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Tel Aviv's Gay-Center is unique in Israel for being sponsored, managed and controlled by the municipality. This article focuses on the Gay-Center as a material, symbolic and discursive space in order to clarify the relationship between LGBT individuals and the nation. Based on an ethnographic study, we show that since its establishment the Gay-Center has undergone centralization processes as a result of being located in central Tel Aviv and by striving for LGBT mainstreaming, thereby accelerating the achievement of sexual citizenship and urban belonging. However, the expansion of sexual citizenship, which is always based on processes of inclusion and exclusion, reveals homonational practices and homonormative discourses. Since being in the city is the easiest and, at times, the only way to earn sexual citizenship, we argue that LGBT urban citizenship is an indication, a marker and thus a prerequisite of homonationalism.

In this article we stress the need for specifically located understandings of the concept of homonationalism, by introducing an analysis of spatial and political power relations dissecting disparate constructions of LGBT arenas. The article explores three spaces: Tel-Aviv-an urban space of LGBT belonging; Jerusalem-the Israeli capital where being an LGBT individual is problematic both in public and in private spaces; and Kiryat-Shmona-a conservative and peripheral underprivileged town in the north of Israel. By showing how local understandings of queer space shape power relations and translate into subjective spaces within wide-ranging power dynamics, we claim that homonationalism cannot be seen as one unitary, consolidated category or logic. Instead, we argue, homonationalism should be considered a multidirectional and multiscale political stance, manifesting cultural practices and political relationship with the state and society in distinct settings. By expanding considerations of the nuanced interplay of state power and LGBT spaces we aim to elucidate some paradoxes of homonationalism.

Over the past decade, a growing number of critiques have been levelled at institutional LGBT initiatives in Tel-Aviv, characterising them as homonational and pinkwashing. Gay tourism to Tel-Aviv is one of the central initiatives under attack. Supported by national ministries and by local organisations, Tel-Aviv became a popular destination for a ‘gay vacation’. This paper explores the dynamic formation of the political economy of gay tourism to Tel-Aviv, underscoring the impact queer tourism has on Israeli LGBT politics and specifically on urban LGBT politics in Tel-Aviv. Particularly, this paper critically discusses neoliberal urban politics of LGBT value and valuation and its break from rights politics. I claim that the processes responsible for the increase in gay tourism to Tel-Aviv engendered confusion between rights achievements and recognition anchored in other kinds of national and municipal support (mainly allocations), encouraging fragmentation within the Israeli LGBT community. This process reproduced capitalist logics in urban spaces and constructed LGBT individuals as valued products based on their promotion of the urban space to other gay tourists, producing Tel-Aviv as a gay heaven and as a homonational hub. If the state works on the national level to create ‘pure’ homonationalism, the kind of homonationalism created on the urban level is an economic homonationalism: where the neoliberal agenda influences decision-making rather than questions of national belonging. Meaning that the effects of homonormativity are (becoming, once again) more significant within homonationalist political configurations.

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