Archive | 2010 | June | 30
Gay Arabs and Jews come together in Tel Aviv
June 11 is Pride Day in Tel Aviv, and Israel’s party capital was packed with great, gay events. But I doubt any of them was as much fun as the one I found myself at a couple of months ago.
It all started with a lame LGBT picnic in a downtown park, right next to Tel Aviv’s gay and lesbian resource centre. I arrived with my friend Mimi, a lefty dyke, and her five-year-old son Boaz, to find a rainbow flag and a small band of bored-looking Jewish queers. It was just hours before my only Friday night in Tel Aviv, and I was determined to find the best party possible.
One of the fags at the picnic, a young guy named Zohar, said he and a friend were planning to check out a gay Arab party. I asked him what that meant but he said he didn’t know – he’d never gone to one before. He gave me the address and encouraged me to check it out.
Hours later, after primping at Mimi’s, I handed the address to a cab driver. He didn’t have a clue where it was and neither did I. After all, I was a tourist in Israel. As I told my friends back home, I was there “to see what the fuss is all about.”
I was about to find out where the fuss was on that Friday night. The cabbie had to stop three times to ask for directions, until we finally came upon a warehouse district. Finally, upon hearing the address, a guy said, “That’s the gay party around the corner.” He didn’t look like he was involved with it but he didn’t look like he minded it, either.
“Do you think it’s all right if I go?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course,” he said.
I was a bit suspicious, since he pointed toward a dark alley. But when the cab turned, we suddenly found what I was looking for: gay men. And these weren’t just any gay men, they were the most beautiful group of gay men I’ve ever seen in my life.
There were about 50 guys, mostly wearing dark T-shirts and jeans, milling about and (in some cases) making out. Most of the guys had dark, tanned skin, dark brown eyes, thick black eyebrows and amazing physiques.
I heard music, which I followed into a large warehouse space. The entrance had a banner announcing the name of the host organization: Al-Qaws (Rainbow) for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society. A gorgeous guy at the entrance asked for 30 shekels ($8) and stamped my hand.
Inside, the party was sensational. There were about 200 sweaty guys – all around a massive bar – and just about everyone was shaking their hips, flailing their arms and belly-dancing to loud Arabic pop music. There was no border between the dancefloor and the rest of the party. The whole space was a dancefloor, with guys (many of them shirtless) moving to the beat in groups of three or four, singing along and switching partners between songs.
In the centre of it all, on top of the bar, was a drag queen dressed in a white wedding dress, enthusiastically lifting her skirt. And on a riser right behind her was Zohar, the Jewish guy I met at the picnic. He was there with another guy I saw that afternoon. At first I thought they were boyfriends, but they were so friendly with so many other guys around them that I couldn’t figure out if they were part of a twosome, a threesome, or a moresome. One thing’s for sure: they were having a wicked time.
At the end of the night, when everyone spilled out into the alley, I asked Zohar how many other Jewish guys were there. He shrugged and said he didn’t know. For him, it didn’t seem to matter. Then I found the organizer, a guy named Raafat, and asked for his estimate of the Jewish/Arab mix. Again, he shrugged and said he wasn’t counting. The party, he told me, was open to everyone.
When I got back to Mimi’s place, she and her partner Dana were still awake. They were fascinated, but not entirely surprised. In Israel, they admitted, Jews and Palestinians don’t often travel in the same social circles. But when it comes to the gay community, they said, there are a lot more connections than you might think.
Source: Xtra.ca
Thinking of visiting Israel, well: Bat Yam promenade to get 3 new hotels
Municipality advancing plan to turn central city into Israel’s new tourism Riviera. ‘As far as tourists are concerned, there is no different between a hotel located on Tel Aviv’s coast or on Bat Yam’s coast,’ official says
The Bat Yam Municipality is advancing a grandiose plan to turn the city into Israel’s new tourism Riviera. Three new hotels are being built along the Bat Yam coast, and the municipality has decided to allot five more plots for hotels in different areas across the city.
Erez Podemski, assistant director-general for development and strategy at the Bat Yam Municipality said Wednesday, “Some 2.6 million foreign tourists who visit Israel see the shoreline from Herzliya to Bat Yam as one metropolitan bloc, and as far as they are concerned there is no different between a hotel located on Tel Aviv’s coast or on Bat Yam’s coast, apart from the price and service with which Bat Yam can compete successfully.”
The three hotels being built are Bat Yam Beach and Bat Yam Sun by entrepreneur Yehoshua Gutman, and another hotel which will be called temporarily Top Ben.
All three four or five-star hotels will include about 300 rooms and large areas for commerce and conventions. The estimated cost of construction is NIS 240 million (about $62 million), excluding the price of the land. Bat Yam currently has only 530 hotel rooms.
Source: Ynetnews.com
Israeli professor creates birth control pill for men (Via Israel21c)
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By jamming the biochemical machinery of sperm, an Israeli professor has created a new pill that could finally place the responsibility of birth control with men.
The female birth control pill, commonly referred to as ‘The Pill,’ is not 100 percent effective, and some women’s bodies don’t react well to the extra hormones. Now, finally, a new birth control option for men is in the works, which would allow partners to share the responsibility, and let guys be in control of whether or not there will be any surprises in the procreation department.
Prof. Haim Breitbart of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University authored a breakthrough paper in 2006 describing how sperm survive in the uterus. Now the biochemist is taking those findings and using them against sperm. He’s developed a number of novel compounds that have no affect on male sex drive, but succeed in impairing the reproductive ability of the sperm. If all goes according to his plan, a new male birth control pill could be on the market within the next five years, he tells ISRAEL21c.
So far, the new pill dubbed the Bright Pill (a play on Brietbart’s name) has been tested on animal models in a pre-clinical setting, and has been found to work wonderfully on mice. “What we found is that by treating the mice with our molecule we can get sterility for a long period of time; in the lower dose, about one month, and in the higher dose we found three months of sterility.
“Later on the male mouse can become fertile. It’s reversible,” he promises.
Provided in pill form, but also tested as an injection, the male birth control solution was administered in two treatments over three days: One day on, one day off, one day on. In the larger dose group, it took about a week until the effects manifested themselves, but most importantly, the treatment does not appear to in any way affect the sex drive or the sexual behavior of the mice who received it.
“The mice behaved nicely, they ate and had sex”
“The mice behaved nicely,” Breitbart reports, “they ate and had sex; they were laughing, and everything, so all I can say is that we couldn’t see any behavioral side-effects – all their sex behavior was retained, which is a very important consideration for human men. A man who takes this pill could also be sexually active later on and have children.”
Rather than undergo an irreversible vasectomy, a man could sterilize himself for short periods, suggests Breitbart – probably one to three months depending on the dose. And, unlike the female pill, the male pill wouldn’t have to be taken every day.
Scientifically speaking, the effects of the male pill would be highly specific, meaning men would likely experience fewer side effects than do women who go on the pill. Careful not to reveal any of his trade secrets, Breitbart will divulge that the male pill is based on techniques in bioinformatics and microbiology and shows no sign of attacking any cells other than sperm cells.
Referring to the groundbreaking paper that he published in the journal Genes and Development, Breitbart says that the Bright Pill jams the sperm’s biochemical machinery. Disproving textbook science, he showed in the seminal paper that mature sperm cells synthesize new proteins in the uterus where they reside for up to three days or longer until fertilization of the egg takes place.
“We thought that since sperm can survive for three days or even longer, that there is another hypothesis: The sperm should renew their proteins because in order to get energy they need new proteins,” he tells ISRAEL21c.
In the mature sperm, messenger RNA (mRNA) is produced by DNA in the sperm’s nucleus and it is this mRNA, which directs protein synthesis in the sperm, Breitbart’s lab showed. In his breakthrough he describes how mitochondrial ribosomes are active in synthesizing nuclei-encoded mRNA proteins. This led to his realization that if he could stop protein synthesis in the sperm, they wouldn’t manage to survive in the uterus.
The Jewish stamp of approval
“We thought we could use this method to develop a male contraceptive,” Breitbart relates. Sperm are produced in the testes and then move to the epididymus, which is like a holding tank, and there can stay for a few days before encountering a female.
“If we can use a molecule which will inhibit the synthesis of certain proteins in sperm development, and it will stay in the sperm when it goes directly to the epididymus, we increase its chances for high efficiency. So far we know this works in mice,” he says.
The Bright Pill would have to be taken a week in advance, which should encourage deliberate, planned, safer sex. And it should be well received by religiously observant Jews. According to Jewish law, castration of any animal – human or non-human – is forbidden; not to mention that ‘spilling seed’ or ejaculating outside the female body is not permitted.
Also, for Jewish women who are allergic to the pill, the Breitbart solution provides more freedom in family planning, says the professor.
The Bright Pill is being submitted for a patent through Bar-Ilan University’s tech transfer company BIRAD, and Breitbart will continue his current studies for another year before moving on to primates. Working with his research associate Dr. Yael Gur, who is currently in the US, the two are seeking a $10 million investment to enable them to move on to the next stage of clinical advancement.
Source: Israel21c