From a “Gay Paradise” to a Pioneer Frontier: Constructs of the “Frontier” in the Activist Struggle and Activist Discourse of LGBTQs 1 in Israel and Palestine, 1988–2012

In May 1998, Dana International, an Israeli transsexual songstress, won the Eurovision song contest. Despite strong opposition from religious circles in the country, the victory demonstrated that Israel could be represented by a person with an ambivalent sexual identity who plays with different trajectories and affiliations: a man who became a woman, a Sephardi Jew from a lower middle class background, an icon of a counterculture. In 2007, in Haifa, members of Aswat, ² a group of Israeli Palestinian lesbians organized their first conference, which revolved around the presentation of a work on lesbianism and which drew an audience of more than 300. ³