Where Gay Culture Is Being Born

A reader writes:

Gay Pride Parades may seem unnecessary in the US; this isn't so everywhere. Last Thursday, I participated in the Jerusalem Gay Pride March. It is a very subdued affair - people are marching with placards and rainbow flags, none of the glamour you see in the Tel Aviv parades - yet for the last few years, there has been a strange coalition of rabbis, imams and priests against it.

Consider it for a moment: Israeli extremist rabbis, who call for the desecration of churches and the deportation of Muslims, find common ground with them for just one day in the year. Imams who routinely denounce Jews as "sons of pigs and apes", put that aside for one day. Every year, Jerusalem is engulfed in riots, as the ultra-Orthodox set trash wagons on fire and clash with the police in the days before the parade.

The parade includes both Israeli and Palestinian gays, as well as many straight people, who, like me, think it is a battle front which must not be abandoned. In 2005, an ultra-Orthodox nutjob stabbed three of the marchers, screaming he did so in the name of God; he is now a minor hero of the ultra-Orthodox community. As a result, in 2006 the police have all but said they cannot secure the parade, and instead of it, a happening took place - in a secure, remote location, surrounded  by thousands of policemen.

This year the parade marched - for 500 meters. The police said they couldn't guarantee anything more than that. The marching route was considered a "sterile zone", and was cordoned; snipers took positions on many roofs along the route; helicopters kept buzzing over it. And the police seized an ultra-Orthodox wiho attempted to get near the paraders, having in his position an improvised pipe bomb.

"Anachronistic relic"? In New York, perhaps.