“I Was Not Able To Live a Double Life”: Giora Manor, the Kibbutz, and the Transparent Closet

"I prefer men" stated Giora Manor in an interview conducted with him in June 1996 in one of Israel`s Kibbutz movements` magazines. "I was not able to do what many of my friends did, to marry a woman although this is not what they actually wanted. I was not able to live a double life".
Manor was born in 1926 in Prague, fled the city just before the Nazi occupation, and was raised by his uncle in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq. He grew up to become a prominent figure in Israeli cultural life – as a theatre director, the initiator of Lehaqat HaNahal, a journalist and a writer of radio schemes, and especially in the Israeli dance scene - as a dance critique and researcher. Besides, he led a second life, somewhat more hidden, as a homosexual man.
Manor`s story offers a rare opportunity to examine the lives of homosexual men in Israel, and specifically on a kibbutz, in a time when "unnatural sex" was illegal. Based on archival work, a series of interviews with the Kibbutz`s elders, and Manor`s own writing, this paper will explore the dynamics of the homosexual "closet" in the Kibbutz during the first decades after Israel`s independence. The Kibbutz, as a small and intimate community, left little room for privacy and secrecy. This paper offers the Transparent Closet, an open secret, policed by rumors and gossip, as a way to understand the homosexual existence within the Kibbutz.
Through this specific case, the paper addresses broader tensions that are part and parcel of every Kibbutz history: individual versus collective, private versus public, and community versus the deviant.