Pro-Israel message joins in S.F. Pride parade

There’s surely never been an Israeli tourism campaign like this one: an invitation to visit the Jewish state is extended with a promise that you’ll meet a cute guy or girl — or something in between.

That’s part of the message on a newly produced DVD about Israel’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, “Out of the Closet and into the Streets of Tel Aviv: A Peek at Freedom and Acceptance in the Middle East.” Some 10,000 of the DVDs will be handed out at the Pride parade in San Francisco on Sunday, June 27, courtesy of BluestarPR, the same company responsible for the pro-Israel billboards posted around San Francisco and Berkeley.

Jonathan Carey, BluestarPR’s director, said the goal of the DVD is threefold. “We wanted to show that there’s a thriving LGBT community in Israel. Second, that there are people in Israel working to help the Palestinian gays, because their lives are difficult, at best. And three, it’s a quasi-travel video, we’re hoping to entice people to go to World Pride,” the International Gay Pride Festival that will take place in Jerusalem in 2005, he said.

“It’s all working to improve Israel’s image,” said Carey. “We want people to be surprised and welcomed.”

Several BluestarPR staffers, particularly longtime gay Jewish activist and deputy director Peter “Pini” Altman, noticed that some queer Jewish groups use the Pride event as a venue to spread their anti-Israel message. Together, the staffers decided to produce a DVD.

First they got in touch with Donna Rosenthal, a Bay Area-based journalist and author of the recent book “The Israelis: Ordinary People Living in an Extraordinary Land.”

Not only had Rosenthal shot footage of the Pride parade in Tel Aviv last year, but she had all the right contacts.

BluestarPR then found a husband-wife team in Israel, provided them with questions, and told them whom to interview.

Obvious candidates were Etai Pinkas, an openly gay city council member in Tel Aviv, who is a former chair of the Agudah, the national LGBT organization in Israel, and Hagai El-Ad, executive director of Jerusalem’s Open House, an LGBT center.

Sounding a bit sheepish, Carey said the organization really got lucky in finding someone to produce it.

“It was really a needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing,” he said with a laugh. By searching online, they came up with the name of a producer who does, as Carey chose to put it, “non-mainstream” gay DVDs.

“He cut us a deal to do this all at cost. He wanted to support us because he’s Jewish and gay, and it made the whole project very economical.”

The DVD also features “man on the street” interviews, one with a lesbian couple who say they were married by a Conservative rabbi, and are raising their son with no problems, and one with a gay soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who says his coming out has had absolutely no bearing on how he is treated in the army. Another woman ends by telling people to come, because Israel has some beautiful women.

Carey said his sense is that most LGBT people who aren’t Jewish will be “shocked” by what they hear.

And straight Jews, too, may be surprised. “Even if you’re Jewish but not gay, this is a learning experience for you,” said Carey. “This is something you don’t think about if you’re not either gay or Jewish.”

Carey said that with a bit of re-editing it could be entered into LGBT and Jewish film festivals. He hopes to do that in the future.

He’s also looking for volunteers to hand out the DVD at the San Francisco Pride festivities. To help, visit www.bluestarpr.org.