That gathering reaffirmed my experience: gay people transcend politics, borders, and differences more so than any other minority group. On a holy night in the holiest city in the world I happened upon an alleyway where I found the door to a world all-too familiar: gay men and lesbians, drag queens, a disco ball, sweaty bodies, and the unfamiliar confluence of Arab and Jew, soldier and civilian. Eight years earlier I had ventured into the night in Jerusalem on Shabbat in search of a gay club with the curiosity of a sociologist. At a friend’s urging I arrived before the Tel Aviv Gay Pride parade on June 13. Tel Aviv has been my home since, a laissez-faire, secular metropolis within a Jewish state wrapped by the shores of the sparkling Mediterranean.
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I needed to go to a place where I could reconnect with my own humanity, and that of strangers. Instinctively I knew it was time to recharge my soul away from the loss, rejection and self-loathing that had overwhelmed my life for six years. I focused on wrapping up pending obligations and getting out of America for a while. I had an epiphany of sorts, choosing life over death. One son beset with schizophrenia, the other disavowing me over my sexual orientation as contrary to his Muslim faith, a shattered relationship with my partner, tough times financially, anger over having been rejected by the institutional Democratic Party in my 2008 Senate run simply because I am gay, deep depression and ultimately an “I don’t give a fuck” attitude that culminated in a deadly dance with addiction to crystal methamphetamine. “Gay” is okay in Tel Aviv but it can induce a pregnant pause in conversations in Jerusalem and the West Bank. For some inexplicable reason this region beckoned me, a secular gay man who everyone greeted in English before I uttered a word- as if “American” were stamped across my forehead. Hungry for more time, more people, culture and knowledge.
![israel american gay flag israel american gay flag](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/03/04/gettyimages-169455117_custom-5578fe930a5a959f98c5c6cf0087020ba0b32906-s1100-c50.jpg)
Surreal.Īs my flight departed for New York I left Israel feeling hungry. Before me was the casket of Yasser Arafat. Moments later there I stood, alone, inside a Plexiglas dome in an empty parking before the shelled-out headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. “I love Americans I just hate your government,” he said before regaling me with tales of family visits to the United States. I shared the sentiments of the Fatah sentry who allowed me inside the walls of the Muqata in Ramallah. I traveled extensively in and around Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories on my own dime the following week, gaining a personal perspective on the ethnic and non-secular differences which one must see, meet and live to grasp the complexities of this land. My first week in Tel Aviv was one meeting followed by another, affording little time to enjoy this emerald by the sea of a city.