The Tel Aviv LGBTQ Center offers a home to the LGBTQ+ community in Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the surrounding areas and acts as an umbrella organization for local LGBTQ+ activity, while promoting initiative, partnership and social involvement, creating culture and offering assistance and counselling services. The Center, acting as a generator for the community, aims to bring together the different parts of the mosaic that make up the community and the residents of the city, acting as a lighthouse for all parts of the country.
The LGBTQ Center firmly believes that substantial change in the community’s status will come through in-depth and ongoing processes, at the center of which stands the direct meeting of members of the community. The Center is one of the community bodies that leads and specializes in processes of "building community". We believe that alongside the existence of the community as an “imagined community” (an amorphous term that attributes characteristics of community to hundreds of thousands of people even if they don’t know one another) it is our duty to have meaningful relationships and community practices that will make many areas within the community more real and relevant in all of our lives. Every day we discover anew how much strength there is in community and how relevant it is to each and every one of its members, even if they don’t see this on first sight. Additionally, the LGBTQ Center is a home and foundation for organizing many groups in the LGBTQ+ community that aren’t incorporated into organizations and find the Center to be the only answer to their needs.
We operate in the city Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the capital of the LGBTQ+ community, within the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa municipality. We know that many members of the community living in the city were not born and raised in it, but rather moved here with the desire to belong and to get to know the community and the individuals who are a part of it. We believe that many of the community members moved to the city with a desire to live full LGBTQ+ lives and live out their identities in a way that they couldn’t in the city they were born. Thus, in the meeting between community members and the search for the LGBTQ+ community in the city, more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ Center was born. Over the past few years the Center has aimed to create an alternative community gathering through hundreds of activities, events, community projects, volunteer projects, services to the whole LGBTQ+ spectrum and more.
At the LGBTQ Center you can find at any given moment many active groups (“chuggim”), social groups and also treatment groups. You can find cultural events, drag shows, plays, performances, parties, and art exhibitions. You can take part in a special project that battles the loneliness experienced by older community members or help those on the transgender spectrum in finding employment. You can come here and find a clinic that specializes in LGBTQ+ healthcare, meet a therapist, be tested for HIV, connect to a trans* mentor and a wide range of other services. At the LGBTQ Center you will be able to find dozens of programs for all groups, ages and identities – if you feel like a night of fun or a weekly meeting with people outside the world of dating apps.
At the LGBTQ Center, you can simply be yourself.