Gay Years
Haifa
Arnon, on aging in a community that mostly didn't get to.
Arnon is 49. He runs the Communities House, an LGBTQ+ center in Haifa, and he opens by saying that gay years are like dog years, that he isn't supposed to still be alive, and that most of his work now is figuring out how to age inside a community that mostly didn't get to.
He was born in Haifa, spent part of his childhood in Paris, and studied education and school counseling. He never worked in either. For most of his career, he did community work with people with special needs and, for the last decade before this job, in the mental health field. His last position was helping people with mental illness reenter public life through leisure activities at a community center. He was pulled into a national pilot to reimagine what a community center could be: not a provider of activities, but a creator of communities.
Six and a half years ago, he was offered the chance to open the Communities House. He had sworn to himself he would never take another management position after one big failure earlier in his career. He took the job.
The name is important. In Hebrew, the center is called Beit Ha'Kehilot, or House of the Communities. The plural is intentional. The gay community, the lesbian community, the trans community, the Bi community, each has its own history, its own struggles, and its own values. Arnon didn’t want to collapse them into one voice. The logo is in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, which is not incidental in Haifa.
A few hours before I met him, a young gay Arab man walked into the center for the first time in his life and opened up about his identity. Arnon said it isn't the first time. Somebody comes through the door, feels the room, and starts talking about something they haven't been able to say anywhere else. The center runs Friday night dinners, board game nights, youth groups, adult groups, therapy for more than a hundred people a year, and a volunteer program called Help Is On the Way, where people show up to clean a house after an illness or cook a warm meal for someone recovering from surgery. Small things, but they make a person feel less alone.
