The tragic dilemmas facing Palestine’s gay male population arrived on screen at last year’s Out in Africa film festival, albeit for only eight minutes. This was Tawfik Abu Wael’s short film called Diary of a Male Whore, made in 2001. It was based on the autobiography For Bread Alone by author Paul Bowles’s protégé Mohamed Choukri.
This little slice of underground life was made by a crew of Israeli Jews and Arabs and it dealt with a close encounter between a Palestinian refugee rent boy and his aged Jewish steamer. The bulk of the plot took place in a car — a hand-job administered by the client — while the hooker recalled a brutal childhood incident when his mother was raped by Israeli soldiers.
Abu Wael’s work aptly illustrated the real life experience of many Palestinians forced into prostitution in Israel while escaping ostracism and the homophobic legislation of the Palestinian Authority (10 years for sodomy).
If Israel can boast of anything in the human rights arena, it is its treatment of lesbians and gays, whose activities were decriminalised in 1988. Tel Aviv’s annual Pride March has been going since 1998, Jerusalem instituted one in 2002 (complete with outraged, counter-protesting Hassids) and late last year the Israeli Parliament amended its laws to extend the rights of same-sex couples. In Tel Aviv’s 2003 municipal elections, an “out” gay man was elected to the city council.
None of this entirely nourishes the quality of life of Israel’s gay Palestinian refugees, who live in a twilight world as second-class citizens. But Israel’s gay community is considered the most integrated, cruising and socialising with its gay Palestinian counterparts.
At the same time, for better or worse, the Israeli military has, since 1993, lifted security restrictions on gays and lesbians serving in its forces. A study released in 2000 found that “there is no evidence that the inclusion of homosexuals in the Israeli Defence Force harmed operational effectiveness, combat readiness, unit cohesion or morale”.
Israeli gay-rights activists have pointed to the fact that the acceptance of gays in the military happens in theory only, and that individuals often don’t declare their gender preferences for fear that they may not get promotion.
It is this secrecy that informs the narrative of the Israeli hit feature film Yossi & Jagger, showing at this year’s Out in Africa film festival. Set in a bunker-like barracks on the Lebanon border, the work, directed by New York-born Eytan Fox, brilliantly illustrates the manner in which young Israelis have managed to integrate the social aspect of growing up with their compulsory military duties.
The barracks are awash with the sexual intrigue of young people on a hormonal high. In this snowy mountain environment two strapping Jewish lads fall in love. Yossi and Jagger are officers, but each is motivated by different needs.
The brawny Yossi (Ohad Knoller) wants to get ahead in the military so he is disdainful of his lover — the flamboyant Jagger (Yehuda Levi), who dreams of leaving the military and settling down in gay marital bliss. Levi is Israel’s reigning soap-opera star, and it is probably his status as a straight heart-throb playing gay that has contributed to the film’s box-office success.
Originally made for television, Yossi & Jagger is based on a true story of an ambush in 1982 that went awry. In its edgy plot there is a suggestion that the loss of life is a result of a gung-ho macho warfaring and poor military strategising.
As the bullets start to fly, one is reminded of many a Vietnam feature and, in this sense, Yossi & Jagger makes a succinct anti-war statement. Certainly, it is more of a confrontation of military values than the border-war movies made in South Africa in the apartheid era.
Contemporary Israeli culture seems to subsist on the theme of love in a time of war. This is prevalent in a major dance piece brought to the country by the Israeli embassy for the FNB Dance Umbrella.
The Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company presents Screensaver in Pretoria next week. Choreographed by the company’s artistic director and resident choreographer Rami Be’er, the work is a full-length modern dance that relates to the individual’s place in the world of digital images.
Technologically, the work is a feat of multimedia projection and set manipulation. The theme is drawn from a poem by Israeli national poet Yehuda Amichai that begins: “From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring.”
At times the sensuality of the piece gives way to sirens, and a figure clad in a sort of protective bomb-diffusion bodysuit haunts the rafters of the set.
With the appearance of these works, locals may part with the perception that Israelis are hard-assed victors. Clearly, this is what that country’s officials have intended by exporting this work at this moment in history.
Digital dance
The Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company will perform Screensaver at the State Theatre in Pretoria on March 15 and 16 at 7.30pm, and at the Artscape in Cape Town on March 18 at 8pm and March 19 at 3pm. Book at Computicket. Tel: (012) 348 5204/6.