Grey Area

The actor Joel (Joel David Katz) Grey has published an autobiography.

The 'scandalous' part:

...as teen in Los Angeles, Grey had sex with his girlfriend’s mother and embarked on an affair with a cantor named Paul at his parent's temple.  Eventually the charismatic clergyman married a good friend of Grey's. One night the trio went out and Paul initiated a ménage trois. A few months later the cantor's wife confessed that she was getting an annulment and her family lawyer suggested that Grey be a co-respondent. The "Cabaret" star was terrified and confessed all to his parents. 

In fact, the cantor's wife was a former girlfriend:

Mr. Grey, then still in high school, had to reveal to his parents that he had been having an affair with the handsome young cantor of their synagogue in Los Angeles — and that he might be publicly named in the divorce suit brought by the cantor’s wife. (Complicating the story further: Mr. Grey had been dating the cantor’s wife before the cantor began dating her.)

What a cabaret.

^ 

Who is An Islamaphobe? Or, This Is "Green-Washing"?

Pay attention to this:

...the 85 people who gathered in the Pennsylvania woods over Memorial Day weekend had come from 19 states and three countries for a somewhat surprising event: a three-day LGBTQ [Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer] Muslim and Partners Retreat.

Some wore T-shirts that read, “Muslim + Gay = Fabulous.” They prayed. They attended workshops about pioneering progressive Muslims...And they held discussions on struggling to reconcile their faith with their sexuality, and their sexuality with their faith. (Many folks said that they face Islamophobia from inside the mainstream LGBTQ community.)

...Under a blue sky, the final prayer took place on Monday. A woman was allowed to lead both the call to the prayer and the prayer itself...This was the third such retreat, and it was sponsored this year by the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, founded in January to address the needs of LGBTQ Muslims. Another sponsor was Muslims for Progressive Values, a Los Angeles-based group formed in 2007 that parallels, to some extent, Unitarian Universalism and Judaism’s reform movement, and which has nine chapters across the country and abroad.

Is that to be called "green-washing"?

(hint: on "pink-washing")



^

This is Not Gay News

JPost is reporting of a rise in HIV cases among gay men here:

Among the 420 newly diagnosed cases of HIV in Israel in 2010, 148 of them were homosexual men, according to the Health Ministry, which is worried about the “dramatic increase” in infection among gay men. They constituted half of all men who were newly diagnosed.

The ministry released figures to mark World AIDS Day, December 1.

They were collected by Dr. Zohar Mor, adviser to the head of public health services for tuberculosis and AIDS in the Health Ministry, and the voluntary organization Hoshen. The figures were four times higher than the figures of HIV-infected men in 2000.

I hope this isn't a result of Israel's Hasbara campaign line, the one from an Israeli marketing campaign to create a positive, non-conflict image of democratic Israel, including gay life (which is being fought by Queers Against Apartheid) and the Tel Aviv tourism campaign launched last year to attract gay visitors, especially the parade, which has moved up also to Jerusalem.

And just after the NYTimes "pinkwashing" flareup ("pinkwashing"?  here).

Maybe it's better some gay conferences are cancelled.

^

Ain't That Queer

Israeli television presenter as one of the 100 most influential gays in the world for 2009. And he said:

"It's very exciting. I find it a bit odd that someone is New York heard about what I do in Israel, but if this is my contribution to representing our country abroad, then I'm happy I could have done something."

So, what does Shai Bazak, Israel's Consul in Boston, do?

According to Haaretz, he's been invited to lead a pro-Israel PR campaign to represent favorably Israel's homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, transgender in the US.

I guess Shai knows all the ins-and-outs.

^

Rabbis Now Oppose My Neighbor's Initiative

Reported:

Rabbis withdraw support for gay marriage

Senior Religious Zionism Rabbis Yaakov Ariel, Haim Drukman and Elyakim Levanon have withdrawn their support from a recent initiative seeking to match between religious homosexuals and lesbians until the religious and ethical aspects of the issue are clarified, Ynet has learned.  The three even demanded that the Kamoha association, which is part of the matchmaking initiative, immediately remove their names from the list of supporters on the association's website – until further notice.

...Rabbis Ariel and Drukman are refusing to address the issue and explain their stand, but Ynet has learned that they have not ruled out matches between homosexuals and lesbians. They believe that this option must be discussed seriously and thoroughly, including the halachic and mental aspects of such a move.

...The three rabbis feel that Rabbi Arale Harel, who initiated the new project, took things too fast when he launched the initiative based on their agreement in principle, and without receiving their final approval...Rabbi Menachem Burstein, head of the Jewish fertility organization Puah Institute, who supports the initiative, admitted that Rabbi Harel was wrong to have rushed to link the rabbis to the project, but added that he had no doubt that all Religious Zionism rabbis would eventually support it.

According to Burstein, a homosexual and lesbian planning to marry through the new project are required to present a letter from a therapist confirming that they have tried to become straight but failed, promise to remain faithful to each other as long as they are married and accept psychological guidance for them and their children – three conditions aimed at meeting any rabbinical or professional objection to the matter.

The project's initiator, Rabbi Harel, told Ynet that "throughout the years that the matchmaking initiative has been conducted, the abovementioned rabbis have been escorting the idea with their advice and resourcefulness. Now, after it has been made public, they have expressed reservations over its public aspect, as well as additional questions relating to a small number of the couples.

"These reservations were presented to me in talks I had with the rabbis, and therefore we stopped publishing their names as supporters of the initiative until the issue is clarified. Apart from the abovementioned rabbis, there are others who support this initiative and their names will be published soon."

I noted his efforts here and also here.

^

Jewish, Orthodox, Gay/Lesbian. Married?

Here is a video, reviewing the activity of my neighbor here in Shiloh, Rabbi Araleh Harel, reported in TIME Magazine, who has taken upon himself a challenging enterprise, to help Orthodox Jewish gays and lesbians to become a husband and father while keeping them in good standing with Jewish law and their community of believers. The solution: marriage between gays and lesbians:

Since his first arrangement, Harel has matched 13 gay-lesbian couples.

I blogged this previously in March.

^

Tasteless Headline of the Week

In the Jewish Chronicle, reporting on the failed Irish presidential bid of a friend of Israeli Eliyahu Nawi, a homosexual and pederast:

Israel 'smeared candidate'

 

for Irish presidency

'Smeared'? 

Isn't that what homosexuals sometimes do?

^

From the Wall to the March

This wall poster

is protesting this event:

Jerusalem March for Pride and Tolerance


The Jerusalem March for Pride and Tolerance will take place Thursday, July 28th 2011, on the eve of the two-year commemoration-day of the murder at Bar Noar.  The March will begin downtown in Independence Park, and march to the Rose Garden opposite the Knesset. The day of commemoration of the Bar Noar shooting is to us a day of painful memory. At the same time, it marks the LGBTQ community's organization into protest and struggle. It is a day that sounds the sirens for society to rectify itself, to reduce physical, verbal and institutional violence we face.

Our campaign for social amendment is intertwined in a mass of struggles for a more just society. For this reason, Pride will march in Jerusalem this year under the title “intertwined paths”. Our March will emphasize the partnership and need for solidarity between seemingly separate struggles to amend social injustices.

In the past year we admired the strength of the people in nations in our region to overturn regimes of political oppression. We were impressed by the struggle of the social workers and the doctors for more just employment conditions that will allow for quality healthcare and support structures for society at large. We witnessed the success of the women's movement to pin accountability for sexual assaults on the most prominent government bodies. Women and men around us conduct countless struggles for justice.

We stand with them, and invite them to march with us.

There are no platforms at Jerusalem Pride. The entire March is a platform for what you might do in it. We call upon groups and individuals to take an active role in the March; To create the March together with the Jerusalem Open House. We invite you to organize activities during the assembly, to register (in advance!) to the open stage that will run during Pride's assembly, and to create marching-groups for the March itself – using your own messages, creativity and style.

We shall arrive. Together.

^

Jewish, Broadway and ...Gay

From a review of a new play

Leviticus 18 seems fairly forthright on the subject of homosexuality: "You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination." But Stuart (Noah Weisberg)—a gay gastroenterologist and a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism—thinks he's found a work-around. He argues that the text refers only to "anal penetration. So if I don't do any of that, I'm OK. Blessed."

Yet none of the characters in Jon Marans's ' Strange and Separate People' - a love triangle in which two of the characters wear yarmulkes — are particularly fortunate or glorified. None of them gets what they want, and what they want alters vastly, if predictably, in the course of the 90-minute drama.

...none of the roles feels fully inhabited, and the characters' backstories appear conveniently dramatic fillips rather than aspects of fully realized lives. Much of this owes to the script, in which characters narrate their distress with lines such as "So you never really loved me" and "Maybe you don't know me either." Marans has his hands on some powerful material, but another rewrite or two would seem a mitzvah.

From another review:

Take it on faith, rather than from the formal dramaturgy, that Stuart (Noah Weisberg) has good reason to be sitting in the glatt kosher kitchen of a housewife named Phyllis (Tricia Paoluccio). Apply some of that faith, too, to the play's claim that this stressed-out woman somehow manages to run Phyllis's Orthodox Catering while caring for a severely autistic child and attending to the domestic needs of her old-school husband, Jay (Jonathan Hammond), a clinical psychologist specializing in "same-sex attraction disorder" and a devout Orthodox Jew who serves as cantor at the local temple.

Once past the awkwardness of all this introductory exposition, Jay and Stuart -- now revealed as having an existing, and most unorthodox relationship -- sit down with Phyllis to share in "the quiet beauty" of the Sabbath meal.

There is, indeed, quiet beauty in this scene, and the thesps play it well. Weisberg finds the religious sincerity in Stuart's busy-body directions on how to sing the blessing of the bread, Hammond discovers real feeling behind Jay's macho bluster, and Paoluccio is especially good at working her way through feisty Phyllis's dawning awareness that something is going on between these two men that is definitely not kosher.

Of course, there's another verse there, 20:23, which contains this prohibition:

And ye shall not walk in the customs of the nations

which would "solve" the character's problem.

Lucky he isn't Muslim, though.

^

Not Ten-Percent; Not Seven-Percent

You heard of the 10% assertion?

Like this:

The 10% myth for the number of homosexuals is connected to the Kinsey study and an individual, Bruce Voeller. Laumann,et al. in a footnote, on page 289, in their book, The Social Organization of Sex: Sexual Practices in the United States, links the two together. In a 1990 claim made by Bruce Voeller, who was in the late 1970s chair of the National Gay Task Force, takes credit for the origination of the 10% myth. Voeller writes in his article “Some Uses and Abuses of the Kinsey Scale” how he came up with the 10% number. This article is found in the book, Homosexuality/Heterosexuality Concepts of Sexual Orientation. The use of this myth beginning in the late 1970s by the modern gays rights movement’s campaign was to convince politicians and the public that “We [gays and lesbians] Are Everywhere.”...The 10% myth is widely used in older books and articles published advocating for homosexuality. Kirk and Madsen in their book published in 1989, After the Ball How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of the Gay’s in the 90s, wrote about this 10% figure...Others say that up to 10% are homosexual. “According to estimates, at least 1 in 10 teenagers struggles with issues regarding sexual orientation.” (Garofalo, Wolf, Kessel, Palfrey, and DuRant, “The Association Between Health Risk Behaviors and Sexual Orientation Among a School-based Sample of Adolescents,” p. 899-890)...

Well, we now have this:

UK's homosexual population size revealed: Just 1.5% of Britons say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual

Just one in 100 people in the UK say they are gay or lesbian, the first ever survey of British sexual identity has revealed. A further one in every 200 people are bisexual, according to the data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). More than 480,000 consider themselves to be gay or lesbian and a further 245,000 say they are bisexual.

The data revealed men were twice as likely as women to describe themselves as gay or lesbian while London was revealed to have the highest numbers polled and Northern Ireland the lowest. The figures fall short of previous estimates which have put the gay population at between 6 and 7 per cent (picture posed by models)

The information collected as part of the new Integrated Household Survey (IHS) means that nearly three-quarters of a million UK adults say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual. The IHS is the largest social survey ever produced by the ONS and contains information provided by nearly 450,000 people - the biggest pool of UK social data after the Census.

The research showed that 95 per cent said they were heterosexual, 1 per cent gay or lesbian, 0.5 per cent bisexual and 0.5 per cent other. Nearly 4 per cent of those asked refused to answer, said they did not know or described themselves as 'other'.

The figures are well short of previous estimates used by the government and gay rights charity Stonewall which have put the gay population at between 6 and 7 per cent - which works out at 3.6 million people.

- - -

Wall Posters

This one, "Ripping Off the Masque", is weirdish:

and even after I enlarged the writing, I still can't figure it out properly:

Unless,

Unless it has something to do with homosexualism in the Hareidi world?

The writing reads:

Three in the morning. Three masked men break through the door and begin searching while uttering "and you shall burn the evil amongst you" and
sowing disorder...

And this one is simple. It protests, in the name of some anonymous "Committee of Callers Upon", the ads for vacation in hotels in the Hareidi press and demands that the newspapers and weeklies stop accepting them since they are not proper for these hotel stays have led people astray:

For Lack of A Better Subject: Islamic Gays

Wave of Homophobia Sweeps the Muslim World

In most Islamic countries, gay men and women are ostracized, persecuted and in some cases even murdered. Repressive regimes are often fanning the flames of hatred in a bid to outdo Islamists when it comes to spreading "moral panic."

It looks as if a wave of homophobia has swept over the Islamic world, a place that was once widely known for its openmindedness, where homoerotic literature was written and widely read, where gender roles were not so narrowly defined, and, as in the days of ancient Greece, where men often sought the companionship of youths.

Islamists are now a dominant cultural force in many of these countries. They include figures such as popular Egyptian television preacher Yussuf al-Qaradawi who demonizes gays as perverse. Four years ago Shiite grand ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa saying that gays are to be murdered in the most brutal way possible. These religious opinion leaders base their hatred for gays on the story of Lot in the Koran: "Do ye commit lewdness such as no people in creation (ever) committed before you? For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds." Lot's people suffered the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins. The Prophet Muhammad has a number of dicta in which he condemns these acts by Lot's people and in one of them he even goes as far as to call for punishment by death.

Open and Shut in Meah She'arim

The new Israeli pro-homosexuality film based in...Meah She'arim:

Oh, So Someone Doesn't Like Opera

Edalat Square is an opera based on the true story of two gays teens who were hung in Iran in 2005 for homosexuality.

The Opera Vista Festival at UH is featuring the piece this year, and organizers say they expected some controversy. It's arrived, in the form of a death threat.

Amy Hopper, founding director of the Nova Arts Project (also involved in producing the festival), says she received a note in her mailbox saying this: "You are pigs to mix Islam with gays. You must stop! We will not let you do it."

Source

What A Pain

Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.

Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

...The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.

Source

Not Even a Rabbi

Carl Alexander Roller and Daniel Isaac Weiner were married yesterday at the Egremont Inn in South Egremont, Mass. Barbara J. Cohen, a Jewish spiritual leader, officiated.

Gee, "a Jewish spiritual leader"? Well, she is a Cohen. But no Rabbi.

--------

She may be found here, I presume.

Congregation Ahavath Sholom,

a Reconstructionist temple in the Berkshires. Located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Ahavath Sholom is one of the oldest continuously operating shuls in Berkshire County

Congregation Ahavath Sholom (Reconstructionist)
Box 464
Great Barrington, MA 01230
Main Office: 413-528-4197
Barbara J. Cohen, Spiritual Leader
Harold Schrager, President
Religious School Director: John Slote

Congregation Ahavath Sholom, founded in 1926, is a member of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and is committed to maintaining the traditional practices and values of Judaism and Jewish life in the context of modernity. Reconstructionist Judaism, based on the teachings of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan...Members of CAS are not mere observers but active participants in all aspects of synagogue community life. We provide opportunities for our members to grow in knowledge in order to make informed decisions about their personal and religious lives. All are encouraged to choose a level of participation that is comfortable for them. A variety of committees provide possibilities that appeal to the interests of our diverse membership.

Oh, Did We Mention "Occupation"?

A professor of international and constitutional law at Tel Aviv University, Eyal Gross, takes issue with the Knesset's legislation aimed at halting events in Jerusalem that are disturbing to the public through an amendment to the Basic Law: Jerusalem that allows the City Council to ban parades and marches in the capital if they are "deemed likely to cause public disorder or offend public sensibilities," or should not be held for religious reasons.

All this is in connection with the scheduled Gay Pride Parade next week in the capital.

Gross attacks one Na'ama Sheffi who published an op-ed in which she blames those who demanded that the Gay Pride Parade be held in Jerusalem. She thinks this is unnecessary, an urge to "show them" and likens it to demands of the religious public to prevent the consumption of pork.

In attacking her, Gross just can't but put in a reference to those "other" religious people, the "settlers":-

And as long as there is a closet and homophobia and discrimination, as long as there is racism and an occupation that is only becoming stronger, it is not enough to merely live peacefully.

.

What has that got to do with anything?