JERUSALEM, Israel — Monday nights at the Video Pub weren’t known for being particularly wild, but Nikolas Brummer, 22, didn’t mind. Even on a Monday, many of the same faces from the weekend could be spotted drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at small tables on the cobblestone sidewalks outside.
The Video Pub is known by locals as Jerusalem’s only openly gay bar, providing a nightly oasis for LGBTQ residents and visitors in a city traditionally associated with religious conservatism.
A golden retriever named Buto ran underneath the tables, collecting head pats. His owner recently moved out of the country, one patron explained, making Buto a neighborhood pet.
Having worked his way through the crowd, the dog ran off to chase a pigeon in the road.
“There’s an imaginary line here,” Brummer said pointing toward the ground with a cigarette in hand.
“They don’t cross it,” he explained, gesturing to the presumably heterosexual men and women sitting just a few feet away outside the adjoining watering hole, The Record Bar.
The Video Pub, The Record Bar and a third space called The Cassette Bar share a building on the corner of two intersecting streets in the city’s center. The Record Bar opened in 2007, Cassette in 2009 and Video Pub in 2012.
In an earlier life, the building was a farmhouse outside of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, before the area was commercially developed. Though connected by architecture, a shared patio courtyard and interchangeable bartenders, each space has its own distinct crowd and vibe.
Video Pub is nestled behind the building at the top of a hidden staircase, cordoned off from the rest of the world.
Brummer’s been a nightly guest since moving from Berlin seven months ago. While there are other LGBTQ-” friendly” places those individuals can go, Brummer said gay nightlife in Jerusalem revolves around the Video Pub.
“It’s visible and known to people, it’s not hidden,” Brummer said. “Everybody knows, ‘oh, this the gay bar.’”
For Brummer and others like him, the Video Pub is a place to dance, drink cheaply and exist in a space that allows one to come as they are, unburdened by the behaviors and expectations enforced by religion in a holy city like Jerusalem.
Still, he wondered aloud how much his own personal projection affects how he navigates space.
“I project holiness on to the city, and something inside of me wants to maintain that holiness,” Brummer said, adding that he avoids holding hands with his boyfriend in some neighborhoods to not offend their more conservative neighbors.
Emilee, 29, requesting to go by the first name only, is also a Jerusalem resident and Video Pub regular. A former student of the nearby Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Emilee lives across the street from the bar. He said the projection that Brummer describes is real.
“Jerusalem is a very extreme city,” he said. “We don’t have middles.”
While grateful that Video Pub exists as a community space, Emilee said that certain “projections” can have harmful social effects, like the evaporation of LGBTQ spaces. Emilee expressed frustration at Jerusalem’s limited queer spaces.
“It’s not like gay people don’t go to other places, so it’s not like it couldn’t work,” Emilee said of creating more explicitly pro-gay environments.
Emilee places some of the blame for limited venues on what he called the “extreme” nature of Jerusalem, wondering if more gay bars spread out across the city might invite conflict from the religious factions that believe homosexuality is a sin.
The Video, Cassette and Record’s owner, Avi Goldberger, said he tries to keep a more progressive point of view.
“If there’s another gay bar that opens, we’d be very happy,” Goldberger said, “But for the moment, we’re the only one.”
Goldberger described his marketing philosophy for the Video Pub as a straightforward one; Video Pub is marketed as an openly queer space for queer people.
“We aim everything we do to be a place for the LGBTQ community,” Goldberger explained over the phone.
He added that before Video Pub opened, gay people were often forced into what he calls “freaky places” like dark parks and public restrooms in order to connect, physically or otherwise.
The Video Pub instead provides a safe space, changing the community in profound ways, such as reducing the amount of violence LGBTQ people experience for seeking the same connections their straight counterparts enjoy.
This makes the Video Pub, among all of Goldberger’s venues, his favorite.
International visitors in Jerusalem may take gay bars for granted, and opening a bar in Amsterdam, London or New York is a business no-brainer, Goldberger said through a chuckle, but there’s “something different about Jerusalem.”
“There’s a political meaning to it,” he said. “It’s a safe zone for a lot of people and I really feel that we’re improving lives by having it.”
Back on the patio, Buto the golden retriever returned from his bird hunt mawing a chewed up Coca Cola bottle instead. Cigarette still burning, Nikolas Brummer reached down with his free hand to ruffle the dog’s fur.
“After the first week,” Brummer exhaled, “This became my home.”
Additional reporting by Ashtyn Hiron