Based on archival work and a series of interviews, this paper explores the Israeli dance world of the 1960s and 70s, focusing on queer men and women who took part in it, as dancers, choreographers, critics, patrons and directors. These decades saw the rise of famous Israeli dance companies, such as Bat Sheva, Bat Dor, and the Kibbutz dance company, working with world-renowned choreographers, such as Martha Graham and Jerome Robbins. Dance has a reputation, and indeed history, as a queer social space. In Israel too, gays and lesbians were some of the most famous and pivotal figures in the country`s modern dance history, as early as the 1920s and increasingly in the decades discussed in the paper. Still, this quality was contested by another trend of these decades: the stark increase in homophobia in the Israeli society. This paper describes the Israeli dance world of the time as a haven for queer existence, and a site for the creation of queer networks. Further, it examines the relative tolerance, and even acceptance, which queer men and women experienced as part of the dance world, in juxtaposition to their on-stage performance, characterised by rigid gender roles and the absence of homoerotic desire. The heteronormative on-stage performance, this paper claims, was necessary for the social containment of queer existence in the dance companies of the period, through the creation of a knowledge regime that kept gays and lesbians in a "transparent closet" - a semi-clandestine, tolerable open secret. Thus, this paper ends by drawing broader conclusions on the nature of the triadic relationship of performance, knowledge, and secrecy.