From Terra incognita to Terra firma: the logbook of the voyage of gay men's community into the Israeli public sphere.
This article charts the winding and tumultuous course Israeli gay men have taken in their struggles to claim a visible and audible place within the Israeli public sphere. Whereas for the greater part of history, Jewish gay men were symbolically annihilated by various social institutions, for the past decade they have been active as agents of social change. The paper's objectives are to offer an account of the developments that enabled such a transformation, to review socio-political strategies in an arena not yet discussed in academic literature, and to examine the roles mass media play in these processes. The article is composed of four chapters: literature review, detailed descriptions of the erstwhile and present legal, social, and cultural status of gay men in Israel, and a brief discussion of Orthodox-Jews' reactions. As this is a preliminary, and the first of its kind, study, it combines analyses of a diversified melange of sources. The author deliberately employs an eccletic methodological framework, nonetheless with an emphasis on newspapers as viable texts.
Kama
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Department of Communication, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
D018451:Homosexuality, Male / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007557:Israel; D007585:Jews / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D011287:Prejudice; D011640:Public Policy; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012922:Social Change; D012933:Social Identification