ABSTRACT

Two years into the second intifada, and just months after the election of Ariel Sharon — a right-wing ‘hawk’ on whose behalf he and other ‘gays for Sharon’ enthusiastically campaigned — Shaul Ganon embarked on a mission to expose the suffering of queer Palestinians to the world. As head of the Palestinian Rescue Project at HaAguda, Israel's oldest and largest gay rights organization, Ganon had worked for several years to provide food, clothing and condoms to Palestinian male sex workers who lived illegally in the slums and parks of Tel Aviv. But in the aftermath of the intifada, letters from HaAguda verifying the queerness of their holders were no longer sufficient to protect his ‘children’, as Ganon calls them. 1 The Israeli police began arresting and deporting Palestinians who had, until then, flown under the radar of the state as harmless queers. In response, Ganon began issuing press releases, contacting Israeli and Western journalists, and circulating transcripts of interviews he had conducted with a few queer Palestinians, who recounted in disturbing detail their stories of suffering and victimization at the hands of Palestinian fathers, brothers, police and other terrorists.