Homosexuality is unyieldingly, unilaterally condemned in the Book of
Leviticus: a man shall not lie down with another man. To do so is to commit a
sin tantamount to bestiality. Nonetheless, there are strong hints of a
homosexual affair in the stories surrounding the friendship of Jonathan and
David, and the entire homosexual Jewish community of New York City, a
politically and economically very significant one, is well organized around the
gay Synagogue in Manhattan, affectionately called Shaarei Zahav (gates of
gold). The Jewish community worldwide seems to be in denial over the issue of
homosexuality. Significantly, the highly respected Encyclopedia Judaica,
first published by the Magnes Press in Jerusalem in 1972, during the height of
the Gay Rights movement, does not even include one single entry under the
heading of homosexuality per se, as though wishing it away were enough.
Of course, on the other extreme we have the over-inflated gay histories of
the world that purport to prove, though spurious hearsay and an obvious desire
to reap political benefits, that just about every significant person in world
history was gay. The Jewish attitude towards homosexuality is at best
ambivalent. It might be compared to that of an Irish friend of mine, who, when
asked whether there were homosexuals in Ireland, responded in a shocked tone “Why
man, how could there be? This is a land of saints and scholars!” How
flabbergasted my friend was upon learning that one of the leading lights in the
Irish literature department at Trinity College in Dublin, and the resident
expert on James Joyce, had publicly come out of the closet! And even more
surprising, his mate of many years was, of course, Jewish!
Israel’s Chief Rabbis, Loew and Bakshi-Doron, are unanimous in their
condemnation of homosexuality, yet the phenomenon is rife within the
ultra-Orthodox movement. As any tried and true Jerusalemite knows, that city’s
Independence Park has become a sort of unofficial meeting place for Haredi
homosexuals searching for partners. On Saturday night the “park scene” is
particularly fruitful. It is not Jerusalem’s best-kept secret, it has in fact
been known for many years. Israel has taken quite a while to come to terms with
the existence of homosexual culture. And despite its difficulties in doing so,
it has responded with some surprisingly good artistic offers.
The film director Amos Gutman, himself a declared homosexual, filmed the
award-winning Hesed Moofla (Amazing Grace), a drama which spoke
poignantly about an aging homosexual dying of Aids in a society-Tel Aviv’s-which
prides itself as being liberal, but chokes on that liberality where
non-heterosexuals are concerned. A biting movie indeed, Hesed Moofla also
contained very telling criticism of the exaggerated promiscuity that
characterized the radical wing of the Gay Rights movement in the mid 1980’s,
before AIDS consciousness took center-stage. In the early 1990’s one of Israel’s
premier folk-rock singer-composers, Yehudah Polliker, shocked his own country by
confessing to his homosexuality. More than a bit of a mover and a shaker,
Polliker had been one of the first Israeli musicians to introduce Sephardic
content (his parents were Spanish Jews from the Salonika community) and
Holocaust content (those same parents were Auschwitz survivors, most of the
Salonika community having been butchered in the camps), in a music scene grown
lethargic due to the repetition of well-worn themes (such as endless odes to
sites in Israeli geography).
Polliker’s admission did not affect his popularity adversely, an affect
which cannot be said regarding British rock superstar Elton John. John, who,
together with the Beatles and Pink Floyd, shone among the luminaries of England’s
fertile entertainment world, suffered a nose-dive in popularity upon admitting,
in an interview with rock stalwart Rolling Stone, that he actually
preferred sex with men. One of Israel’s top female singers, Yehudit Ravitz,
took courage from Polliker’s honesty and admitted, in the mid 1990’s, to
being a monogamous lesbian: had Ravitz dare admit such a thing in the mid 1970’s,
when she first came to public attention, her career would have been swiftly and
silently stifled. But nothing could have prepared the Israeli public for the
success of Dana International, the transsexual singer whose spectacular voice
and feminine appearance belied the fact that she was the beneficiary of one of
the most successful sex-change operations of all times. Dana quickly became the
doyen of Gay Liberation artists in Italy, Spain and France, in those halcyon
days before the second Intifadah. But within Israel, Dana was the focus of a
heated debate that challenged the fibers of much of Oriental Jewish society:
Dana was a Yemenite Jew, and homosexuality was frowned upon severely within that
community. But the Yemenites were going to swallow an even bitterer pill.
When one of Israel’s leading pop stars, Ofra Haza, died of cancer, a
leading investigative journalist from the otherwise staid and respectable (and
moderately left-wing) daily newspaper Haaretz decided to research the
matter a bit more…..all this against the wishes of Haza’s family, and, one
might add, against a common sense of personal privacy and decency. Ofra Haza had
gone overseas in the 1990’s where she struck up a romantic relationship with a
well-known German bisexual entertainer, who was, unbeknownst to Haza at the
time, himself ill with AIDS. Hazah was soon diagnosed HIV positive, and the
matter was kept under wraps for fear that it would damage-as it later did
damage-Hazah’s image among the conservative and generally traditionalist
Yemenite community. The story was published in the worst of all tabloid items,
and while the Ashkenazi elite clucked with relish over the fact that another
sacred cow had bitten the dust, Ofra Hazah’s family was subjected to the
pettiest of all sexual scrutinizes imaginable. As was obvious from the time of
Oscar Wilde, when the great Anglo-Irish author was jailed for acts of sodomy,
the intellectual elite has always evinced a morbid curiosity regarding
homosexual encounters, adventures, and in many cases perverse antics. Within
Jewish tradition, homosexuality is explicitly defined as a sin, an attitude that
complicates matters both in the Diaspora and in the State of Israel.
Why, culturally, is the prohibition against same-sex encounters in the Torah
so resoundingly strong? What were the historical factors at work here?
Jews have always been a numerically threatened minority even in the best of
times, and by that token, anything that threatened the biological continuity of
the people was viewed with scorn and fear….just as it was among the Armenians.
That minority have, like the Jews, often been the victims of hate and ruthless
butchery (on the part of the Turks), and for the Armenian community, whether
they live in Armenia or in the Armenian “Diaspora” in Israel, Canada,
Argentina or the USA, homosexuality is intensely disliked. Like the Jews, the
Armenians are both a people and a faith (the Armenian Church is independent of
both the Greek Orthodox Patriarch and the Vatican), and like the Jews,
time-honored religious antipathy towards homosexuality is bound up with social
and political arguments. In other cultures however, even some other minority
ones which have also been the victims of political and social persecution, the
attitude is different. The Mexican Indians of the Olmec-Maya family, in the town
of Juchitan, are known for their spectacularly tolerant attitude towards overtly
feminine homosexuals. Their yearly Carnaval, unlike Brazil’s, is not an
isolated affair: men may dress up as a woman and flaunt his same-sex
relationship all year, and the mothers of Juchitan do not mind when their sons
publicly “come out of the closet.” As they say, it is as good as having
another daughter to help you around the house! Mexico’s Aztec empire also
accepted homosexuality……in military settings, where they are rejected today.
In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, prior to the 16th century Spanish
Conquest, an overtly homosexual advisor, called the Cihuacoatl, literally the
“serpent woman,” served as one of the most feared military advisors of the
Aztec sovereign. Lest we suspect that an effeminate man does not make a good
soldier, remember that among both the Spartans and the Greeks, homosexuality and
bisexuality were considered routine traits of some of the finest fighters. Why
then did the Jewish world explode when parliamentarian Yael Dayan, during a
session on homosexual rights in the Knesset, quoted from King David’s lament
on the death of his friend Jonathan, remarking that Jonathan’s love for him
was “dearer than that of any woman’s”.
(See: II Samuel 1:17-27) Suspicious? Or was David simply in the tradition
of many warriors of the ancient world, whether Greek, Spartan or Aztec?
It is easy to explain away David’s comment about Jonathan’s love being
prized beyond the love of a woman as simply being a panegyric to his dear
friend, spoken in a moment of extreme grief and being more of a symbolic than a
sexual statement. It is obvious that David was also a womanizer, (remember Bat
Sheva and Michal, the daughter of Saul), so we can discount the possibility that
David was gay, but the tantalizing question remains…..could he have been, like
the Greek and Spartan soldiers, bisexual? Did the intense male solidarity of
wartime activity produce bonds that ultimately no woman could penetrate? If so,
that would have been both a natural and temporary state of affairs, much as the
temporary homosexual affairs that are born-and die-between inmates in prison.
Argentine author Manuel Puig, himself an outspoken homosexual, detailed just
such a transient affair between two men, one gay and one straight, in a prison
in Buenos Aires during the last dictatorship (1976-1983). In his masterpiece The
Kiss of the Spiderwoman, two political prisoners of conscience temporarily
share sexual intimacy despite the fact that one is heterosexual and in fact
deeply in love with a woman. Solitude and necessity create the need for love,
and if it cannot be satisfied in the traditional way, than an unconventional one
may suffice.
Contrary to claims made by militant homosexuals, this in no way implies that
the straight political prisoner is latently homosexual. Puig’s sensitivity to
this ambivalence created a truly human drama…..and perhaps this is the way
that we should view David’s behavior vis-à-vis Jonathan. Interestingly,
ultra-Orthodox rabbis who insist that the Bible be taken quite literally in its
descriptive aspects, such as seven days of Creation signifying seven 24-hour
days, rather than epochs as Maimonides suggested, shy away from the idea that
David’s words when he wept for his fallen comrade should also be taken
literally. In other words, it is a game that suggests that all should be taken
literally except when it conflicts with Halacha, a very selective and indeed
manipulative form of “literalism”. David’s bereavement, as he wept for the
friend who had defended him in the most trying of circumstances during the years
in which Saul, Jonathan’s father, tried to have David assassinated, is neither
a statement of hidden sexual tendencies, nor is it a denial of the former. A
little healthy ambiguity might clarify this argument, removing it from the
terrain of Orthodox spokesmen who fear any hint of homosexuality-as they fear
and negate its existence within their own communities-and radical homosexuals
who would have us believe that homosexuality is lurking everywhere: a sort of
reverse persecution complex. David’s words may be literal and they may not be,
and no one except the departed King knows for sure. Or, they may be a testament,
a sublimely poetic and moving testament, to a profound loss and a set of wartime
experiences that those who have not undergone them-gay or straight- should not
judge.
Rather than delving into the nature of the love that David and Jonathan bore
for each other-a prurient exercise with strong elements of “lashon hara”-gossip,
itself strictly forbidden in Jewish tradition-we would do well to concentrate on
the beautiful commentary provided for us by the Jewish sages in Avot 5:16: “The
love of David and Jonathan did not depend upon any material cause, and is the
prototype of disinterested love which never passes away.” And was it gay love
or straight love or something in between, or purely platonic? Who are we to
decide?
