The Gay Pride Parade 2016 in Tel Aviv will take place on Friday June 3rd, starting at 10am at Meir Park (home of the Tel Aviv Gay Community Center) with music, shows and speeches. The parade will kick off at 12pm with floats, music and hundreds of thousands of participants in the largest Pride Parade in the Middle East. The parade will march along Bugrashov Street, turning north on Yarkon Street, west on Frishman Street and eventually south along the city's famous beach promenade towards Charles Clore Park. The parade will include the following floats: The Beef, Shirazi, Lizi, Zoti, Tel Aviv Sauna and Bshala.
Following the parade, a huge beach party will be held at Charles Clore Park till sunset.
The spotlight of this year's Nonstop City's Pride Parade is "Women for a Change", highlighting the role of women in the LGBTQ community. The Tel Aviv Pride Parade opens the European pride season – the continent's first pride parade for 2016.
In 2012 Tel Aviv was selected the Best Gay City in the world by GayCities.com. Recently, Tel Aviv was named "The gayest city on earth" by the Boston Globe and ranked by CNN as "one of the world's top gay honeymoon spots".
The first Israeli LGBTQ rights organization was established in 1975, marking the beginning of the LGBTQ campaign for social and legislative equality. The first large-scale pride event took place in 1993 when activists of the gay community set a closet in Sheinkin Garden and asked members of the community to step out of it. Some years later, in 1998, the first official Pride Parade took place and has since become a major annual event, attracting hundreds of thousands people, both from Israel and abroad.
The Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality allocates many resources into promoting and supporting the gay community, in an over-all yearly investment of $1 million. The Tel Aviv Pride Parade is the only parade in the world that is fully sponsored by the Municipality. In the last few years Tel Aviv has significantly deepened its investments to promote gay tourism to the city, while an estimated number of 35,000 tourists are expected to arrive this year in Tel Aviv to take part in the pride events.
Mayor of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Ron Huldai said: "The Pride Parade has turned into one of the symbols of the City of Tel Aviv with hundreds of thousands of participants and tourists from all over the country and the world. I believe that Tel Aviv-Yafo, a city of tolerance, is a beacon to other cities in this issue".
