Hot Guys” in Tel Aviv “

“Hot Guys” in Tel Aviv Pride Tourism in Israel Amit Kama and Yael Ram ABSTRACT: The LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) community is warmly embraced by the city of Tel Aviv. This phenomenon is exemplified by the fact that the Tel Aviv City Hall has been taking a leading part in the organization, financing, and promotion of Pride parades and events in recent years. The present article analyzes a quantitative survey of overseas participants in the 2016 Pride events in Tel Aviv. It explores the motivations, attitudes, satisfaction, and behaviors of tourists, both LGBTQ+ and non- LGBTQ+. The results show that Tel Aviv is perceived as gay friendly by all participants, regardless of their affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community. We discuss the advantages of being a gay-friendly city via high visibility and social inclusion. Finally, we address ‘pinkwashing’, an umbrella term employed to describe the efforts by Israeli authorities to promote a positive image of Israel despite its questioned geopolitical reputation. KEYWORDS: LGBTQ+, pinkwashing, Pride Parade, Tel Aviv, tourism Israel is routinely covered by international media in the context of war, terror, and bloodshed. Its image is embedded in and framed by the Israeli- Palestinian conflict (Philo and Berry 2011). Notwithstanding this well- known phenomenon, recent years have seen a dramatic burgeoning of international media attention focused on Israeli LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning) political achievements and trials and tribulations. Furthermore, the international LGBTQ+ public sphere has recently been inundated with stories that depict Israel, and Tel Aviv in particular, as a haven for LGBTQ+, especially gay men. For instance, in a worldwide survey conducted in 2011 by GayCities (2012),1 Tel Aviv was named “Best City.” This article’s objective is to understand Israel Studies Review, Volume 35, Issue 1, Spring 2020: 79–99 © Association for Israel Studies doi:10.3167/isr.2020.350106 • ISSN 2159-0370 (Print) • ISSN 2159-0389 (Online) 80 | Amit Kama and Yael Ram how this bifurcation affects tourists, both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+, who visit Tel Aviv during Pride Parades. It also examines how Tel Aviv and Israel benefit from these events. The article is organized as follows. First, a literature review presents various themes regarding LGBTQ+ tourism in general and specifically in Israel, where geohistorical circumstances encompass questions of equality, human rights, and an ongoing geopolitical conflict. The conceptualization of ‘pinkwashing’—marketing strategies promoted by Israeli authorities to enhance the positive image of the state by portraying it as a haven for the LGBTQ+ community while deflating issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—is elaborated and will be questioned in light of the findings. Then four research hypotheses are discussed. The first two focus on the implications of the Pride Parade for Tel Aviv and Israel, while the last two concentrate on the behaviors and preferences of LGBTQ+ tourists. The next sections describe the quantitative research method and explain the findings. The theoretical and practical contributions of the results are discussed in the last section of the article. LGBTQ+ Tourism Recent decades have witnessed a growing academic interest in LGBTQ+ individuals and communities. Various disciplines have been inundated with a vast empirical and theoretical literature that delves into a large array of aspects pertaining to LGBTQ+ identity, social relations, politics, representa tions, and so on. The emerging academic interest in LGBTQ+ tourism is quite new in this rich field, but it mostly focuses on gay men (Vorobjovas-Pinta and Hardy 2016). It can be traced to the publication of the first academic article (Holcomb and Luongo 1996) and the first book on this subject (Clift et al. 2002). The present study, which, as far as we know, is the first of its kind to be carried out in Israel, may help determine whether this country’s singularities have any bearing on the experience of tourists from abroad and their subjective assessment of their visit. LGBTQ+ tourism is, inter alia, the result of lifelong experiences of being disenfranchised, discriminated against, and the target of heterosexist practices (the wide-ranging array of formal, legal, and governmental practices that discriminate against and exclude LGBTQ+) and of homophobia (cog- nitive and affective attitudes and behaviors exhibited by individuals or social groups against LGBTQ+) (Sears 1997). LGBTQ+ tourism differs from non-LGBTQ+ tourism as it constitutes an outlet to relieve and alleviate minority stress that has developed from prejudice, rejection, hiding one’s sexual orientation, and discrimination (Meyer 2003), all of which create “Hot Guys” in Tel Aviv | 81 a hostile and stressful environment that is suffered by many LGBTQ+ individuals on a quotidian basis. It presents an opportunity to escape into friendly circumstances where LGBTQ+ are welcome and homophobic hostilities or threats are minimized, and where they can behave freely and independently of oppressive societal sanctions felt at home. LGBTQ+ holidays also provide a way to construct and validate individual and collective identities (Hughes 2002). Indeed, “gay travel motivations usually arise from the opportunity to feel free and a possibility to articulate ‘gayness’ in a non-judgmental space … and a sense of belong- ing to a particular community” (Vorobjovas-Pinta and Hardy 2016: 412). Consequently, most LGBTQ+ tourists prefer destinations celebrated as friendly—with spatial concentrations of venues, accommodations, and events that cater to LGBTQ+—where socializing with predominantly or exclusively other LGBTQ+ is easy and safe. Host cultures, cities, and/or states that are not perceived as threatening (Hughes and Deutsch 2010) thus become popular sites whose reputations are consolidated via word of mouth and the tourism industry catering to LGBTQ+. Pride parades have recently been utilized by various cities around the globe to attract LGBTQ+ tourists with two main objectives in mind. First, for the LGBTQ+ person, participation “provides opportunities … to reaf- firm his particular sexual identity, his membership in an imagined community, and to actively contribute to the production of a cultural form” (Waitt and Markwell 2006: 218). These carnivalesque rites of passage, despite being “magnets for commercialisation” (Kates and Belk 2001: 392), result in the “social legitimisation of gay and lesbian community” (ibid.: 415). For the organizing authority (usually a city hall), such events consti- tute a source of income, and they are considered to be economically lucra- tive venues. Official sponsorship and endorsement of Pride events result from the acknowledgment that these events not only attract large numbers of tourists who spend money during their visit, but can also lead to further visits. Alexandra Chasin (2001) laments the ‘selling out’ of the gay and lesbian movement for equality and civil rights and the rise of consumeristic culture that infuses this community. She notes that the political concept of Pride has been commodified and turned into a consumeristic apparatus. Lisa Duggan (2002) calls this rather new phenomenon ‘homonormativ- ity’—that is, a politics that challenges neither heteronormative assump- tions nor neo-liberal capitalism. Homonormative LGBTQ+ pursue and aspire for assimilation within the social and political order without chal- lenging the status quo. In the same vein, and despite her blatant critique of the commodification and commercialization aspects of the parades along- side her uneasiness with the homonormalization and policing of the queer body and community, Lynda Johnston (2005: 77) elaborates on the various 82 | Amit Kama and Yael Ram benefits cities accrue thanks to these events: “The site of pride parades do not just use cities as their spatial back drop, rather, cities derive their tourist meaning from the queer bodies that parade in them.” It is thus not surprising to learn that InterPride (2016–2017), the International Associa- tion of Pride organizers, has identified 971 Pride events worldwide. Pride Parades in Tel Aviv Pride events—in particular the annual parade commemorating the Stone- wall riots of 1969 and celebrating LGBTQ+’s demand for full social, cultural, and legal inclusion—provide opportunities for LGBTQ+ people to assert their social and individual identities and help consolidate a sense of community, especially in a world that tends to shun and shame them. The first LGBTQ+ public event in Israel took place in Tel Aviv in 1993: it was attended by a few dozen LGBTQ+ and attracted as many curious bystand- ers.This humble event was organized and financed by the Society for the Protection of Personal Rights, an LGBTQ+ Israeli organization. After sev- eral years of repeated requests by the Society, the Tel Aviv municipality agreed to assist and has gradually become the sole producer of the annual parade (Kama 2011).2 As of 2007, the Tel Aviv City Hall has been involved in all aspects of the organization, financing, and promotion of the parade. These efforts include appointing an LGBTQ+ city councilor to be in charge, authorizing alloca- tions from the city budget, promoting the event overseas, and the like. Tel Aviv actually begins to celebrate Pride weeks in advance when the city’s main arteries are already clad with rain bow flags, the international sym- bol of the LGBTQ+ community. This munici

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