Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

I'm Eli.

I'm Irene.

And today we're talking about the Israeli poet Yon Avalak.

Before we start this episode, if you've listened to our episode on Oscar Wilde, you might

have noticed at the end of that we said we were going to talk about Freddie Mercury next.

We've made some changes to our schedule, so we will be talking about Freddie Mercury later this

month on the 15th, but today we're talking about Yorna.

We have some content warnings for this episode.

There are mentions of the first Arab-Israeli war and

death in the war. Discussions of drug use, including mentions of overdose, mentions of

abortion, discussions of mental illness and mentions of suicide. There is no suicide in the

episode, but there is mention of suicide, and discussions of institutionalisation and mentions

of medical malpractice in that context,

mentions of Parkinson's disease, mentions and descriptions of murder,

explicit discussions of sex and sadomasochism, mentions of violence and sexual assault,

and mentions of cancer and death from cancer.

We're also going to read and discuss some of Yonna's poem Teflin, which includes

the use of teflin in a violent and sexual context. There's also a brief mention of modern-day

homophobia in the Israeli education system. So if any of that is something you don't want to

listen to, feel free to skip this episode and check out any of our other episodes. So before we actually

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