In a play that's stirred up a storm in L.A., a Palestinian writer creates a relationship that defies two taboos

NEAR YEAR'S END, EZER Weizman sparked a brief if furious spat with Israel's gay community. At issue was the "shoot from the lip" Israeli president's expression of antipathy, during a Q&A session with students, toward people disposed to what he clearly regards as unnatural acts. A subsequent meeting between Weizman and gay activists elicited something akin to an apology, and the matter was left to fade away.

In Los Angeles, meanwhile, a gay Israeli was at the center of another flap - the controversy around a two-act play at Hollywood's Los Angeles Playhouse by Palestinian playwright-actor Saleem Azzouqa. Heralded by the Los Angeles Times as a "compelling piece with heartfelt emotion" due to the "daring" author's "frank treatment of his subject," "Salam Shalom" was slated to run through the end of January before moving to San Francisco and possibly to Israel.

Azzouqa plays Nabeel, a Palestinian graduate student at UCLA who cannot decide if he is more dismayed to learn that his new roommate, Yaron (Mark Irvinsen), is Israeli or that he is gay. His predicament is complicated by his own tentative emergence from the closet. Nabeel grew up in a West Bank village where homosexuality is regarded as a mark of sickness and depravity. In Los Angeles, he finds the freedom to consider his own sexuality unencumbered by the traditional social consequences.

There are, however, other repercussions. Proudly Israeli and unrepentantly gay, the feline Yaron launches a playful, and eventually successful, pursuit of the prickly Palestinian. The roommates become a campus item, prompting at least one incensed Arab student to get to the heart of what appears to be distressing some Arab-Americans who have seen the play.

"I don't care about your sexual preferences," declares Malek (Michael Desante), who eventually betrays Nabeel to his father.

"But to be f---ed by a Jew?!"

"Most people didn't seem to have a problem with an Arab and a Jew being involved," Azzouqa, 35, told The Jerusalem Report. "But some Arabs asked why the Israeli's the aggressor and the Palestinian more submissive. When I opened the play as a one-act last year, one lady asked why I had made Yaron the tall, gorgeous one, and Nabeel the short and ugly one.' I said, Excuse me?!'

As portrayed by the fair-skinned, green-eyed Azzouqa, Nabeel may not be quite as tall or self-possessed as his Israeli counterpart, but the play is hardly a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast." Rather, it's an earnest, if occasionally overwrought treatment of the kind of star-crossed relationships that have long been a staple of Israeli literature and film. Usually (though not always), though, such stories, like Amos Oz's "My Michael," involved Israeli women being drawn to the ostensibly feral sexuality they perceive in Arab men.

Fables about gay Israeli-Palestinian relationships, however, remain a rarity. In part, this is a function of the low regard both societies hold for homosexuality. But as with most other facets of Arab-Israeli relationships, it is also impossible to consider such pairings without considering their political underpinnings.

The strength of Azzouqa's play, quite apart from any inherent artistic merits, is that while it contemplates these underpinnings, they are not permitted to overpower the individuality of the characters. Still, given the autobiographical nature of the play, it's no surprise the Palestinian character is more fleshed out, and perhaps more sympathetically treated than the Israeli. "Saleem," observed the San Diego Weekly, referring to Azzouqa by his stage name, "gives the role such authenticity that one wonders how strongly Salam Shalom' would play with someone else."

"The play," acknowledges Azzouqa, "is based on my story. I became involved with an Israeli of Libyan-American descent, who, as in the play, returned to Tel Aviv, where he manages his family's retail businesses. But I personally know at least four other gay couples here in Los Angeles, in which one partner is Israeli, the other Arab. That which is forbidden is most wanted. I should know - every time I've been attracted to someone, he's either Jewish or Israeli.

"But I suppose you can also compare the sexuality of the two characters to the state of their respective national identities. The Israelis have established themselves nationally and internationally. They have been out of the closet' for a long time. But the Palestinians are only now beginning to come out. We are still trying to establish our identities."

Saleem Azzouqa's identity was forged in Saudi Arabia, where his father, a native of Circassian descent of the West Bank town of Jenin, worked as a caterer for various international concerns. Saleem graduated with a BA in business administration from the American College in Dhahran, and at the age of 24 left for graduate work in marketing at Colorado State. He did not begin coming out until 1989, though, when he arrived in L.A. to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.

AZZOUQA MET YARON AT A party hosted by another gay Israeli. In Israel, the Intifada raged, and the two were initially quite wary of each other. "But we were also tremendously attracted too. In two months, we were dating; in four, we moved in with each other. For one year, it was really the best period of my life."

Azzouqa rejects the view that Yaron is an aggressor, Nabeel the object of sexual and political exploitation. Yaron, he says, was simply more assertive and up front about who he is. "I was shyer, still trying to find my way. There is a huge population of Israelis in Los Angeles," recalls Azzouqa, "and I realized that what I was conditioned to expect was not what I was seeing. They were not as ugly or scary as I had imagined.

"I saw people who were human beings. They were trying to live their lives and make ends meet. These were tired of insecurity and war, and wished to live their lives in harmony with everyone else."

Azzouqa, who though he's never lived in Israel or the West Bank, has visited, is aware of the progress made by Israeli gays in recent years. Despite general societal attitudes not so different from Weizman's, a gay subculture thrives in Tel Aviv, gays may now serve in the IDF without the fear of blackmail or persecution that existed only a decade ago, and unprovoked invective from prominent political figures is no longer suffered in silence.

Arab society, he says, has not evolved along similar lines. Homosexual acts abound, but if performed by men who are either married or who do not identify themselves as homosexuals, they are regarded as a useful outlet in a society that cannot otherwise countenance any kind of sex outside of marriage. Also, people tend to differentiate among those who do and those who are done to.

"But being openly gay in the Middle East is degrading," Azzouqa told The Report. "People think that you are a hustler, a hooker, submissive, the lowest of the low. This isn't the case in cities like Cairo or in tourist meccas like Morocco and Tunisia. I would say that Cairo, which hosts the Egyptian film industry, and Beirut, which has always been an open, cosmopolitan city, are now regarded as the West Hollywoods of the Middle East. But you don't see this openness in Jordan, and you certainly don't see it in Jenin."

In L.A., according to Azzouqa, gay Arab men (though not yet women) have found a public voice, largely due to the establishment of a support group called the Gay and Lesbian Arab-American Society, which, he says, eventually attracted non-Arab Middle Easterners as well, including some Iranians, Turks and a few Jews.

"The local Arab community," he says, "expressed a lot of resentment at the group's creation. They insisted there are no gays in the Arab world. But this kind of thing only makes us more assertive. Sooner or later, Arab society will have to accept us. But it's going to be a long haul.

"We're looking into taking the show to the Acre Festival (in Israel). But I also got a call recently from a local Arab producer who wanted to take it to an Arab country. There was only one thing - couldn't I make Yaron a woman? I said, OK, but then let's also make Nabeel a woman.'

" No, no,'" he said, " Nabeel must be a man!'"

" Honey,' I said, that just doesn't work for me.'"

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