Gan Meir – Städtisches LGBTQ+ Community Center & Aguda

Gan Meir is a small palm-shaded park in the middle of Tel Aviv named for the city's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. In June 2008 the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality opened the country's — and the region's — first fully municipally-funded LGBTQ+ community centre on the park's eastern edge. It's known simply as **The Centre** (המרכז הגאה). The two-storey building serves roughly 100,000 visits a year: youth drop-in, coming-out groups, HIV and PrEP clinics, refugee and asylum support, an elder-LGBTQ programme, and a rotating cultural calendar. It is the Israeli equivalent of New York's LGBT Center, but younger and municipally rather than community-owned. The rainbow flag over the entrance is a permanent installation. The same block houses the offices of **Aguda — the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel**, the country's national civil-rights organisation, founded in Tel Aviv in 1975 by Uzi Even and a small group of Hebrew University graduates. Aguda ran Israel's first coming-out helpline in 1978, argued the case that removed homosexuality from Israeli criminal law in 1988, and organised the first Tel Aviv Pride march in 1993. Its archive — 50 years of Israeli LGBTQ+ history — is held on the Centre's second floor. Gan Meir is free and open dawn to dusk; the Centre building is open Sunday-Thursday roughly 09:00-22:00 (check lgbt.org.il for current hours). Drop-in visitors welcome. The park itself is the site of the annual Pride week candle-lighting; on 1 August, the annual memorial ceremony for the Bar-Noar attack begins here.