Danny Kaplan's book on Israeli conscripts who, after three years of military duty, emerged from their service as mature gay men offers an absorbing look at the consequences of maintaining a stigmatized sexual orientation in a most inhospitable social environment. This is not an ordinary ethnographic work. Kaplan, a psychologist by training, did not observe his subjects during their army service. Instead, he conducted in-depth interviews with gay men who had just completed their active military duty. The series of eight eloquently narrated life histories drawn from the larger pool of interviewees details their narrators' survival strategies in that citadel of Israeli machismo. It reveals a pattern of compartmentalization between the men’s inner, hidden erotic attraction and their public behavior and display of sexual identity.

Kaplan's interviewees did not describe their days in the army as a time of suffering. On the contrary, they generally managed to integrate successfully into their units, both in combat and social situations. They appear to have built mental and emotional barriers against the sexual temptation inherent in living closely in the company of attractive men. Kaplan argues, however, that the long army service was ultimately instrumental in leading his subjects, shortly before their return to civilian life, into the liberating and final stage of "coming out." Turning to the theoretical legacy of Victor Turner, Kaplan writes, “It is intriguing that so many of the interviewees began that process [of coming out] when they were still within the confines of their service, often at the very last stretch. . . . What may be at work here is a cultural state of liminality—an unstable position occurring in the rite of passage from one normative social structure to another" (p. 157).

The men in Kaplan’s study are generally drawn from the more well-off, better-educated, secular sectors of Israeli society. They also volunteered to participate in his research. To what extent that record of painless army experience and safe passage to gay identity applies to gay recruits from less comfortable social backgrounds is difficult to conclude from this work.

The field of gay and lesbian studies is new in the Israeli academic tradition. Israeli anthropologists had avoided a subject that seemed threatening in their small-scale, relatively intimate society, in which family life, marriage, and children have constituted basic societal values since the days of its founding. Readers of this review, then, will not be surprised to learn that I conducted my own research on gay life in New York City. Kaplan's book is a most rewarding project and an indication of a new era in the landscape of homosexuality research in Israel.