Jul 31, 2013

In a sparkling, beaded black dress and stilettos, 30-year-old "Gallina Port des Bras" bid welcome from the stage of "Mikveh" — the self-proclaimed "one and only lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and straight-friendly club in Jerusalem." Smacking her strawberry red lips and flipping her long blond wig, Port des Bras — whose offstage name is Gil Naveh — told Al-Monitor that though Jerusalem has bred the country’s most famous drag queens, the city is no easy place to be a drag queen, or for that matter gay.

“Jerusalem is one of the craziest cities in the world. It’s very religious but also very free. It’s the most beautiful city in the world, but has some of the ugliest sides of humanity in it,” he said. Raised in a very secular family and coming out at the age of 13, he said he was also raised in a bubble. Naveh — among the organizers of the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade to take place on Aug. 1 — said he has never been attacked himself, but seen it happen to several of his friends. He explained that it is not so much the frequency of incidents of violence, but the constant awareness of the threat of violence.

During the Gay Pride Parade in 2005, an extremist from the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community stabbed and injured three people, arguing later during his police interrogation that he “came to murder on behalf of God. We can’t have such abomination in the country.” Naveh, who was standing only 20 to 30 meters away from the incident, said it was a major scare, but also a time when he felt that it was his responsibility as "hostess" to show people that the parade had to carry on.

“That is something a drag queen in Jerusalem does. Wherever there is strong homophobia, the drag queen comes and glitters it out,” Naveh said.

Israel often brands itself as the hub of tolerance for the LGBT community in a region where such labels are heavily stigmatized and often dangerous. But serious hate crimes are not uncommon. According to Alice Marcu, from the grassroots activist community center Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance — referred to as the "Open House" — there are no records of hate crimes against the LGBT community. In August 2009, a masked man walked into a LGBT youth center in Tel Aviv and started shooting, killing two and wounding dozens. Speaking to Al-Monitor at the Open House, Marcu said that the Tel Aviv attack cut especially deep, partly because of the city’s reputation of being more tolerant and because many of the youths had not come out to their family and friends. Some experienced their parents saying, "I would rather have a dead child than a gay child."