Recently, groundbreaking Israeli LGBTQ filmmaker Gal Uchovsky provided an audience at the Landmark Theatre in Chicago with an intimate and candid look at his work and how film and media in general have helped spur a growing and even right-wing acceptance of the LGBTQ community in his home country.
Uchovsky is the writer of the 2002 war drama Yossi & Jagger. He wrote and produced such widely acclaimed films as the 2004 thriller Walk on Water and the 2006 award-winning romantic comedy The Bubble. The projects were directed by his partner of almost 25 years, Eytan Fox.
Uchovsky cited several key factors in Israeli society as being at the root of the country's evolving acceptance of the LGBTQ community. "Israel is a non-traditional country," Uchovsky said. "We change very fast. [Changes] come in a flood."
He recalled that in 1998 attitudes towards the transgender community were almost universally negative until singer Dana International won that year's Eurovision Song Contest. "Suddenly transgender was OK," Uchovsky said. "She was invited to the Knesset, she changed everything in the way transgender people were perceived."
Uchovsky also noted what he termed as the "myth of the dead soldier."
"In Israel a lot of people die young," he said. "If you were from my generation, you always knew somebody who died. In the last fifteen or twenty years it's the young people killed in suicide bombings. For an Israeli parent the mission in life is to bring their kids to 21 alive. So gay is not that bad."
Uchovsky went on to assert that "all Israelis, no matter what their political opinion, hate the Arab/Israeli conflict. They know that the world looks at them in not such a positive way—as aggressors, occupiers. But we're a good people and something has to be balanced."
He stated that this need for balance in Israeli self-perception has been another factor that has spurred the country's increasing acknowledgement of LGBTQ people—an occurrence some in the United States have termed "pinkwashing."
"If there is a pinkwash in Israel," he argued, "really it's an inner pink-wash, voluntarily to accept the [LGBTQ] community and they really feel it in their hearts. Religious parties try to impose rules on the secular population. But everything that religious guys say is bad, all the seculars immediately think is good. Because, in the last 15 years, a lot of the religious parties are using the LGBTQ ticket as something they oppose, people are taking the other side."
Uchovsky's appearance was aided by the U.S.-based non-profit A Wider Bridge, which focuses on providing education, engagement and experience between LGBTQ communities in the United States and Israel.
