PRIDE OF TEL AVIV
An estimated 200,000 celebrants take part people in Tel Aviv’s annual Gay Pride Parade on Friday. The parade was the final event of Pride Week in Tel Aviv, internationally acclaimed as one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world.
Tel Aviv’s 23rd annual Gay Pride parade drew an estimated 200,000 participants on Friday.
The parade, including music, festivities, speeches and shows, is the largest gay pride parade in the Middle East. Additionally, the festivities included a fashion tour, a Eurovision event and the LGBT Film Festival.
This year’s event spotlighted “Women for a Change,” an organization that highlights the role of women in the LGBT community.
The parade took off from Meir Park, which houses the Tel Aviv Municipal LGBT Center. A representative of the center presented an award to journalist Ilana Dayan and to Ilana Shirazi, an organizer of lesbian marriage ceremonies.
Tel Aviv is not just the Israeli center for the LGBT community. In 2012, www.GayCities.com named Tel Aviv as the “Best Gay City,” while the Boston Globe ranked the Big Orange “the gayest city on earth.”
The Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality invests NIS 4 million each year to provide a plethora of resources as well as support for the city’s LGBT community. Mayor Ron Huldai said, “The pride parade has turned into one of the symbols of the City of Tel Aviv, with hundreds of thousands of participants and tourists from all over the country and world.”
Huldai continued, “I believe that Tel Aviv-Jaffa, a city of tolerance, is a beacon to other cities in this issue.”
Orange is the New Black‘s Lea “Big Boo” DeLaria and Scottish stage actor Alan Cumming who appears in The Good Wife were this year’s special Pride ambassadors for Tel Aviv Pride 2016 and rode in the parade’s main float, dancing and interacting with participants.
Police added extra protection for Likud MK Amir Ohana, an openly gay member of the Knesset, following threats to harm him during the event.
Among the first-time participants at the parade was Buck Angel, a transgender male adult film producer, actor and motivational speaker from California.
“This is my first time in this side of the world,” he told Ynet. “It’s exciting to see the gay community being accepted in the Middle East, and it’s generating change.”
Also taking part were members of a weeklong LGBT mission to Israel sponsored by the Jewish Federations of North America. During their visit, which officially ended on Thursday, more than 100 participants met with leaders of Israel’s LGBT organizations, LGBT leaders from Israel’s political parties, President Reuven Rivlin and US Ambassador Dan Shapiro.
Participants included Stuart Kurlander, an attorney and former president of the Washington-area Jewish Federation, and Matt Nosanchuk, a senior adviser at the US State Department and former White House liaison to the Jewish community.
Same-sex marriages are not performed in Israel, where Jewish marriage is the purview of the Chief Rabbinate. Muslims and Christians have corresponding religious bodies. But gay marriages performed abroad are recognized by the Interior Ministry.
Israel is rated by many LGBT publications as one of the world’s best and safest travel destinations.
Support of the Israeli LGBT community is not just a phenomenon in Tel Aviv, as a recent nation-wide poll indicated.
The survey conducted ahead of Friday’s parade shows a high level of public support for legalizing same sex marriage in Israel.
According to the poll conducted by the Smith Polling Institute for the Hiddush pluralism group, 76 percent of the Jewish Israeli public supports the establishment of some form of marriage for gay couples.
This represents a significant jump in support since Hiddush’s last poll in September, which found that 64 percent of the Jewish public was in favor of same-sex marriage.