Coming Out In The Israeli Army

By Sagi Barkai,

The cold November rain fell heavily against the windows of our car. I sat in the front seat next to my dad with my sister and mother behind me. I could feel their nervous excitement: Sagi is finally going to the army. I sat in silence, all I could feel was fear. It was 2012 and I had just broken up with my girlfriend of one year and was about to step into the army for three. I thought of what lay ahead for me: sleeping with seven guys in one room, spending 24 hours a day with them, 7 days a week. Training with only men, eating with them, showering with them. I was scared most about the showers. I was gay, and I couldn’t even say it out loud to myself. Was I going to be able to hide it from them?

We turned into the compound and I said goodbye to my parents. I began my first day of training.

The first day passed, and the first week, and soon the first year. It wasn’t easy staying in the closet, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. By the time I made it to the showers at the end of the day I was too exhausted to notice the other men anyway. I just wanted to clean up and get out.

What was hard, however, was the masochistic, homophobic environment the army fostered. While on paper, army rules are liberal and accepting, the atmosphere there is anything but. Like in the playground, “gay” is the worst insult you could be called, and it was thrown around freely – and not just by soldiers. Commanders would bark orders and tell their men to be tough and strong and to not be faggots.

After a while this intense homophobia started to get under my skin, it started to annoy me. I remember once I was in the office of the high commander of the unit and he made a joke about a pink pen I was using, he said he hoped “I don’t belong to the other side.” I felt outraged, I didn’t think the high commander could say something like this. If you force every citizen to serve in a compulsory army for three years then it should be accepting of everybody, including LGBT+. I decided I had to do something.

People in my unit didn’t know a gay person and I realised if they knew I was gay it would break the stereotypes they held in their minds. So, at first, I told my 5-person-team. I knew most of them were liberal, progressive-thinking people, but there was one guy who was very homophobic. After I told him he completely changed his attitude. A few months later he even became good friends with another gay man – something that was unthinkable before. The fact that even my most homophobic friend could become so accepting motivated me to change the minds of more people around me.

At the beginning of my third year I was promoted to the role of commander. Along with several other commanders I oversaw a team of 25 soldiers. I decided to tell my fellow commanders I was gay, and in doing so found one of them was deeply in the closet.

However, I couldn’t tell my soldiers. It was against army policy for them to know anything about my personal life.

In the last week of the commanding period, and the last week of my military service, we had an educational seminar with the soldiers about values.

I asked the instructor of the seminar to give me one of the lectures, I wanted to use the opportunity to tell them I’m gay in a special way. I knew what a big influence I had over them. I was their commander for eight months, and even though I was tough and strict on them they felt almost like my children, and I knew they would respect anything I had to say.

I also knew they held homophobic attitudes. I realised I could influence not just their opinion on the LGBT+ community, but the opinion of future soldiers they would teach, the opinions of their friends, families, and their future children. I didn’t fit into the stereotype of a gay man so I knew I could break their preconceptions of gay people just by telling them I was gay. 

I didn’t tell them straight away. When they came into the classroom I told them we had a lesson about the LGBT+ community and that it was part of the seminar.

I asked them: how do you recognise a gay man or lesbian woman in the street? Their answers reflected the ingrained stereotypes they held: a gay man would be thin and feminine, could walk in a feminine way and would use feminine gestures. He would wear girlish clothes and talk in a funny way. A lesbian would be hairy, manly and tough. She would talk like a man and wouldn’t take care of her looks.

I was shocked by some of the answers, but also knew that many of the soldiers came from distant villages, and most had never met a gay person in their life.

Next, I asked them how many men they knew, in their whole life. They replied somewhere in the thousands, maybe more. Then I asked them, how many gay men do you know? A few of the soldiers answered one or two, but most fell silent. So, I told them that statistically they knew hundreds of gay men, they just didn’t know it because they were in the closet and that they were in the closet because our society, and the army, can be homophobic. I told them they didn’t know the gay people around them, and they didn’t know their difficulties. They didn’t know the struggle a gay person goes through when they realise they’re gay and how hard the process of self-acceptance is.

I told them I found a story online about a gay man and the process he went through when he realised he was gay at just 12 years old to when he fully accepted himself at 18 and came out of the closet at 20. I handed the soldiers the story and told them to read it. Afterwards we talked it through. The soldiers started to understand what LGBT+ people go through, how a homophobic society can burden gay people. I then told them that I was the one who wrote the story.

The next thing I saw was 25 pairs of shocked eyes. It was hard for them to fit me into the strict stereotypes they had about gay men. They then all started asking me questions, and we talked for nearly two hours – we talked instead of going to sleep, sleeping time in the army is very precious as we don’t get a lot of it, so I really appreciated this. Afterwards they all hugged me and went to bed. The next day, half of the soldiers came back to talk to me and told me how I had completely changed their perception of LGBT+ people and how they would treat gay people differently.

On the way home from the seminar I told my soldiers it was the most meaningful time I had in the army, and maybe my life. I told them how happy I was that I’d changed their attitudes and I asked them to be LGBT+ ambassadors, so the next time they see homophobia they step in and take the opportunity to change more people’s minds.

The next day, the 300 people in my unit heard about the seminar. Many people came and talked to me and asked me questions. They told me this was the first time in their lives they had met a real gay person, and that I wasn’t just a stereotype or someone on TV. I was the first gay warrior in the unit to come out of the closet, and within a few months more men in my unit started coming out. I felt I made a different to the atmosphere in the army, and in my own small way contributed to the LGBT+ community.