The progressive Orient: Gay tourism to Tel Aviv and Israeli ethnicities

Abstract

Tel Aviv is becoming a hotspot for gay tourism through the support of municipal and national forces. The city is marketed as a Middle Eastern gay utopia, drawing tourists due to its location, LGBT nightlife, and Oriental flavor. Meanwhile, local Israeli LGBT individuals strive to produce themselves as Western, both performatively and politically. This paper discusses how the Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individuals utilize Israeli ethnicities. We argue that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as a Middle Eastern global city, which we term the Progressive Orient. Reinforcing the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries, while embracing Orientalist images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing also differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness illustrated by an emerging gay Mizrahi culture.

Keywords

Gay tourism Mizrahi/Ashkenazi ethnicity LGBT progress LGBT in Israel pinkwashing Orientalism

Introduction

The field of LGBT tourism intersects discourses of travel, capitalism, and consumerism with cultural criticism (Puar, 2002c). Moreover, it reflects an assemblage of discourses on modern citizenship (Bell, 1994), marketing, and identity politics (Johnston, 2005), which have not yet been discussed in the context of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a fascinating example of a city that has been promoted in the last 20 years (amongst other initiatives) via gay tourism. It has become a space of mainstreaming and belonging for the Israeli LGBT community (Hartal and Sasson-Levy, 2016; Kama, 2011). Featuring a Municipality-funded Gay-Center, it is popularly thought of as a local heaven for gays. Moreover, the Municipality helps promote gay culture and belonging by sponsoring and producing the Pride Parade, as well as by launching campaigns to promote gay men’s tourism to the city.

Israel and Tel Aviv specifically are fractured ethnically, religiously, and nationally. In Tel Aviv, there are both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim (Jews of European versus North African and Middle-Eastern descent, respectively), and both secular and religious Jews as well as Arabs. How can such a stratified and heterogeneous society, which includes significant conservative spaces, be considered a liberal and tolerant space? Ethnic divisions, we argue, play an unexpected role in constituting LGBT spaces and culture in the city. We investigate production of place through diverse usages of Israeli ethnicities, specifically through gay tourism promoted by Tel Aviv Municipality, the state, commercial actors, and LGBT individuals.¹ Thus, this paper asks: how and to what end do the gay tourist campaigns and city branding use Jewish and Arab ethnicities and play on the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes? We will discuss the ways this Israeli gay ethnic formation, which we call the “Progressive Orient” to signify a combination of global and oriental, functions as a mode of national incorporation, turning the city into a space that facilitates Israeli ethnic gay embodiments.

We argue that top-down usages of Mizrahi ethnicity (by the government and travel agencies) reinvent Tel Aviv as an exotic, sexy, and progressive space for gay men tourists which is in tension with the simultaneous production of the city as Western. This construction, we claim, allows for a more nuanced understanding of how local sexual and ethnic identities are perceived, embodied, manipulated, and performed. Specifically, we will show that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as a Middle Eastern global city. Reinforcing the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries and embracing Orientalist images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness. In other words, the intersection of neoliberalism and the politics of gay tourism to Tel Aviv created a new space for a local gay (Mizrahi) culture. Simultaneously, this spatial politics maintained postcolonial politics of homonationalism and pinkwashing.

In the following section, we introduce literature on critical sexual tourism politics and LGBT subject formations outside the West. Next, we discuss ethnicities in Israel and specifically, the interlacing of ethnicity and sexuality discourses. Following the “Methodology” section, we present our analysis. In order to construct the argument, the findings are divided into four subsections which were developed through the analysis of the empirical data. Each theme is devoted to an aspect of Tel Aviv’s spatial characterization. The first subsection—(sexual) Westernization processes—reflects past understandings of Tel Aviv as Western through narratives of American LGBT activism. The second—the progressive Orient—examines the marketing of gay tourism to the city using motifs of Tel Aviv as an Oriental space where “ethnic” connotes sexiness (and the exotic). The third—negotiating sexual authenticity—demonstrates how gay men’s Mizrahi culture is produced via dominant cultural representations drawn from gay men’s culture and from gay tourism ethnography. Finally, the fourth subsection—dislocating Tel Aviv (from Israel)—investigates Tel Aviv on a larger scale, accentuating the need to symbolically dislocate the city from Israel in order to present it as an LGBT safe space. This perspective allows to view the contradiction between Tel Aviv—the liberal space and Israel (and the Middle East)—the conservative space, as a binary contributing to the enhancement of the pinkwashing logic. Thus, as we elaborate below, ethnicization processes take on different meanings on diverse scales: in Tel Aviv, the combination of Mizrahi ethnicity with sexuality symbolizes the city’s sexual attractiveness, whereas outside it, Mizrahi ethnicity still represents backwardness and homophobia.

Gay tourism: A non-Western perspective

The relationship between global cities and LGBT cultures and their status as spaces of belonging for LGBT individuals, organizations, and culture is a well-studied phenomenon. Sexuality is known to be a primary and fundamental force in everyday life in cities (Hubbard, 2011; Hubbard et al., 2016; Oswin, 2018). Scholars (Bell, 2001; Bell and Binnie, 2004; Markwell, 2002; Rushbrook, 2002) have noted that over the past two decades, there has been a major turnaround, with government, municipal, and business support of LGBT tolerance added to the mix, enabling LGBT politics and culture to metaphorically “step into the light” and be gladly promoted by local establishments. Nevertheless, there are relatively few studies devoted to the gay tourism industry as a major sociocultural and urban phenomenon worldwide (but see Cieri, 2003; Hughes, 2003; Johnston, 2005, 2007; McCormick, 2011; Markwell, 2002; Puar, 2002b; Visser, 2002; Waitt, 2006; Waitt and Markwell, 2006; Waitt et al., 2008), and none that deal specifically with Tel Aviv.²

The understanding of queer tourism as exclusively consumerist and depoliticized has been undercut by some scholars (Binnie and Klesse, 2011; De Jong, 2016; Johnston, 2005), who claim that pride parades should be understood as “parties with politics” that reconstruct identities, spaces, and bodies (Browne, 2007; see also Waitt and Stapel, 2011). Despite the politicization of the field, only a few studies specifically discuss sex tourism of White Western gay men to global “south” destinations (Cabezas, 2004; Padilla, 2007). Thus, intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and nationalism have received little attention within the study of LGBT tourism (Puar, 2002a). One of the scholars who does utilize such an intersectional approach is Moussawi (2013), who discusses gay men’s tourism to Beirut. He claims that, although representations of Beirut by tourists abandon the East/West binary, they end up introducing essentialist Orientalist understandings of people and places, failing to include the intersectional experiences of Middle Eastern men. Considering that the foundational understanding of LGBT subjectivity is Western based, such a portrayal of LGBT individuals in the Middle East is not surprising. Gay tourism, specifically to non-Western destinations, is directly linked to sexual consumption and to consumption of non-Western LGBT places.

Michael Warner (1993) argues that the queer subject is White and universal (see also Smith, 2010). Criticizing this universal discourse, Hoad (2000) claims that homosexuality is “an identity that travels” (151), underlining that, outside Western contexts, narratives of sexual identities are part of a colonial legacy. Such legacies have been contested by queer theorists, who claim that sexual and racial processes are always already mutually constituted (Oswin, 2008). Bobby Benedicto’s (2008) discussion of Manila and the bakla, for example, allows for a rethinking of the “erasure of othered gay men” (319), showing how class shapes the relationship with the global/local, articulating body formations and subjectivities. In his analysis, Livermon (2012) shows how the White queer body is emblematic of human rights and progressive discourses, promoting South Africa as a queer friendly tourist destination, while leaving the Black queer body as a “threat to African culture and tradition” (302). Livermoon also shows how terms in the local vernacular to describe sexual positioning, acts, and performances are reworked into sexual identity categories that at times challenge Western understandings of sexuality. This critique is echoed by Rofel (2007), who, in her discussion of sexualities in China, aims to disrupt neoliberal homogeneous global sexual identities, thus uncovering a globalized logic that colonized sexual imagination.

Although it has ensued just as much, the (LGBT) subject proliferation that has been widely documented in the West has not been chronicled nearly as much in the Middle East. Massad (2002) argues that projections of lesbian and gay identities onto non-Western individuals can be dangerous. Within the discussion of gayness and ethnicity there is a danger of “identities [to] collapse into bodies” (Alexander, 1994: 12), and looking specifically at the Middle East, homoeroticism underwrites the attractiveness and practices of Orientalism (Said, 1978). Boone (2010) claims that “the implication is that if sex between men occurs in the Muslim and Arab worlds, it is a foreign vice the West has exported to infect and undermine Middle Eastern culture” (564; see also Walsh-Haines, 2012). Furthermore, Mikdashi (2016) charges that sexual “orientalist fantasies” are coupled with the war on terror and strategically advertised for the benefit of the “public good.” Framing a large portion of queer activism as the act of imposing Western categories not suited for localized/non-Western cultures, Massad (2002) sets the stage for a critique of homonationalism and pinkwashing (which will be addressed in the next section), rendering comparisons between cultures, countries, and different spaces futile (see, e.g. Franke, 2012).

Setting the stage: A sexual perspective on Israeli ethnicities

Israel is a multi-ethnic society comprised mainly of three master categories: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, and Palestinian citizens of Israel. While this classification is prevalent, it is also reductionist, ignoring the complex lived experiences of many, such as Arab Druze, Christian Arabs, Bedouins, and Circassians. Furthermore, in many places there is explicit spatial segregation of Jewish ethnic groups.

Although the Israeli ethnic map has changed greatly due to immigration from the Former Soviet Union and from Ethiopia (Cohen, 2009), ethnicity has always been a cause for inequality in Israel, in which “Jewish Ashkenazim still represent the dominant group” (Sasson-Levy, 2013: 28). Thus, even though Jewish ethnic distinctions are primarily cultural and symbolic, racist power relations and discrimination against Mizrahim are well documented (Sasson-Levy and Shoshana, 2013; Semyonov and Lewin-Epstein, 2011). However local, the category of Ashkenaziness is similar in many ways to the unmarked construction of whiteness, symbolically contrasted with Mizrahiness, which is often marked as ethnic (Sasson-Levy, 2013).

In the colonial Zionist discourse, Mizrahim or Arab Jews were repeatedly separated from their Arab background (Shenhav, 2006; Shohat, 1999), creating an “Orientalist” process in which Mizrahim were defined as inferior to Ashkenazim (Khazzoom, 2003), culturally closer to Palestinians than to (invented) Israeliness (read: Ashkenaziness). Cities, specifically, and not just Tel Aviv, have a pivotal role in (re)producing these ethnic relations within the national order in Israel (Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003).

For example, lesbian-feminist Mizrahi women suffer from dual oppression processes, both sexual-gendered and ethnic, prompting the belief that to escape oppression, they must move to Tel Aviv and become Ashkenazified (Mishali, 2012). Concentrating on three sites in Tel Aviv, Allweil and Kallus (2013) add another component to this sexual-ethnic formation, showing how the relationship between the city, the ethnic body, and the nation allows for a negotiation of belonging in urban space as well as in the national space.

In the past, the Ashkenazi colonial fantasy created a highly stereotypical image of Mizrahi men as both hypersexual and beautifully exotic (Yosef, 2004). During the British Mandate, Zionists considered sex between men politically dangerous, and as the embodiment of pure evil, creating an amalgam of struggles in which fighting sodomy was understood as one of many Zionist interests in the strategy to segregate Jews from Arabs (Ilany, 2015). Later, during the 1970s and beyond, when homosexuality in the West was gaining legitimacy, and when Israel was becoming Westernized, a new discourse on homosexuality was introduced. In this discourse, homosexuality was not only legitimized, but more importantly, it was “purified,” cleaned of its linkage to Arabness, now serving as a proof of progress, and producing a contrast to the discourse on Iran as a backward place (Ilany, 2015). Westernization became a condition of Israeli queerness, entailing immigrants undergo a transformation in which ethnic identifications were neglected in favor of passing as middle-class Jewish queers (Kuntsman, 2003).

The Westernization of LGBT identities in Israel created new homonational configurations. Combining nationalism and neoliberalism, homonationalism (Puar, 2005, 2013b) refers to a binary process of national inclusion (and exclusion). In Israel, public officials and others champion gay rights for the purpose of being able to claim that Israel is a liberal state, as opposed to the “primitive” and Oriental Middle East, especially Iran and the Palestinian Authority. While specific groups are marked with the “correct” belonging and deemed normal, others are distanced from the public sphere and deemed perverse. LGBT subgroups who receive equal rights by adopting the hegemonic ideology (e.g. by having biological children forming a normative family) strengthen the legitimate belonging of LGBT individuals to the nation. In turn, expanding the nation’s boundaries and including LGBT groups within it serves to portray the state as tolerant and liberal while simultaneously marking other states as intolerant, undemocratic, and illiberal. This process, referred to by academics and activists as pinkwashing, fuels the harmful politics that legitimizes violent policies toward countries portrayed as less tolerant of LGBT individuals and other minorities such as Middle Eastern Arab countries (Atshan and Moore, 2014; Gross, 2015; Puar, 2013a; Ritchie, 2015; Schulman, 2012).

Examining Israeli ethnicities and their role in negotiating the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, we ask: how does the strategic branding of Tel Aviv as a combination of global and oriental reinvent an ethnic LGBT sociocultural landscape? This paper is mainly focused on the politics of representation, following in the wake of tourism studies scholars who broadened the discussion to include not only economic aspects, but also images and cultural landscapes (Selwyn, 1996; Urry, 1990; Wilkes, 2016).

Methodology

This qualitative ethnographic research is based on semi-structured interviews, direct/participant observations, textual analysis, and an archival investigation. The fieldwork was carried out between May 2015 and August 2016 by the first author. Thus, in the following sections, the “I” relates to the first author.

Twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted with key actors, such as gay tourism agency owners, municipal employees, gay club owners, hotel managers directly marketing to gays, and Tourism Ministry officials. All interviews lasted from one to three hours and were recorded and transcribed. Interviewees were presented with the option of reviewing the interview transcription, and when requested, the transcription was sent to participants for approval. Although it is unusual, because most participants are well-known local public figures who wanted credit for their statements, all participants signed a written consent form, agreeing to the use of their real names.

In addition to the interviews, direct/participant observations were conducted between May and August 2016. The observations took place at relevant government committees and activist meetings and other political settings. During the summer season, observations were conducted at prominent gay tourism scenes such as the Tel Aviv Pride Parade, gay parties and clubs, day tours promoted exclusively to gay men tourists, and specific urban areas which attract (gay) tourists (the beach). The first author began her fieldwork with broad knowledge of the activist LGBT community stemming from years of activism and research. Even so, entering settings tailored to gay tourists for the first time, new politics were revealed, unfamiliar and at times uncomfortable to my Jewish-Ashkenazi-woman perspective.

Finally, textual sources and material produced to promote gay tourism to Tel Aviv were analyzed. These included national and local newspapers, policy documents, the Tel Aviv Gay-Center website, the Aguda and other local NGOs’ websites, and a gay dating portal that advertises gay tourism. The archival investigation concentrated on examining government and municipal records of decision-making processes regarding gay tourism, mostly at the Tel Aviv Municipality archive.

The qualitative analysis of the collected data entailed coding and thematic analysis for emerging and recurring themes and categories. The analysis process focused on the diverse usages of Israeli ethnicities by the Tel Aviv Municipality and the state, as well as by commercial actors and LGBT individuals, revealing various ways “progress” and LGBT rights are used to produce new nuances of ethnicized Israeli gayness.

(Sexual) Westernization processes

In 2003, Tel Aviv was declared a “White City” world heritage site by UNESCO, thanks to the Bauhaus style in (parts of) the city. However, the name White City, which originated much earlier (to describe the buildings’ color), evolved into a poetic metaphor and became a widely used brand name (Azaryahu, 2007). Rotbard (2015) framed this branding process as an elitist construct and an “urban legend” (12). He contrasted the symbolism of “white” attached to a city wherein the local politics suppressed Mizrahim, Arabs, and foreign workers, a politics that overlooked southern “black” neighborhoods.

As part of the White City narrative of Westernization, the gay tourism inducements began in 2000, along with other initiatives to brand the city as an entrepreneurial hub. Since then, annual gay tourism campaigns to Israel are promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Ministry of Tourism, and the Tel Aviv Municipality and have also been promoted by the Aguda, Israel’s LGBT Task Force. The LGBT tourist industry, consisting largely of male gay tourists, has a multi-million-dollar turnover (Community Marketing Inc., 2016). In 2010, Tel Aviv Municipality, together with the Aguda (the national LGBT association) and the Ministry of Tourism, initiated the Tel Aviv Gay Vibe campaign, to promote North American and Western European gay tourism to Israel, and specifically to Tel Aviv. The substantial investment was perceived as potentially lucrative and as an indicator that gay issues were part of a strategy for changing public opinion of Israel worldwide. In 2011, the Tel Aviv Municipality estimated the revenues from gay tourism to be $57 million per year with average expenditures of $1800 per tourist, 50% more than a heterosexual tourist. During the summer of 2012, an estimated 25,000 gay men tourists descended on the city, spending about $50 million in total, a 20% increase over the previous summer. In 2016, the Ministry of Tourism allocated NIS 11 million for the promotion of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, confirming the government’s clear support. Current estimations predict 50,000 gay tourists a year, while the city’s population is just 426,000 (as of 2014).³

The NIS 11 million allocation came under heavy criticism from within the LGBT community, drawing tremendous attention from a wide range of organizations and activists. Raging and protesting against the fact that, instead of allocating the money to self-help, social, and political organizations, it went to the promotion of gay tourism, the Aguda joined forces with local council members to threaten to cancel the Pride Parade—the central tourist attraction. Aguda chairwomen Chen Arieli explained:

We said we are drawing the line, we will not be taken for granted and they will not profit off of us, we are considering canceling the parade. […] This enabled the community to reclaim the parade as a tool for protest. This brought us back to the Stonewall riots and to the original purpose of the parade.

The Stonewall riots of 1969 are considered the genesis of pride parades, a public LGBT political presence, and the struggle for LGBT visibility in the West (Armstrong and Crage, 2006). By referencing the Stonewall riots, Arieli is contextualizing Tel Aviv’s Pride Parade as part of a Western lineage of LGBT liberation—one that is not based on the local history and struggle for rights, but rather is rooted in American LGBT history and milestones instead. Arieli illustrates an argument made by Raz Yosef (2004) who claims the Aguda promotes Europe-centric politics of sexuality, while suppressing Mizrahi homosexuality as well as reproducing LGBT identities in Israel as Western. This linkage identifies the Stonewall Riots and Western ideas with the marginalization of Mizrahiness. Ofri Ilany (2015) also contends that since the 1970s, the representation of Israeli Jewish homosexuality has become White and North American that describes a Western liberal lifestyle. He argues that this Western narrative is not limited to the understanding of the LGBT rights struggles and politics, but also reflects personal identifications and performances.

Discussing local LGBT individuals’ looks, Rommey Hassman, a gay activist who was part of the Aguda’s initial tourism branding campaign, described the resemblance of Tel Aviv gay men to European gays: “The fact is that if you go to parties in Tel Aviv, [you’ll find] Tel Avivian gays [who look as if] they came out of the European ‘production line’, the same prototype, the same look.”

Apparently, it is not only that Israeli gay men strive to self-identify with Western LGBT rights struggles by adopting Westernized narratives of liberation but they also attempt to mimic European physical appearances and performances. Within a wider LGBT struggle to accumulate rights and public visibility as well as political and economic power, the process of Israeli LGBT identification with Western narratives and style is understandable.

At the same time, Israeli public officials and others have been widely criticized for pinkwashing Israel, using gay rights for the purpose of claiming that Israel is a liberal state, by stressing its progressive human rights legislation. In this process, Tel Aviv becomes a space of acceptance of LGBT individuals, a bubble of LGBT inclusivity, a safe haven for Israeli gays, away from the dangers of backwardness and consistent homophobia. Lior Meyer, the director of brand marketing and communications at Tel Aviv Global & Tourism, a Tel Aviv Municipality-owned company, depicted:

[The gay tourism campaigns] contributed to the self-perception of Tel Aviv as a city that loves to show itself off as cosmopolitan, […] a bit like Israel, that loves to show itself within the space of the Middle East as, how Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister] puts it: We are a villa in the jungle. So like that. Not from an arrogant place, but […] we love to see ourselves as enlightened and liberal and very open and gays are an easy way to achieve this.

The well-known phrase “villa in the jungle,” coined by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1996,⁴ is utilized here to portray both the State of Israel’s desire to become a Western/European White space, but it also reveals what this desire camouflages and represses (Bar-Yosef, 2013), i.e. Israeli Mizrahiness, Arabness, and its links to Africa/Middle East. On a wider scale, it symbolizes the striving to construct Israel as a “bubble” that purposely disregards its location within the Middle East (Zaban, 2015). This phrase “encapsulates the Israeli construction of identity and sense of place as being White, ‘European-like,’ democratic and enlightened; a ‘villa’ that dominates a White and modern territory surrounded by walls and borders that are supposedly impenetrable” (Yacobi, 2015: 2).

The progressive Orient

Despite these wide-ranging Westernization processes, the Tel Aviv Municipality, the Ministry of Tourism, and commercial companies who all promote gay tourism strive not to portray Tel Aviv as “just another” Western city. Rather, as their marketing strategies suggest, they believe the best way to increase gay tourism is to paint Tel Aviv in Oriental colors, marketing it as an exotic authentic Middle Eastern heaven—located in the Middle East, but not black like Africa, and not backwards like Arab states.

Shai Doitsh, the initiator and the “engine” behind promoting gay tourism and former Aguda chairman, explained the secret to the gay tourism campaign’s success:

[Tel Aviv] was the new guy … not just the new guy … I’m not another European city, I have an Oriental flavor, I’m Middle Eastern. I’d say to them: we are Europeans with a Middle Eastern temper. We’re different, we’re gnarled, we have stubble and chest hair. […] And today Israeli DJs are touring parties around the world […] and the logo says Tel Aviv, Israel. Because Tel Aviv became a hot brand around the world.

Doitsh understood the potential of mixing Europe with a touch of Orientalism, to create a winning and easy-to-promote product. Lior Meyer of Tel Aviv Global & Tourism, continued:

When you market, the tension between what you expect and what you actually get is your greater strength. Now, in Tel Aviv, let’s look at one extreme: the element of […] the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and war and the Middle East, and the absolute other extreme the subject of Tel Aviv and pride. The surprise on their [tourists’] faces … the fact is this completely dissolves what they think they know of this place, and enables you to create a whole different narrative, and this is a great marketing strength.

The story Meyer is telling distinguishes between Tel Aviv and Israel: Westernization processes are part of Tel Aviv, just as Hassman and Arieli described earlier, and the Oriental processes are located in the State of Israel, but not directly tied to Tel Aviv’s urban space. At the same time, Tel Aviv is framed as an integral part of the Middle East to promote its (men’s) attractiveness to Western gay tourists. This notion of Tel Aviv as an amalgam of East and West, modern and backward, is not an original perspective, and is also prominent in UNESCO’s declaration of the city as a world heritage site.⁵ The city has already been branded as a global-nonstop-entrepreneurial urban space (Azaryahu, 2008). In promoting gay tourism, the Municipality and other commercial agencies stress Tel Aviv’s Middle Eastern location and character in new and compelling ways.

While Beirut, for example, is advertised as the “‘Paris of the Middle East’, ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’, ‘San Francisco of the Arab World’ and ‘Amsterdam of the Arab World’ […] as a means of situating the city as both exotic and familiar” (Moussawi, 2013: 863), Tel Aviv is presented in the media as a “gay Mecca,” anchored in the Middle East. Previous success branding Tel Aviv as Western meant that marketing strategies in fact needed to tie it to the Orient to create this new gay vibe, as opposed to Beirut, which is already Middle Eastern, where its “progress” invites us to divorce it from its location. The gay tourist campaign, bringing Tel Aviv back to its Middle Eastern context, has become a winning formula encapsulating a mixture of West and East, of LGBT assimilation and Westernization with a grain of Orientalism, a winning advertising ensemble.

Negotiating sexual authenticity

To this point, we have shown how the usage of Israeli ethnicities reveals an understanding of ethnicity as a means to reinvent Tel Aviv as an exotic yet liberal city, sexy yet progressive. In this section, we shift the focus to show how tourists perceive gay Tel Aviv culture, considering its authenticity. We will show that the commercial use of gay men’s ethnicities can be read as a continuation of neoliberal and political colonialism, using Israeli subjects as the bodies upon which progress is embedded to advance homonationalism. However, we would also like to suggest that Israeli gays are not duped into this process, but rather take an active part in this production of Mizrahi gay culture, seizing new opportunities for Mizrahi cultural acceptance.

I met with Russel Lord, a gay travel consultant who specializes in gay tourism, who immigrated to Israel from New York. Curious about how tourists perceive locals, I asked him: what kind of images do the tourists who come to Tel Aviv have in mind?

[if you’re asking me] to represent the tourist’s thoughts and images: […] the tough Israeli who is both gentle and rough, what’s called – the Sabra [the native-born Israeli…]. Israeli gays dress well and look good and know how to party. […] If a guy travels to Sweden, he dreams of blond guys with blue eyes. When he travels to Israel or Turkey, he dreams of all kinds of Eliad Cohens, hairy brown guys with brown eyes.

Eliad Cohen is a presenter at the Arisa, an extremely popular party series dedicated to Mizrahi music. During one of the nights of the ethnography, I was standing outside the Arisa’s gates, watching hundreds of very young adults entering, mostly men, but some women, who matched this exact stereotype. I asked Lord about the Arisa’s attractiveness to tourists and he replied:

It’s the combination of West and East […]. It appears to be very sexy, attractive [he smiles]. […] It’s music that they can’t hear elsewhere, the East-West combination of sounds with an Israeli flavor and spice, it’s very appealing.

This attractive East–West blend is also featured in music and in visual representations, and the Municipality and other gay tourism and Pride promotion initiatives have taken advantage of it. A good example would be the annual Pride video clip, co-produced by the Municipality. In 2013, this clip featured a co-production of Arisa and Omer Adam, a well-known Mizrahi music singer, with the hit song Yahabibi Tel Aviv. Due to the space limitations of this paper, we will not be able to discuss all of the annual Pride video clips at length. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the 2016 clip, a cover of Aerosmith’s Pink, starring Shefita.

Shefita is the stage name of Jewish Israeli cover artist Rotem Shefy. Shefita began with a video clip of a cover of Rediohead’s Karma Police filmed in southern Tel Aviv, which was posted on YouTube. Shefita’s image in that video and the ones that followed were of a modern-day Arab diva, or a modern Umm Kulthum. Not long after her first video came out, she was accused of cultural colonialism and of being a postmodern pastiche.

Councilwoman Efrat Tolkowsky told me that Shefita was chosen to star in the clip both because of her trendiness and because the producers were looking for a woman singer who would be able to film the video within a 48 hour timeframe. Even though the video was accepted within the LGBT community for its women-only cast, consistent with that year’s Pride theme, which was Women for a Change, for the most part it was criticized by the LGBT community. Shefita, singing with an exaggerated Arabic accent in English and using a cane (the necessity of which was questioned by viewers), was perceived as artificial and inauthentic. The choice of song was criticized as well, with critics suggesting that Pink is pinkwashing, and that the situation in Israel, rights-wise, is not pink at all.⁶ However, the production did feature an Orientalist image of a belly dancer at the forefront, playing with (or violating) Mizrahiness/Arabness through reductionist performances and sound choices which were rendered Orientalist. Schwarz claims that sonic styles and sensibilities are perceived as ethnic and class specific. In Israel, sounds (sonic practices) are used “to bolster both national boundaries and ethnic hierarchies among Israeli Jews” (Schwarz, 2014: 2043). In this case, what was bolstered through the production of Pride events was a relatively new sound in Israeli gay culture, introducing the negotiation of Mizrahi cultural aspects within gay culture.

Yosef (2004) argues that since Jewishness and Arabness are perceived as antipodes, gay Mizrahi men are thought to represent a sexual and national anomaly, which leaves no legitimate cultural space in which Mizrahi and Arab gays can express their Arabic heritage. Viewing the Shefita Pink video clip and standing at the entrance to Arisa, I understood that, contrary to what Yosef argued, what I was seeing was a particular kind of gayness that doesn’t reject the West as a whole, but whose gaze is not magnetically drawn to the West.

Keep in mind that, since 2000, queer Mizrahi and former Soviet Union cultures have emerged, mostly in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and to a smaller extent in Beer-Sheba and Haifa. This cultural flourishing within the radical-queer community has materialized as a party series dedicated to queer Mizrahi and former Soviet Union cultures, performances, and music. However, these parties are highly political and seldom attract tourists, reaffirming the centrality of consumption practices and specific kinds of homonormativity that are integrated with discourses and practices of gay tourism and its advertising markets. In that sense, from the marketing agencies and their perception of the tourists’ perspective, the cultural spaces that queer Western Tel Avivian culture produce are not exotic enough. I asked Lord what makes this place (Tel Aviv) exotic, and he continued:

Israel and Lebanon are both in a state of war and have a lot in common, people in both places love life, love the fun in life, the good in life. Now this may sound funny, but a tourist who comes to Beirut is similar to one coming to Tel Aviv. He wants to go somewhere exotic. After all, this is not London or Paris, the Middle East is exotic. […] The food, the music, the West-East blend. […] In America, they call this the melting pot, this is not a melting pot, it’s a mosaic, we’re all Israelis but each of us kept the tradition and heritage of our origins. Moroccan Israeli and Russian Israeli or myself, New Yorker Israeli – we all think of ourselves as Israelis […] and Arabs – Christians, Muslims, each with his own tradition and traditional costume, food, music. This is what makes this place exotic.

Lord’s reflections on Israel echoes the uniqueness of this East–West combination, one he calls an exotic mosaic. For him, this is the raison d’être of gay tourism to Israel, what draws Westerners to Tel Aviv.

Within the field of tourism, ethnicity serves to capture the tourists’ gaze, marking certain places, cultures, and places as authentic (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). This authenticity is used to enhance the economic potential of a place, marking ethnicity appropriate for commercial use. Xie (2003) suggests authenticity “is not a fixed property of an object or a situation but is a negotiated attribute” (6). Authenticity, rather than an objective quality, is an “invention” and a “fabrication” (Garzian, 2011) for commercial purposes. However, Tel Aviv is perceived as Mizrahi not only by tourist companies, but also within the local gay culture itself. The production of Mizrahi culture is part and parcel of recent developments within Israeli society, which opened new spaces for just such a production. For example, the last 20 years have seen a mass mobilization of lower-class Mizrahim into the middle class, accompanied at times and in specific spaces by a proliferation of Mizrahi culture (Cohen and Leon, 2008).

Hila Oren, the CEO and founder of Tel-Aviv Global & Tourism presented her perspective on authenticity as a marketing strength: “Within the context of tourism, it is highly important to understand the local. People from abroad would not come here if a single thing were not authentic.”

This desire for authenticity opened up a new space for local gay cultural producers and enabled a Mizrahi gay culture. This is not a case of underprivileged minorities being taken advantage of by the establishment, but a win-win situation in which top-down and bottom-up processes collided, only to converge and become a new authentic formation of gay Mizrahi culture that keeps on attracting gay men tourists.

Dislocating Tel Aviv (from Israel)

Tel Aviv, a progressive Oriental space permitting Mizrahi gay culture, is inherently different from all other Israeli space as well as the Arab surrounding countries. It is not only the largest metropolitan area, but also the commercial and cultural center of Israel, with vibrant nightlife and a dynamic LGBT culture. Tel Aviv is portrayed as a global city, associated with liberalism and secularism, contrary to Jerusalem, which is considered a local and national city (Alfasi and Fenster, 2005). We argue that this differentiation of Tel Aviv from the rest of Israel is essential for the success of the tourism campaign’s hybrid formation. Furthermore, we contend that the bubble in which gay Mizrahi culture in Tel Aviv proliferates is the same one sustaining pinkwashing.

Hassman, the marketing expert, claims that the aim was to differentiate Tel Aviv, which is perceived as a pluralist space, from Israel, which is associated with backwardness, homophobia, and atrocities toward Palestinians. He described this process:

When the brand is problematic, you leave the principal brand. As far as I’m concerned, the problematic brand is Israel, Jerusalem, the holy city with the image of the Temple Mount […]. So we thought to ourselves: why don’t we take a different element [of Israel] and push it forward and when it succeeds on its own it will pull the principal brand up with it. […] The main rejection was of Israel […] so we said, wait a minute, besides the settlements we also have Tel Aviv.

Shai Doitsh elaborated:

Everybody knew that until gay tourism, Tel Aviv didn’t have any leisure tourism, only business and Jewish pilgrims, Jewish tourists who come to see the holy land. […] When we started working [on the Tel Aviv Gay Vibe campaign] we didn’t want to be thought of [associated with Israel] … we didn’t want to hand out brochures at the Israeli stand [at the international tourism fair], [we thought] we should take a stand for ourselves [for Tel Aviv] within the gay compound.

Tourism promotion concentrates on Tel Aviv since it is considered an easier location to promote to gay men tourists, much easier than Israel, which is associated with repeated wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a conservative and partly fundamentalist society. This image stems from the political atmosphere and Israel’s occupation of Palestine, as well as Israel’s image as a desert state that is identified with Middle Eastern backwardness. Russel Lord described what draws tourists to Israel:

[…] How many opportunities does a guy from LA get to sit down with an Israeli, a Palestinian, a Jordanian, a Syrian and an Iraqi who are all gay or lesbian, and to hear what it is like? […]. I met with a guy from Bethlehem who, one day out of the blue, his family locked him in a room, withdrew his money from the bank and took his car and informed him he was getting married [to a woman] in two weeks. The tourists can’t believe this is happening in 2015 until they look into this man’s beautiful eyes and hear him tell his story.

On the one hand, Lord’s depiction locates Israel within the Middle East, alongside Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, seemingly not so special after all. However, he continues by sharing a tragic story of a man who was robbed of his liberty when he tried to live as a gay person. This story clearly couldn’t have happened in Tel Aviv, but rather, is located in Bethlehem, where “unbelievable” backwardness is a reality, and “progress” has not yet arrived.

Dislocating Tel Aviv from Israel was a narrative strongly discernible during a day tour to Masada and the Dead-Sea for gay tourists (see Figure 1). Declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, Masada is an isolated fortress on top of a mountain plateau overlooking the Dead Sea. It attracts more foreign tourists than Israelis (Ben-Yehuda, 1995). The site’s political meanings shift over time, at first representing military bravery, later focusing more on the continuity of Jewish persecution, thereby accentuating modern-day Zionism’s significant role and its importance to the Israeli collective memory as a signifier of the Jewish attempts to protect Jewish sovereignty in Israel (Zerubavel, 1995). Even though Masada’s meanings have changed in the process of this myth-making, it is considered a place to contemplate national security and survival concerns in the Israeli political context (Sasson and Kelner, 2008).

Figure 1.

Two gay tourists on a camel during a day trip to Masada and the Dead Sea. June 2016. Source: Photograph by Gilly Hartal.

The narrative mechanisms during the day tour produced a highly political, Orientalist, biblical-traditionalist, and exotic image of Israel. So much so that during the day tours in and outside Tel Aviv, it was almost as if I was in a museum, and the tour guides were presenting authentic Orientalist gays, produced for the tourist-consumers’ pleasure. This kind of reification was so prominent that it was naturalized. This narrative indirectly reinforced the uniqueness of the Tel Aviv bubble as a gay heaven. Standing in the blazing sun on Masada, some of the tourists were interviewed for a promotional clip the tourist company was producing. The well-known Israeli drag queen who joined the tour and played the role of the journalist asked the tourists what they thought of Israel. Although the answers varied, the interviewees limited their answers to gay issues: parties, pride parades, beautiful gay men. Their reflections were all tied to Tel Aviv, revealing of the ways Israel was presented to these tourists during the tour: even when they left the geographical space of Tel Aviv, symbolically, they were still there.

Discussing gay tourism to Beirut, Moussawi (2013) illustrates how the gay friendliness of the city spills over onto the whole country, creating a progressive urban image, while at the same time disconnecting Beirut from its Middle Eastern location. He calls this “fractal Orientalism,” an “Orientalism within the ‘Orient’” (863). Likewise, Tel Aviv is occasionally connected to and disconnected from Israel and the Middle East. Masada and the Dead Sea were represented as spaces of heritage, political conflicts, and emptiness (of gayness), the ultimate other of Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv, on the other hand, was the space for fun and freedom, encapsulating a gay narrative of urban safety and sexual culture.

As this dichotomy revealed itself, it was obvious that pinkwashing initiatives, either deliberately or by chance, rely on this division and on the brand Tel Aviv has created for itself through gay tourism. Mickey Gitzin, a gay city councilman, reflected on the blindness within Tel Aviv, and the dis-acknowledgement of its uniqueness:

Many gays think that they’re lucky to be living in Tel Aviv. So, a Palestinian living behind the fence/wall does not interest them. The municipality doesn’t recognize this [What goes on behind the separation wall], I mean, I was shocked, they’re just not interested. They see themselves as part of a larger system. Yaniv [Wizman, a city councilman and the mayor’s advisor on LGBT issues] completely sees himself as a component of the Israeli marketing system. I mean he’s leftist and all of that, but it doesn’t … [change this blindness].

Since he referred to alienation from Palestinians in the West Bank, I took it a step further and asked about Palestinian citizens of Israel in Jaffa, who are closer and not behind a wall:

I was in a meeting last week, and I brought Ran Leabel, IGY [Israeli Gay Youth organization] CEO to speak and he described extremely high levels of homophobia in Jaffa. He said that if we were to shift the course of the [Pride] parade to Jaffa, it would be the same as inserting it into Mea-Shearim [an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem]. […] There is a Palestinian [LGBT] community, they have parties … . But Jaffa is not part of this [Palestinian LGBT nightlife], Tel Aviv is.

What Gitzin is suggesting is that Jaffa is comparable to Mea-Shearim, a neighborhood which is hostile and even belligerent toward secularism, Westernization, and specifically toward out LGBT presence. The boundaries he is demonstrating are clear—whatever is out of sight, far from Tel Aviv is not of concern. Even Jaffa, the southern and oldest part of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, which has undergone gentrification in recent years, is apparently not taking part in this East–West consolidation, embodied by progressive Oriental gayness.

Conclusion

In this paper, we discussed new Israeli gay ethnic formations and their emergence in response to the neoliberal urban politics of gay tourism to Tel Aviv. The literature has maintained until now that gay tourism is marketed by national tourism organizations in order to create the normalization of gayness by the neoliberal state (Johnston, 2005; Markwell, 2002; Waitt et al., 2008). We have shown that this process is more nuanced and complicated, influenced, on the one hand, by establishments and neoliberal processes, but also by local gay cultural actors on the other.

Specifically, we argued that the dissonance between Orientalist images and Westernization processes, which are particularly noticeable in the marketing of gay tourism to Tel Aviv, maintains a twofold construction of Tel Aviv as a Middle Eastern global city, which we termed the Progressive Orient. Reinforcing both the differentiation from the Middle East and other Arab countries, while embracing Oriental images and tastes under the guise of authenticity, this particular kind of pinkwashing differentiates the city as other than the rest of Israel. This in turn creates new nuances of ethnic Israeli gayness—illustrated by the emerging gay Mizrahi culture.

Thus, local cultural identifications are constructed both by neoliberal gay politics that demands representational Western bodies, as well as by postcolonial politics that stimulates Mizrahi gay culture. Although we are aware that any explanation of Progressive Oriental gayness based solely on the marketing of gay tourism is a partial one, we also believe that pretending the penetration of capital into LGBT discourses did not leave a substantial mark is naïve. While local LGBT activists and individuals were initially trying to adopt Western discourses, a gay Mizrahi sub-culture developed. The Municipality and others involved in marketing gay tourism to Tel Aviv recognized this new formation of East–West and its potential. They understood that, in order to succeed, they needed to create a middle way—not selling the city as just another Western city bringing more of the same, but at the same time, not portraying Tel Aviv as the Mizrahi, “black” other to the Western tourists’ gaze. The successful combination distinguished Tel Aviv from the rest of Israel, with the first portrayed as an Oriental, sexy, and fun place, and the latter as a desert state which facilitates (and claims that it saves) LGBT Palestinians. Ultimately, what stimulated this hybrid progressive Oriental gayness were economic interests, not multi-culturalism or some gay newness. The opportunities within the very profitable market of gay tourism constructed new ways of being gay in Tel Aviv, beyond the White, Ashkenazi way. What is left to be determined is whether this Progressive Oriental gayness, aside from being a huge moneymaker for the city, can create actual new ways of being gay or will remain simply a marketing ploy. Moreover, will this change Mizrahi symbolic ethnic power and discrimination? If, as we showed, the Oriental gayness is a new symbolic capital available for Mizrahi gay men, can it be mobilized for the advancement of Tel Aviv’s Mizrahi heterosexual individuals, or borrowed by Mizrahi gays into arenas such as the workplace? In addition, since gay culture is segregated within Tel Aviv and the differentiation between Tel Aviv and the “rest” of Israel, as we have shown, is central to this construction of Oriental gayness, will it have an influence on the construction of Israeli ethnicities outside Tel Aviv’s space and culture?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I owe great appreciation to Natalie Oswin for her guidance through this project. Many thanks to Yossi David and Tair Karazi-Presler for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was received from the Israeli Science Foundation, grant number 59/16.

Notes

Gilly Hartal is a lecturer in the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University. She has been awarded the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) post-doctoral fellowship for 2016–2017. Her research and teaching interests include geographies of sexualities and gender, queer theory, qualitative methodologies, and specifically the production of spatial belonging through discourses of inclusion and exclusion along national, ethnic, gendered, class, and sexual trajectories. She has published in journals such as Urban Studies (2018), Social and Cultural Geography (2017), Gender, Place & Culture (2016), Sexualities (2016), ACME (2016), and more.

Orna Sasson-Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Program in Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her research and teaching interests include feminist theory, militarism and gender, gender and new social movements, and Israeli ethnicities. Sasson-Levy has published widely in journals such as Gender & Society (2003, 2007, 2011), The Sociological Quarterly (2002, 2013), Signs (2007), and The British Journal of Sociology (2015). Her book Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State (with Edna Lomsky-Feder) was published by Routledge in 2018.

References

Alexander

(1994) Not just (any) body can be a citizen: The politics of law, sexuality and postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas. Feminist Review 48: 5–23.

Alfasi

Fenster

(2005) A tale of two cities: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in an age of globalization. Cities 22(5): 351–363.

Allweil

Kallus

(2013) Re-forming the political body in the city: The interplay of male bodies and territory in urban public spaces in Tel Aviv. City 17(6): 748–777.

Armstrong

Crage

(2006) Movements and memory: The making of the Stonewall myth. American Sociological Review 71(5): 724–751.

Atshan

Moore

(2014) Reciprocal solidarity: Where the black and Palestinian queer struggles meet. Biography 37(2): 680–705.

Azaryahu

(2007) Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Azaryahu

(2008) Tel Aviv: Center, periphery and the cultural geographies of an aspiring metropolis. Social & Cultural Geography 9(3): 303–318.

Bar-Yosef

(2013) A Villa in the Jungle: Africa and the Zionist Imagination. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House (Hebrew).

Bell

(2001) Fragments of a queer city. In: Bell D, Binnie J, Holiday R, et al. (eds) Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, pp. 84–102.

10.

Bell

Binnie

(2004) Authenticating queer space: Citizenship, urbanism and governance. Urban Studies 41(9): 1807–1820.

11.

Bell

(1994) In bed with the state: Political geography and sexual politics. Geoforum 25(4): 445–542.

12.

Benedicto

(2008) The haunting of gay Manila: Global space-time and the specter of Kabaklaan. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14(2–3): 317–338.

13.

Ben-Yehuda

(1995) The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

14.

Binnie

Klesse

(2011) “Because it was a bit like going to an adventure park”: The politics of hospitality in transnational lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer activist networks. Tourist Studies 11(2): 157–174.

15.

Boone

(2010) Modernist re-orientations: Imagining homoerotic desire in the “nearly” Middle East. Modernism/Modernity 17(3): 561–605.

16.

Browne

(2007) A party with politics? (Re)making LGBTQ pride spaces in Dublin and Brighton. Social & Cultural Geography 8(1): 63–87.

17.

Cabezas

(2004) Between love and money: Sex, tourism, and citizenship in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 29(4): 987–1015.

18.

Cieri

(2003) Between being and looking: Queer tourism and lesbian social space in Greater Philadelphia. ACME: A International Journal for Critical Geographies 2(2): 147–166.

19.

Cohen

Leon

(2008) The Israeli Mizrahi middle class. Alpaim – A Multidisciplinary Publication for Contemporary Thought and Literature 32: 83–101 (Hebrew).

20.

Cohen

(2009) Migration patterns to and from Israel. Contemporary Jewry 29(2): 115–125.

21.

Comaroff

(2009) Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.

22.

Community Marketing Inc. (2016) 21th LGBT tourism & hospitality survey. Available at: http://www.communitymarketinginc.com/documents/temp/CMI_21st-LGBT-Travel-Study-Report2016.pdf (accessed 30 March 2017).

23.

de Jong

(2016) Rethinking activism: Tourism, mobilities and emotion. Social & Cultural Geography 18(6): 1–18.

24.

Franke

(2012) Dating the state: The moral hazards of winning gay rights. Colombia Human Rights Law Review 49(1). Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2186595

25.

Garzian

(2011) The symbolic economy of authenticity in the Chicago Blues scene. In: Bennett A and Peterson RA (eds) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 31–47.

26.

Gross

(2015) The politics of LGBT rights in Israel and beyond: Nationality, normativity, and queer politics. Columbia Human Rights Law Review 46(2): 81–152.

27.

Hartal

Sasson-Levy

(2016) Being [in] the center – Sexual citizenship and homonationalism at Tel Aviv’s Gay-Center. Sexualities 20(5–6): 738–761.

28.

Hoad

(2000) Arrested developments or the queerness of savages: The existing evolutionary narratives of difference. Postcolonial Studies 3(2): 133–158.

29.

Hubbard

(2011) Cities and Sexualities. New York: Routledge.

30.

Hubbard

Collins

Gorman-Murray

(2016) Introduction: Sex, consumption and commerce in the contemporary city. Urban Studies 54(3): 567–581.

31.

Hughes

(2003) Marketing gay tourism in Manchester: New market for urban tourism or destruction of “gay space”? Journal of Vacation Marketing 9(2): 152–163.

32.

Ilany

(2015) “A common affliction in the East”: Descriptions of homosexual intercourse during the mandate period. Zmanim 121: 8–21 (Hebrew).

33.

Johnston

(2005) Queering Tourism: Paradoxical Performances at Gay Pride Parades. London and New York: Routledge.

34.

Johnston

(2007) Mobilizing pride/shame: Lesbians, tourism and parades. Social & Cultural Geography 8(1): 29–45.

35.

Kama

(2011) Parading pridefully into the mainstream: Gay & lesbian immersion in the civil core. In: Ben-Porat G and Turner B (eds) The Contradictions of Israeli Citizenship: Land, Religion and State. Abdingdon: Routledge, pp. 180–202.

36.

Khazzoom

(2003) The great chain of orientalism: Jewish identity, stigma management, and ethnic exclusion in Israel. American Sociological Review 68(4): 481–510.

37.

Kuntsman

(2003) Double homecoming: Sexuality, ethnicity, and place in immigration stories of Russian lesbians in Israel. Women’s Studies International Forum 26(4): 299–311.

38.

Livermon

(2012) Queer(y)ing freedom: Black queer visibilities in postapartheid South Africa. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(2–3): 297–343.

39.

McCormick

(2011) Hairy chest, will travel: Tourism, identity, and sexuality in the Levant. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7(3): 71–97.

40.

Markwell

(2002) Mardi Gras tourism and the construction of Sydney as an international gay and lesbian city. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8(1): 81–99.

41.

Massad JA (2002) Re-orienting desire: The gay international and the Arab world. Public Culture 14(2): 361–385.

42.

Mikdashi

(2016) Fear and loathing in Orlando. Jadaliyya. Available at: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/24635/fear-and-loathing-in-orlando

43.

Mishali

(2012) Visible girl invisible lesbian/Mizrahi: Gender, sexuality and ethnicity in Israel. In: Frånberg GM, Hällgren C and Dunkels E (eds) Invisible Girl. Umeå: Umeå University, pp. 185–193.

44.

Moussawi

(2013) Queering Beirut, the “Paris of the Middle East”: Fractal orientalism and essentialized masculinities in contemporary gay travelogues. Gender, Place & Culture 20(7): 858–875.

45.

Oswin

(2008) Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: Deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography 32(1): 89–103.

46.

Oswin

(2018) Planetary urbanization: A view from outside. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36(3): 540–546.

47.

Padilla

(2007) Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

48.

Puar

(2002a) A transnational feminist critique of queer tourism. Antipode 34(5): 935–945.

49.

Puar

(2002b) Circuits of queer mobility: Tourism, travel, and globalization. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8(1): 101–137.

50.

Puar

(2002c) Introduction: Queer tourism: Geographies of globalization. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8(1–2): 1–6.

51.

Puar

(2005) Queer times, queer assemblages. Social Text 23(3–4): 121–139.

52.

Puar

(2013a) Homonationalism as assemblage: Viral travels, affective sexualities. Jindal Global Law Review 4(2): 23–43.

53.

Puar

(2013b) Rethinking homonationalism. International Journal of Middle East Studies 45(2): 336–339.

54.

Ritchie

(2015) Pinkwashing, homonationalism, and Israel-Palestine: The conceits of queer theory and the politics of the ordinary. Antipode 47(3): 616–634.

55.

Rofel

(2007) Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

56.

Rotbard

(2015) White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Cambridge: MIT Press.

57.

Rushbrook

(2002) Cities, queer space, and the cosmopolitan tourist. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8(1): 183–206.

58.

Said

(1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

59.

Sasson-Levy

(2013) A different kind of whiteness: Marking and unmarking of social boundaries in the construction of hegemonic ethnicity. Sociological Forum 28(1): 27–50.

60.

Sasson-Levy

Shoshana

(2013) “Passing” as (non)ethnic: The Israeli version of acting white. Sociological Inquiry 83(3): 448–472.

61.

Sasson

Kelner

(2008) From shrine to forum: Masada and the politics of Jewish extremism. Israeli Studies 13(2): 146–163.

62.

Schulman

(2012) Israel/Palestine and the Queer International. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

63.

Schwarz

(2014) Arab sounds in a contested space: Life quality, cultural hierarchies and national silencing. Ethnic & Racial Studies 37(11): 2034–2054.

64.

Selwyn

(ed) (1996) The Tourist Image: Myth and Myth Making. Chichester: Wiley Press.

65.

Semyonov

Lewin-Epstein

(2011) Wealth inequality: Ethnic disparities in Israeli society. Social Forces 89(3): 935–959.

66.

Shenhav

(2006) The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

67.

Shohat

(1999) The invention of the Mizrahim. Journal of Palestine Studies 29(1): 5–20.

68.

Smith

(2010) Queer theory and native studies: The heteronormativity of settler colonialism. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16(1–2): 41–68.

69.

Urry

(1990) The Tourist Gaze. London: SAGE.

70.

Visser

(2002) Gay tourism in South Africa: Issues from the Cape Town experience. Urban Forum 13(1): 85–94.

71.

Waitt

(2006) Boundaries of desire: Becoming sexual through the spaces of Sydney’s 2002 gay games. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96(4): 773–787.

72.

Waitt

Markwell

(2006) Gay Tourism: Culture and Context. New York, London and Oxford: The Haworth Hospitality Press.

73.

Waitt

Markwell

Gorman-Murray

(2008) Challenging heteronormativity in tourism studies: Locating progress. Progress in Human Geography 32(6): 781–800.

74.

Waitt

Stapel

(2011) “Fornicating on floats”? The cultural politics of the Sydney Mardi Gras Parade beyond the metropolis. Leisure Studies 30(2): 197–216.

75.

Walsh-Haines

(2012) The Egyptian blogosphere: Policing gender and sexuality and the consequences for queer emancipation. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8(3): 41–62.

76.

Warner

(1993) Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

77.

Wilkes

(2016) From the landscape to the white female body: Representations of postcolonial luxury in contemporary tourism visual texts. In: Lester JA and Scarles C (eds) Mediating the Tourist Experience: From Brochures to Virtual Encounters. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 33–56.

78.

Xie

(2003) The bamboo-beating dance in Hainan, China: Authenticity and commodification. Journal of Sustainable Tourism 11(1): 5–16.

79.

Yacobi

(2015) Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of Moral Geography. London and New York: Routledge.

80.

Yiftachel

Yacobi

(2003) Urban ethnocracy: Ethnicization and the production of space in an Israeli “mixed city”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21(6): 673–693.

81.

Yosef

(2004) Ethnicity and sexual politics: The invention of Mizrahi masculinity in Israeli cinema. Theory and Criticism 25: 31–62 (Hebrew).

82.

Zaban

(2015) Living in a bubble: Enclaves of transnational Jewish immigrants from Western countries in Jerusalem. Journal of International Migration and Integration 16(4): 1003–1021.

83.

Zerubavel

(1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.