Marching in a ‘Pride’ Parade in Tel Aviv

By Len Gregory

TEL AVIV, Israel — Last month I participated in one of the greatest annual parties in Tel Aviv, the Pride Parade.  I mention “one of” because only two weeks before, Tel Aviv hosted the Eurovision contest.  Each event had approximately 250,000 participants from all over the world.  Event coordinators and security services were working extraordinary hours on these back-to-back events and from my perspective they pulled off these massive events very well.  Not the balagan (chaos) one comes to expect so often in Israel.

This was my first Pride parade anywhere.  With me were my sister, brother-in-law, and friends from San Diego, Beth and Laura Dabby.  We connected with my son Tye who is the executive director of A Wider Bridge, a LBGTQ organization promoting understanding within the gay community in the US about gay rights in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East, or more accurately, the lack of gay rights elsewhere in the Middle East.

As allies, we joined the Wider Bridge delegation which consisted of thirty LGBTQ leaders from around the US representing Black, Hispanic, and others within the gay community.  For most participants it was their first time in Israel, in fact their first full day.  It was a high spirited, energetic, and really loud event.  The narrow streets of Tel Aviv were pack with marchers shoulder to shoulder.  It was uncomfortably hot but observers on balconies and roof tops obliged the participants with streams of water from water cannons and hoses.  We were grateful.

Being one of the older people out there on the streets I had a perspective that few of the overwhelmingly younger crowd could have had.  I was profoundly moved by the change that has taken place in Israeli society over the past few decades.

First and foremost this change is found in Tel Aviv but it pervades the entire country.  When I came to Israel as a civilian volunteer during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 there was an extreme “macho” culture.  The cultural icons of the day were the paratroopers, pilots, and special forces, “tough guys” so to speak.  Gay communities existed but they were hidden and discrete.  Not any longer.

Israel has evolved very rapidly in many ways, no more emblematic than the celebration of equality as demonstrated in the parade last month.  I was proud to be a part of it.

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Gregory is a San Diego County resident.