This weekend I joined 200,000 of my closest friends for Tel Aviv Gay Pride, the only Pride celebration in the Middle East and one of the largest in the world. The municipality puts on the main event, and estimates that as many as 30,000 come from abroad to spend their dollars and euros. I got to explore the fair, celebrate Shabbat at a gay family’s home (through EatWith.com), dance at a giant rave with hot gay men, wade in the cool ocean, and go to a Pet Shop Boys concert (which shows my age).
The event is not without controversy. There were religious counter protesters, transplanted American evangelicals and local groups of uncertain affiliation. More important were marchers with signs and t-shirts against “Pink Washing.” Pink Washing is the idea that Israel markets its tolerance for gays in Tel Aviv to Western liberal elites to divert attention from Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. And a sub theme is that Tel Aviv is held up as this open place, while gays in the Palestinian Authority are driven underground or co-opted by the security services upon pain of exposure to homophobic families. This is another of many cases where “The Situation,” as both Israelis and Palestinians call it, rears its ugly head. My own half formed opinion is that it is a move to set oppressed peoples against one another in a divide and conquer move. So while Israel recognizes gay marriages performed elsewhere, they (or and civil marriage) are not performed here. While Tel Aviv Pride has 200,000 marchers, Jerusalem has around 2,000. And the Pink Washing marchers were receiving as many middle fingers as cheers.
You might ask why, in the midst of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I stepped away from the program go do Pride for a weekend. Isn’t a big gay party a distraction from the holy work I'm pursuing? The answer is two-fold.
On pilgrimage, I do not only bring my intellectual and professional self. To be fully present to the people, places and Spirit I’m engaging, I need to bring my whole self to pilgrimage. Gay people struggle mightily with re-integrating our sexuality and our spirituality. Pilgrimage is to be a holistic transformative and integrative process. To leave out a core of my imago Dei, my capacity for relationship at the deepest level, would miss the reason for going.
More importantly, Gay Pride reminds me that I am an embodied person following an incarnational faith. I too often act as if Christianity is about an abstract, ethereal, disembodied spirit. But God is incarnate in flesh in Christ: my body isn't something to cart my brain around.
The particular gift GLBT people bring to the Body of Christ is a reclaiming of bodily, sexual, passionate existence. In drag, we reshape and subvert patriarchal power. In dance, we open to ecstasy, caught up in the beat and the crowd. By highlighting sexuality, we invite straight people to consider how even their embodied human sexuality is a good gift from a passionate God.
So I needed to dance with 1,000 other men until my exhausted body was drenched with sweat. I needed to clap and chant and shout and march until my feet were sore. I needed to relish an ice cream in a park surrounded by crowds of happy bodies. I needed to talk to the Palestinian from Jericho who introduced himself as “Osama bin Laden,” and I needed to listen to the Israeli who told me that Obama “ruined everything” but Trump understands that they will never ever again allow their Jewish bodies to be herded to slaughter.
This Holy Land pilgrimage is not just about seeing the settings for ancient stories. It is not even about unearthing bodies long gone. It is about meeting the living bodies of the land here and now. It is even about following a resurrected body. Gay Pride sets bodies free from agony to ecstasy. Gay Pride helps set my body free, free to be present in this amazing Holy Land.
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Join the community at Northern Colorado Pride on Saturday July 15 in Fossil Creek Park at the Lakeside Pavilion from 10 a.m to 4 p.m. See www.NoCoEquality.org/events
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