Scaled back World Pride draws gays
They had spent Sunday, August 6 discussing medical issues all day in a darkened auditorium in a small convention center spilling over a rocky hill. There were perhaps a 100 of them - activists, doctors, and visitors from Israel, Europe, Canada, and the United States. By the time all had ended in the late afternoon, they stumbled en-masse out the stairs of the Konrad Adenauer Conference Center into the ethereal golden late afternoon desert light. The hundreds of bells of the churches of Mt. Zion in Jerusalem’s Old City, a mere few hundred feet away, rang out through the surrounding hills, a background to their last conversations, goodbyes, and discussions of plans for the rest of the week.
And so it was on the first official day of Jerusalem World Pride, the contested event in arguably the world’s most contested city. A planned parade that was to be the signature event was canceled last month because of the ongoing fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militia. Many religious leaders in the country also have denounced the event.
In her speech closing Sunday’s health conference, Daphna Stromsa, the health coordinator for Jerusalem’s Open House, the organization behind World Pride, had called the day "in Israel, a small miracle," a quiet reference to those miracles documented over the thousands of years of the city’s history. A night of dinners with new friends, a fun opening party for the World Pride Film Festival, or simple reflection about where they were awaited the participants.
Monday began with a focus on gay youth with a session in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. In addition to political leaders, the session included young LGBT activists who came to meet politicians and express their views. Gal Scholl, a 16-year-old teenager who lives in the suburbs of Jerusalem, said that being openly gay was difficult for him. "Teenagers, they laugh and make fun of everything," he said. Other students "start up with me," teasing him in class. "I think they need to give us more attention about our rights," he said of the Knesset leaders.
It took several months of work for the session to happen, according to Noa Sattath, one of the chairs of the Jerusalem Open House. "This is remarkable," she said, "because it’s the first meeting between Parliament and gay youth." Issues focused on funding for sex education, preventing violence against gay youth, transgender teenagers, and what rights young LGBT people aged 15 to 25 already have in Israel.
Only a handful of politicians were at the session, the most prominent being Labor Party Knesset Member Sheli Yachimovitch, who comes from Tel Aviv. She is one of the strongest supporters of LGBT rights in Israel, but finds that not all members of the Knesset can be so vocal.
We talk about visibility for youngsters," she said, but that, "in Israel especially because it is a religious country, and a very militarized one, young gays and lesbians have faced difficulties."
She pointed specifically to last year’s Jerusalem Pride, during which Adam Russo, 18, was nearly stabbed to death. Still, she knows that there are many Knesset members who support gay rights, but cannot do so openly. "A few Knesset members sympathize with gay and lesbian youth but can’t show it," she said, explaining that come election time, "it will hurt them at the political level."
At the session’s end, when gay youth approached her about specific problems, she gave out her personal cell number, explaining to this reporter, "this is a small country, we have to be this way with our people."
After the Knesset session ended, 40 youth and counselors from the United States and Israel headed to the Spitzer Youth Center in another section of Jerusalem to create a LGBT Youth and Teen’s Bill of Rights to present to the Knesset after World Pride ended. One counselor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to talk to journalists, mentioned that about 100 more youth were expected to attend, but fears from the attack last year kept many young people away.
"Especially to be in the old city is dangerous for them," the counselor said, because of the conservative nature of those who live in the areas of Jerusalem so closely associated with the religious history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Eden Shiloni, the youth coordinator for the Jerusalem Open House, said that the young people are "very interested in the mission," and that they are teaching them "the democratic part" of obtaining their rights as LGBT citizens.
A major player in the events in Jerusalem is San Franciscan Julie Dorf, a co-founder and former executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. She also served as co-chair of World Pride and is on Human Rights Watch’s committee for LGBT rights.
"The most important part of World Pride is that the LGBT rights are understood in the bigger context of human rights," she said. Dorf felt that with the fighting going on between Israel and Hezbollah, it was all the more important that World Pride continued. LGBT rights were related, "not just with the war, but with the occupation, and the lack of procedure," for ending Israeli involvement. World Pride, she explained, was trying to embrace the greater problems within Israel as part of its mission.
Monday’s events closed with a City Hall reception for LGBT leaders and faith groups from the U.S., Canada, Latin America, and Europe. The event was hosted by Sa’ar Ran Nathaniel, Jerusalem’s first openly gay City Council member. City Hall might have had a rainbow flag in its main meeting chamber for the first time ever, but it overlooked an empty chair, the seat of Jerusalem’s conservative Mayor Uri Lupolianski, an utra-orthodox rabbi, who boycotted the City Hall event and tried to prevent World Pride from happening. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the North American co-chair of World Pride and leader of New York’s Beth Simchat Torah congregation, sat on the empty chair and announced, "I want him to know that a lesbian rabbi sat in his chair."
Many San Franciscans were at the City Hall event, including Dorf, who spoke during the session, and Rabbi Camille Shira Angel of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav. New York-born Howard Hahn, who now lives in San Francisco, is a member of her congregation and also was at the City Hall session. He had last been to Israel at the age of 13, for his bar mitzvah 25 years before. He was happy to be here, he said, because "now I get to experience my identity as a Jew, a gay, a New Yorker, and a San Franciscan." Coming at a time when so many people canceled trips to World Pride, he also said, "my voice would actually count double" to replace the voices of those who could not attend.
Throughout the various events, the attendees were overwhelmingly Jewish, with a handful of Christians, and virtually no Muslims, many of whom boycotted World Pride. Louis Georges Tin, a Frenchman who founded the International Day Against Homophobia, remarked that "I don’t agree with the politics of Israel," but that in spite of many of his friends’ refusing to attend, he came because "we need to promote dialogue if we need to understand each other."
Fatima Amarshi, a Canadian of Muslim heritage who is the executive director of Toronto’s gay pride, said it was a weighty decision to come to Israel given the war and other events, but that she was "here to support a sister queer community. We would not boycott parades in New York, or parades in San Francisco because we did not like the politics of Bush." In her view, the Jerusalem Open House also addressed issues generally considered beyond simply gay and lesbian, such as the planned protest against the barrier wall keeping Palestinians out of Jerusalem. It was necessary to come, and to include broader human rights issues in the programming, she said, because Jerusalem is a "complex city of politics not always easy to digest."