im having an out of body experience
im having an out of body experience
There was this summer camp near where I grew up aligned with Habonim Dror, the “Labor Zionist Youth Movement”. Had a friend who’d gone for years with his sister, and when one of our friends came out as gay his first boyfriend was working there as a counselor (well I think at that time he was still saying “bisexual”, which we took as “either gay or looking for attention”, which apologies to the actual male bisexuals but when a 17 year old boy so declared in the late ‘90s, chances were good) so we visited sometimes.
First time we drove over one summer while camp was in session the boyfriend was still working so we got up in a treehouse and smoked pot, eventually some adult came by, greeted us in Hebrew, greeted us again in English when it was clear we had no idea what he said, and walked off. It was that kind of place. I don’t know how Zionist it was still (they were vaguely upset about the plight of the Palestinians) or how Labor (that summer they tried to do some role-playing for the kids about the bad capitalism only to find the kids rooting for the capitalist figure as a sort of Santa Claus of consumerism, it was I think ‘99 and history was still over), though I think kids who stayed in the programs long enough ended up spending some time on one of the remaining kibbutzim.
Honestly that was probably of a kind with the Birthright thing - “hey, suburbanowhere bougies-in-training, come visit Israel: a beautiful land full of fun young military hardbodies who share your pop culture and want to sex you up”. Israel is good at that shit.
Anyway one night we were hanging in the counselors’ rec cabin, smoking cigarettes when some girl - this might have been the one who could recount from memory all 98 people she’d ever kissed - said that she had found one of her kids - actually, one of her [hebrew word for a kid between 6th and 7th grade]s - sniffling in the grass that day. And when she’d tried to comfort her, the girl sobbed that all the other kids were exploring their bisexuality and she felt like a left-out failure, and so the counselor reassured her that no, it was totally okay and valid to be straight.
We all got to shake our heads and have a chuckle at that one.
