אתניות ומיניות: סובייקטיביות מזרחית-הומואית חדשה ותיירות גאה בתל אביב

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 flavour. 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 both Middle Eastern and a global city. 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.