Yuval Yonay: "'I Was Totally Dazed': Gay Men's Discovery of a Homosexual Community in Israel, 1948-1975", February 17, 2011

Lecture | February 17 | 4 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall. Berkeley, CA

Featured Speaker: Professor Yuval Yonay, University of Haifa

Moderator: Professor Daniel Boyarin

Sponsor: Center for the Study of Sexual Culture

The categories of "homosexuals" and "Lesbians" were invented in the 19th century as part of the evolving medical and psychological scientific discourse. They gradually spread, socially, from elite professional knowledge to the wider public and, geographically, from Western and Central Europe to the rest of the world. During this process people who felt sexually different came to identify themselves as "Lesbians" and "gays."

How did "sexually different" people who lived in the middle of this decades-long process experience it, and how did they learn to identify themselves as "homosexuals"? In a previous work Professor Yonay discussed the early awareness of sexual difference and the emerging understanding of one's own homosexuality in a society in which sexual categories are not yet fixed. In this lecture, he will describe how this early awareness develops to a full-blown homosexual identity when individuals discover the existence of a vibrant underground community of people "like them." Joining this community they gradually come to identify themselves as "homosexuals."

The lecture is based on 30 in-depth interviews with Jewish-Israeli elderly gays who remember gay life in Israel before the establishment of the first gay and Lesbian organization in 1975.

Yuval Yonay got his Ph.D. at Northwestern University (1991) and since 1993 has taught at the University of Haifa. He has published a book and articles on the history and epistemic culture of mainstream economics and on Israeli Palestinians' status in the Israeli labor market. During the '90s Yuval was active in the Haifa GLBT organization and he belongs to the first generation of Israeli scholars studying and writing on GLBTq issues. This year Yuval is a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley, where he plans to write a book on the gay history of Israel.