly dark spot in the center of town. From the adjacent windows came the happy sounds of the event the haredim were celebrating – a wedding, bar mitzva.

“At the end of the street a group of border police passed looking for people who want to blow themselves up. And me, I was standing there with him, ‘provoking,’ ‘parading my perversions down the street,’ doing the thing that ‘most residents of Jerusalem find disgusting,’ that ‘the three religions see as a sin’ – kissing the person I love.”