ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways different ideas about hospitality are mobilized to constitute queer migrant subjectivity. In particular it addresses the ways immigrants' sense of belonging works through their relations to a community space and how this space, in turn, constitutes immigrants as mobile or rooted in the past and in the present. It is based on ethnography of the Russian-speaking queer community in Israel. The chapter shows the fights embody the ambivalence of the club's visitors, who are simultaneously welcomed and othered both in Israeli society as a whole and on the local queer scene. The idea of hospitality for the soul has its roots in the Russian tradition of welcoming and turning strangers into guests by opening for them the doors of one's home. Reading the immigrants' affective relations to the club as melancholic ambivalence one can better understand the violence of the flame wars about it.
