It’s been a big year for openly gay Israeli pop star Ivri Lider. His first U.S. single, "Jesse," was released, exposing the singer to an entirely new fanbase and the music video has been in constant rotation on Logo (AfterElton.com’s parent company) ever since. He also performed a song in The Bubble, for which the singer also composed the score. If that weren’t enough, he was also selected as one of Out Magazine’s "Out 100" last month.

Gay blog Hunk du Jour scored an interview with the singer, in which he talks a bit about his upcoming Hebrew and English language albums and his ongoing professional relationship with director Eytan Fox. The singer addresses the fairly liberal attitude towards LGBT people in his native country and how things have changed since he first publicly came out in 2002:

I can definitely say there has been a shift. I think famous people coming out is an extremely important thing that helps to change lots of peoples' views. It also helps a lot of young people who are dealing with their sexuality and the feelings of being isolated and alone in the world. With regard to Israel, or at least Tel Aviv, you could probably call it one of the gayest cities in the world. For most people here, it's just not an issue.

The singer has also apparently found love since the last time we mentioned him on this blog:

I have a boyfriend for over a year now. His name is Mike Phifer and we met in New York. He moved to Israel nine months ago and now we live together here in Tel Aviv. I suppose I want the same thing everyone else wants in a man, someone who's smart, kind, cuddly, and really great in bed.

It’s definitely nice to see someone who’s managed to find worldwide success while making no apologies for being an out and proud gay man. Here’s hoping that Lider’s success continues when his new albums drop later this year. A U.S. tour is planned to begin sometime in March, before the album’s release.

You can watch the video for "Jesse" right over here.

What I'm thankful for in gay entertainment this year, in no particular order:

Neil Patrick Harris on "How I Met Your Mother" – One of the most underrated shows on TV and also one of my favorites. NPH deserves oodles of awards for his scene-stealing role as the self-centered, womanizing (yet still totally lovable) Barney. It’s a performance that’s legen... wait for it... dary!

Alex Sanchez’s The God Box – I’ve been on a gay young adult fiction kick recently and just finished Sanchez’s latest. I'm a big fan of his Rainbow Boys series, so my expectations were high going into this one. It didn’t disappoint. I’m always impressed at how well Sanchez is able to blend education and entertainment in his novels without ever making the reader feel as though they're being beaten over the head with the nutritious stuff.

Ugly Betty- Much has been written about the show on this site, so I’ll just say that I adore it. It’s the gayest show currently on network television and the most consistently entertaining.

Enchanted – I cannot wait to see this movie. I know it’s not technically gay, but it might as well be: For once Disney is actually poking fun at itself; the adorable Amy Adams (who’s consistently fantastic in every movie she’s in – just watch her Oscar-nominated performance in Junebug and tell me she doesn’t break your heart) plays an animated princess who gets transported to real-life New York City; it’s a musical; James Marsden plays prince charming, sings, and looks damn good doing it; and Susan Sarandon looks like she's having the time of her life chewing the scenery as the evil drag queen Narissa.

Gay Film Festivals – For the past few years, I've been attending my local gay film fest. It's always tons of fun and my moviegoing year wouldn't be half as gay without it. There's something heartening about being in an audience of GLBT people and seeing our own stories played out on the big screen. True, independent gay cinema is notorious for having more than it's share of awful films, but the fun is digging up the gems of the bunch. This year, my favorites included: The Bubble, For the Bible Tells Me So, The King and the Clown, Red Without Blue, and The Curiosity of Chance.

And finally, I’m thankful for my wonderful boyfriend, Matt. Hey, he entertains me, so I say he counts.

The gay-related news out of Israel of late has been dominated by their fundie wingnuts rioting in the street over gay pride events held this month in Jerusalem. Fortunately, that isn't the only news of gay interest to come out of the strife-torn country. Just this week, the Israeli paper Haaretz did a very in depth interview with Israeli pop star Ivri Lider. If that name is unfamiliar to you, Lider, a huge star in his home country, came out publicly five years ago and has nonetheless remained a wildly popular even among his girl groupie fans.

In the interview, Lider talks about breaking up with his long term partner, how and why he stayed in the closet for so long (he knew he was gay from a young age, but only came out at twenty-seven after having his first same-sex experience three years earlier), and why he came out publicly despite the risks. On that matter, he says:

I also did it for my own mental health, to be a free person, and also for my audience. I have a social commitment. It's the commitment of an artist. I think it's a right I have and I'm glad I acted on it. A lot of famous people have this right and don't use it. For me, the desire to be a better and braver person exceeded the concern about whether it would make me lose fans. If I hadn't done it, I'd have disappointed myself.

Hmmm, for some reason I find myself thinking about a Lebanese born pop star who now resides in the U.K.

Lider has just put out his first U.S. single titled "Jesse", about a teenage boy in love with another boy. Kudos to Lider for not only not playing coy, but for putting out a song like this. Lider also has a song in Eytan Fox's new movie The Bubble (which we reviewed just last week). It's a version of George Gershwin's "The Man I Love" and both are worth a couple of minutes of your time.

It started with a few gay men, a sheet for a screen, and a bunch of homemade films. Today, it's a huge and prestigious international event, held in the week and a half leading up to Pride in the gayest city of all, my hometown of San Francisco.

Frameline has been teasing us all month with its promised new website (their old website really was so Web 1.0), and they finally made it live. And if you go there, you can see all kinds of very beautiful things, such as all the festival trailers back to 1990 (this year's is at the end of this post), a place to buy tickets starting this Friday, an interactive Festival calendar so you can keep track of all the films you want to see and find out before it's too late if two of them are at the exact same moment so you can have yourself cloned, plus breaking news on schedule changes and ticket availability.

It's also very pretty.

So, what's playing this year?

We've already blogged about The Witnesses (showing June 14) and The Bubble (showing June 18), but the one I got all excited reading about is an American film by Robert Gaston called 2 Minutes Later (pictured at top).

I totally want this film to be brilliant, because the description alone makes me all breathless. Frameline describes it as "an episode of 'Silk Stalkings' if it were directed by Robert Mapplethorpe" and it's not impossible that could be the perfect idea for a movie. Here's the plot:

When semi-closeted insurance adjuster Michael Dalmar lands a case in Philadelphia, he reaches out to his estranged twin brother Kyle, a successful — but abusive — photographer in the City of Brotherly Love. When Michael finds Kyle missing and is mistaken for being the swinging photographer himself, he decides to use his brother’s identity to work the Philly art scene for clues. With the help of lesbian repo girl-turned-P.I. Abigail Marks, Michael discovers a long line of jilted male models who could have had it in for Kyle. Danger and drama lurk around every corner, but Michael soon learns to loosen up and enjoy the pleasures of his much naughtier brother’s life.

It's showing Thursday, June 21, 9:30 PM at the Victoria Theater, which is very much the festival's third string venue, so it made me worry this movie won't be as fabulous as it sounds. Still, it's not like I haven't done worse things for much longer periods of time, so I'll probably see it either way.

So check out the new website and the full schedule, and also this year's trailer:

Gay Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox's last film, Walk on Water, was the top-grossing film of all time in Israel, so when political upheaval in that country pretty much tanked the box office changes of his latest film, The Bubble, it was a bitter blow. This year's looking a lot sweeter, though, as the film is winning awards, critical acclaim, and a distribution deal on the international and gay film festival circuits.

"The bubble" refers to the trendy urban neighborhood where Noam (Ohad Knoller), an Israeli, lives with a straight female friend, Lulu (Daniella Wircer) and a gay male friend, Yali (Alon Friedmann). He meets Ashraf (Yousef "Joe" Sweid), a Palestinian, at a checkpoint one day, and they end up falling in love. Ashraf joins the three friends in their bubble, and for a time, everyone's happy.

Of course, as the title implies, the bubble does eventually burst. This is, after all, Israel and Palestine, and like all Romeo and Juliet stories, it was never going to have a happy ending.

The Bubble picked up a $5000 prize for the HBO juried award for the best fiction feature at last week's Miami Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, as well as the prestigious International Confederation of Art Cinemas Award (CICAE) at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

The film will show on May 17 at the Boston Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and will begin its US theatrical release in late summer. Check out the trailer after the jump for more.