Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘Privilege is nothing if you’re not leveraging it. How do you know you’re really privileged if you’re not testing the limits of what you’re able to do with it?’ she asked me. ‘Give it to someone else who’s gonna do something with it. Every day be better than the system. Show up. Physically. If you’re able to have a conversation to shift something, do it. Put your money into things and push policies that will change what’s happening. Give. Up. Your. Resources.’

  Her words reminded me of something else that Kai said – he said that it’s easy to think we are making progress for ourselves as LGBTQ+ people – particularly trans people – because we create safe-spaces and families, like the Harlem ballrooms Kia and I had talked about, or the Anti-Violence Project. However, it’s worth remembering that these spaces are only there because we make them for ourselves, not necessarily because we are given them. And that if we stop creating these spaces, these communities, and fighting for their existence, they may cease to be there, giving way to the powers – like Trump – that wish to suppress us.

  The way I see it, two things threaten to erase LGBTQ+ visibility and community most – on the one hand there is complacency, and on the other, oppression. But the two are interlinked: one of the reasons we can’t become complacent, even if we are living in relative privilege, is because, if my time in New York had taught me anything, it was that acceptance doesn’t include all parts of queer culture or all LGBTQ+ people, just those that society deems worthy. And that’s in America. There are always, of course, places in the world where our queer siblings live in an even more openly hostile climate, with very little possibility at all.

  chapter seven

  GAY CAPITAL

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No! I’m exhausted,’ said Şerif, laughing. We were on our way to take the metro from Bomonti, a neighbourhood in Istanbul, back to Taksim Square, near where I was staying. He had been translating for me for hours, and my interviewee, Seyhan, had talked quickly. We laughed about how, over the time we had been chatting with Seyhan, she had managed to bring most of my questions back to talking about herself. Then we moved on to her advice – good advice. I was an outsider; I needed to be schooled.

  ‘Look, when we get asked to do interviews with Western journalists, it’s like they already have a portrait of Turkey in their mind and then their questions always reflect that,’ Şerif said, frustrated. ‘This portrait they have, it’s an exaggerated, sad version of our lives and that can be offensive. Our lives are not so different from any other LGBTI community in Europe or the US – it’s harder to be gender non-conforming, harder to be gay if you’re from the countryside or from a religious family or in the military. It’s not like we are some exception to the rule . . .’

  I told Şerif that it had never been my intention to visit a country bordering the Middle East and paint a picture of how horrific it was to be LGBTI there, but I did want to hear about how the context – the state’s reversion to Islam, the extremely right-wing government in power, the patriarchal culture – shaped my queer Turkish friends’ experiences. I told him that, since hearing how difficult life could be for LGBTI people in Serbia and America, I was more aware than ever that discrimination and hate crimes weren’t exclusive to one place, religion or culture. And then I told him what I had been going through at home.

  After I got back from New York, I moved in with Emily. We lived for a few months in total domestic bliss under the silent burden of the fact that she hadn’t told her Christian, three-times-a-week churchgoing parents about my existence, let alone the fact that we lived together. When she plucked up the courage to tell them we were dating, on her twenty-seventh birthday, her mum told her she already knew: she had somehow found my Instagram account.

  When Emily relayed this to me, all colour drained from my face. ‘But . . . but what about the picture of me outside Berghain at 7 a.m.,’ I stuttered. I had a bad habit of making situations that were difficult for other people all about me, but this was practically a free pass.

  ‘I’m sure she hasn’t seen that, baby,’ Emily responded kindly, when really she must have been thinking, That’s not the point here and Why did you put that up anyway, you idiot?

  Her mum cried, she cried, I cried, and then the whole thing sort of got brushed under the carpet. Emily and I went back to our relationship as usual. A relationship which was by now my longest and happiest. Sometimes, she and I talked about it, and occasionally, she and Amrou would bond over their shared experiences with their families, despite Amrou being from a Muslim one and Emily a Christian one.

  What this had reminded me of, I explained to Şerif, was that while government regimes like Turkey’s existed, everyone’s experience was clearly individual. The more places I had visited, the more this had hit home. But still, I wanted to find out what it was like to live in a region where the cultural atmosphere mostly attempted to suppress homosexuality into, well, virtual non-existence.

  It was Şerif who’d suggested I interview Seyhan Arman, and that he be my translator since her English was so minimal. We met her in a queer cafe on a Thursday afternoon. While Şerif relayed what she said, Seyhan would interrupt our interview to get up and greet passers-by that she knew, or to take phone calls, or to post photos and videos on her Snapchat. Şerif and I just sat and sipped our tea while she did this, understanding we were in the company of a true diva and must not interfere. Also understanding that, at this rate, the interview would take hours.

  Seyhan was a well-known activist for LGBTI rights in Istanbul, and according to Şerif she would help me understand the context of what it was like to be LGBTI there, as someone who was part of the culture and had seen things change over the years. She appeared on Turkish television chat shows to talk about trans rights, did HIV outreach work, and coached the young trans people and their families who reached out to her for advice on social media. Originally from Adana, she had acted since she was fifteen, did improvised drag under the name Mademoiselle Coco, and did TV bit parts and indie films. She embodied everything that LaLa had told me we needed to see more of – powerful, successful trans women doing jobs that they loved. And at the moment, she told me, she was even starring in her own play, at a theatre not far from where we were meeting.

  She handed me the poster for the play; all bold red graphics and kitsch scribbly fonts, it looked just like a poster for one of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s films. And just like Almodóvar’s films, Seyhan explained, the script, soap-opera-like, was designed to make Seyhan’s audience laugh, cry and empathize. A one-woman show about a transgender woman’s fight for self-emancipation in the 1990s and 2000s, with Seyhan delivering theatrical but campy monologues from the stage in a shoulder-padded blazer and fishnet tights, it began with a boy on his knees begging Allah to give him breasts, a vagina and long hair overnight, and then to send out the news to journalists the next day so that, once he had become a woman, she could also become extremely famous. As our trans protagonist grew up, she ran away from home to the city, became a sex worker, and experienced discrimination, police brutality and a lot of the other awful bullshit LaLa had described to me.

  Seyhan told me that the likeness to Almodóvar’s posters was deliberate, but her story was not fiction: it was autobiographical, and not just her story but ‘thousands of stories. It’s not just the story of a trans person, but the story of a human being who has love affairs, struggles, whatever a person goes through in life,’ she said. ‘It’s the only mainstream story in Turkey where a trans woman survives and thrives; just when you think her character has been killed, she comes back, and lives to tell the tale.’ This too was intentional; ‘People have this cliché of trans people having terrible lives and living in horrible conditions,’ she explained through Şerif. ‘I’m not saying we don’t have struggles, but we put our lives together and we make it work. We are strong. Stronger than most people,’ she added, flicking back her long, curly and shockingly bright orange hair, which contrasted exquisitely with her magenta
puffer jacket.

  Seyhan’s film work and her play had turned her into a minor celebrity in Turkey, although she warned me that ‘Turkish society are hypocrites – people see me on stage and they applaud me, but if some saw me on the street, maybe they would spit on my face.’

  In Turkey, as in America, this was a common story. The number of openly trans and gay celebrities in Turkey was surprising. Of these, Bülent Ersoy was probably the most famous, a singer and now a close friend of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Already a household name, Ersoy transitioned publicly from male to female in 1981, and decided to keep the name Bülent despite the fact that it’s a popular man’s name in Turkey. Some of Ersoy’s videos – she made classical Turkish music – had around 10 million hits on YouTube. She was huge, a household name. Then there was Mabel Matiz, a chart-topping gay pop singer, and Zeki Müren, who was basically the Turkish version of Liberace before he died in 1996 (in fact, there was a mural of him in the cafe where we met Seyhan). But there was a disconnect between this representation and life for everyday LGBTI people. As one Turkish friend put it: ‘It’s weird, it’s like the only way that it’s truly acceptable to be LGBTI in Turkey is to be famous.’

  Judging by hate-crime statistics, Turkey was the most dangerous place to be in Europe if you were trans, with forty-three murders recorded between 2008 and 2016 (although the actual number could be higher). You could legally change your gender after undergoing gender confirmation surgery from 1988, but with no other legal protections put in place from then until now, violence and discrimination were rife. Ines had told me after her time in Turkey that sex work was a common and dangerous choice in a climate where finding alternative employment could be difficult. She was right. ‘I wanted to work. I wanted to do stuff but I couldn’t,’ said Eylül Cansın, a twenty-three-year-old trans sex worker who killed herself in 2015. Another trans sex worker, Warda, was murdered at home by a client in December 2016. The murderer disembowelled her and cut off her genitals: horrifying, but not a one-off incident. In fact, the precariousness of life for trans people in Turkey was part of the reason that some members of this community (Seyhan included) took on a leading role in the Gezi Park anti-government protests of 2013, to demand a higher standard of protection, a basic chance in life.

  For gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer people, Turkey is one of the few majority Muslim countries where homosexuality is legal – since as early as 1923 – and it acts as a safe haven for LGBTI people from across the region. But the climate is still harsh. There are no laws protecting LGBTI people from violence and discrimination. There is less legal protection than in Serbia, even, and since Erdoğan came into power as President in 2014 (before this, he was Prime Minister), the country has been experiencing a strong shift towards conservatism under his neo-Islamist party, the AKP. Not long before my visit, Erdoğan stated that empowering gay people was ‘against the values’ of the nation, while a handful of LGBTI activists were imprisoned for posting about their rights on social media.

  If Pride is the measure of a country’s LGBTI climate, in Turkey it painted a fairly accurate picture of how things were changing: 2013 saw around 50,000 people march down Istiklal Avenue, the city’s main shopping street, for the biggest ever Pride in the region; in 2015 the event was cancelled altogether. The government justified this by arguing that it clashed with Ramadan. When people in Istanbul headed into the streets anyway, police forced them back into their houses with tear gas and pellet guns. Pride was banned in Istanbul again in 2016 and 2017. From 2017 into 2018, local authorities in the Turkish capital Ankara banned all LGBTI-related events. The country, straddling Europe and the Middle East, was once secular and growing increasingly liberal, but now it was isolating itself geopolitically, becoming more and more conservative, and sending a clear message to LGBTI people that they ought to be afraid.

  ‘We are not as far ahead as other places,’ said Seyhan. ‘When I go on TV, I have to express myself so the general public will understand. So I say it is the same God who created us all, to popularize the conversation, make it understandable,’ she explained. Then she gave an example of someone doing the opposite. When the government banned Pride, they named the holy month of Ramadan as the reason. In Islam there are three holy months, which are also three male names: Rajab, Sha’ban and Ramadan. In a counter-protest to the ban, some LGBTI activists walked down the street with a huge sign that read: ‘Ramadan cannot interfere in the relationship of Rajab and Sha’ban’, the joke being that Rajab and Sha’ban were in a same-sex relationship. This was deeply offensive, Seyhan said, shaking her head. To progress the conversation around LGBTI rights, it was important to be respectful of the cultural atmosphere, respectful of Islam.

  I turned to Şerif, knowing that he was of my generation, not particularly religious, and that he identified as queer, politically speaking. ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘You cannot put people’s religious views or sacred beliefs as your target.’

  It was fine to talk to LGBTI Turks about all of this, said Seyhan, but I needed to remember that I would never understand the situation fully. There were LGBTI people who agreed with the government’s actions; there were religious people who supported Erdoğan’s regime, but also many people who were leaving the country and starting their lives elsewhere. There were people who didn’t like queer politics, but simply knew what being a trans lesbian was because they were one. And then there were people like Seyhan herself, who, at thirty-nine, would have different queer politics and language to someone of a younger generation. No matter how hard I tried, she warned, I would only be able to speak to a few ‘colours of the rainbow’; the same phrase I had read on the DragCon website, only this time I liked it so much that I quickly jotted it down.

  The final thing I needed to remember was the disconnect between the general public’s impression of LGBTI rights in Turkey and what some LGBTI people believed their rights should be. Seyhan then compared the progress of the LGBTI community to a staircase that had a hundred steps. Some activists were behaving as if we were at the eightieth step, she said, but there were still people in the LGBTI community who had not come to terms with themselves, and who were not even aware that this staircase existed. When it came to marriage equality, for example, the government was completely opposed because it didn’t want the idea of the sacred family to be destroyed, she said. It believed same-sex marriage was a ‘discussion for the next century’, as did most of the heterosexual public, and even a large part of Turkey’s LGBTI population. ‘I am not opposed to fighting for marriage equality,’ Seyhan said, ‘but these kinds of fights are higher up the staircase. First, we need to start at the bottom.’

  I looked at Şerif again. ‘She’s right. Here in Turkey we have more urgent priorities,’ he said, as Seyhan got up to take another call.

  I waited for Ayman outside the Starbucks in Taksim Square. As for what he looked like, all I had to go on was his tiny WhatsApp picture, which wasn’t enough to recognize him when he started coming towards me. He had a shaved head, slits shaved through one of his eyebrows, and he was wearing a black leather jacket. Our greeting was awkward, since he wasn’t sure if I was the person he was looking for either; it kind of felt like we were on a blind date. In some ways, we were.

  I had read about Ayman Menem online. He was an activist, although I knew he probably wouldn’t call himself that; he was also one of the 3.4 million refugees living in Turkey, the country with the world’s biggest refugee population, according to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR. There are no figures on how many of these people are LGBTI, specifically, but it is estimated that Syrians like Ayman make up 90 per cent of the refugees in the country, having fled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in their own.

  Ayman and I walked to Mis Sokak, known for being the ‘anarchist street’, where – unlike some other less haram districts of Istanbul – you could drink alcohol in pretty much all of the bars. He told me that, like a lot of Arabs in Turkey, he didn’t speak Turkish. His English
was OK though. Not great, just OK. I assured him not to worry about that: I was terrible at languages. As we walked, he told me about his elderly Armenian neighbours, who invited him round for coffee and talked at him in Armenian. He didn’t understand a word, but the old ladies chose not to notice.

  We ordered a beer at a metal bar and chatted about Damascus, Ayman’s home. He was born and raised there; he said it wasn’t the worst part of Syria to be from as a gay person, since it was the capital and the most liberal city. But any gay culture there had remained fairly underground out of necessity, he said, remembering a time in the late 1990s or early 2000s when there were only about seven openly gay people in Damascus. He gestured at our beers and explained that no one would want to have a drink with you out in the open if you were one of these people – as he was. He was a known homosexual and thus a social pariah.

  Ayman had come out to his family and friends in his early twenties. His father reacted angrily; his mother cried. They immediately sent him to conversion therapy to avert a crisis. He saw three psychologists in Syria, one of whom inflicted electroshock therapy on him. The doctor would show Ayman pictures of men kissing and zap him. After two sessions, he refused to go back. The last therapist he saw was French, and told Ayman’s parents that their son was ‘normal’ after all. It took about ten years, but eventually, Ayman’s parents came to accept his homosexuality – just before he was conscripted, and had to begin the stressful process of hiding his sexuality all over again, this time from his colleagues in the military.