The gay city

I fear that this blog is very quickly turning into Yoel’s Various Homosexual Adventures, which is a road I definitely don’t want to go down. Nevertheless, as my visit in Israel comes to a close (I’m off to Barcelona tomorrow morning), I’ve gotten to thinking about Tel Aviv’s reputation as a very gay-friendly city, and what exactly that means.

A website calling itself Gay Tel Aviv Guide, in addition to showing me not even remotely appealing pictures of mud-covered men (presumably at the Dead Sea, but who knows), describes the city as such:

Tel Aviv, the 24hour non-stop city, has actually a population of only 400,000 people, most of them are young in age. With the #1 gay scene in the whole mediterranean area, amazing beach, good weather and other attactions in the country like Jerusalem and the Dead sea, Tel Aviv is definately a place you should check out on your next trip.

This all seems like totally standard tourist site rhetoric, until you scroll down a little on the “Start Here” page and find descriptions of various cruising sites in the city. I’m unconvinced that “cruising,” in the sense that this website is using it, means the same thing as cruising in the rest of the Western world, but it raises somewhat concerning questions about what it means for a city to be gay-friendly or a desirable destination for gay travel.

Certainly, Tel Aviv is going to be more gay-friendly (re: superficial things like holding hands in public) than, for instance, Tehran. That said, I think the appeal of the city now is that, over time, it has developed an environment in which it’s easy for gay tourists to meet and fuck each other. The goal of gay tourism, to the extent that such a thing even exists, is sex. What else is there? In the case of Tel Aviv (or even more generally), once the city has been characterized as gay-friendly and opened a few nightclubs and/or bathhouses, it doesn’t require much more than that to attract gay tourists, whose priorities seem to be limited to soaking up the sun and spreading STIs.

That said, I feel compelled to qualify the above statements in two ways:

First, my trip to Tel Aviv this time around has been decidedly low-key on the gay front. This mostly has to do with a complete lack of desire to engage in identifiably “gay” things, but also with the fact that, were I to decide that, yes, I want to experience Gay Tel Aviv to its fullest, I wouldn’t really know where to begin. A gay beach? A gay club? I’m not in the market for casual sex, so what else is there to do in such an environment other than look around and think to one’s self, Yeah, I’m gay, and so is everyone else around me. Where’s the appeal in that?

Second, I don’t mean to suggest that the only gay-themed activities in existence are gay clubs and gay beaches. A contemporary art gallery I went to in Tel Aviv featured a number of photographs by an Israeli artist that were on a theme of the simultaneous intimacy and anonymity of erotic photography — with the subjects, conveniently enough, being gay Israeli men. This, my critics all cry in unison, is what makes Tel Aviv a particularly gay-friendly city! Where else could you find a gallery full of photos hairy Jewish men jerking off?

(For the record, most of the photos were kind of hot. But that’s not at all the point.)

My answer to that, and feeling about Tel Aviv in general is: there’s nothing unique about gay life here that you couldn’t find anywhere else if you tried hard enough. Any modern art museum with a photography collection could just as easily showcase some Mapplethorpe photos and — presto! — they’re suddenly gay-themed. Likewise, any beach town with a gay club could serve the same purposes of providing ample opportunities for orange gays to become oranger and find sexual partners.

That’s not to say that Tel Aviv isn’t a beautiful city, or one not worth visiting. But, in gay circles, its reputation precedes it in a somewhat disproportionate way, and I’m not exactly clear as to why.