Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘This is not the Syrian story,’ he explained, meaning that he was one of the lucky ones since he was from a leafy part of Damascus and a middle-class, highly educated family who were more progressive than most. ‘It is all related to if you are from the centre of the city or from country, if you have money or well-known family . . . all these reasons, they give you power.’

  Ayman was living in Damascus in 2011 when the revolution began. As part of the wave of uprisings that happened across the Arab world at that time, young Syrians took to the streets to demand democratic reforms. Ayman would go to protests, sign petitions, write articles. All of his friends were active; they fought peacefully, but the government became more and more violent in quashing public actions until a full-blown civil war broke out. Watching this unfold from inside Syria, Ayman didn’t quite see where things were heading. ‘I feel it’s OK and the regime will go after days or weeks. I keep in this way of thinking until 2013. Every month, I think, “Next month we’ll celebrate in Umayyad Square in Damascus.” But nothing happened,’ he sighed.

  The false hope kept him in Damascus for longer than his friends; by the time he left for Beirut in 2013, chemical attacks had started in Syria, and most of his friends had fled to Lebanon, Turkey, Western Europe. ‘Not just gay people, all people,’ he clarified. ‘I do not feel I am gay when I go, I feel I am Syrian refugee. I feel I am alone and there’s no work, I do nothing, so I go to continue my PhD in Lebanon.’

  Ayman thought he would just go for six months, but the situation in Syria did not improve. Once he had finished his PhD it was late 2015 and Syria was still a war zone, so he decided to come to Istanbul. At this point, we toasted his PhD completion.

  ‘But why did you pick Turkey?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d been here in 2005 as a tourist, in summer. A few days. I feel it is really cheap. Beirut is really expensive. I am working online and my life here is better. That’s the reason I move from Beirut to Istanbul. But in Beirut I have my friends and my language. Most Turks don’t speak Arabic, just those in the south, from old Syrian city.’

  ‘What’s changed for you since you moved here?’

  ‘Tea and Talk,’ he smiled, visibly lighting up for the first time since we sat down. ‘It’s changed my whole life.’

  Tea and Talk was the reason I’d read about Ayman. It was a support group that met on Sunday afternoons on the Asian side of Turkey, near where most of the Syrian diaspora in the city wound up. It was not just for Syrians, but welcomed all Arabic-speaking LGBTI refugees; there were Moroccans, Kurds, Algerians and Lebanese. It had been going since 2015, although Ayman first went in February 2016. A friend had asked him to be a judge in a competition called Mr Gay Syria, a pageant that arose out of Tea and Talk meetings. He got out his phone to show me the trailer for the Mr Gay Syria documentary, which followed the competition to find a winner, who would then go to Malta to represent Syria in Mr Gay World. When I later watched the film, I jotted down something Ayman said in it: ‘I hope that the one that goes to Europe has sex and gets married but I hope that he doesn’t forget us. He could start an online page to raise awareness.’ The winner never made it to Malta; he couldn’t get a visa.

  ‘They screened it in Birmingham,’ Ayman said proudly, before explaining that, to fulfil his role of judge, he thought he’d better go and see what Tea and Talk was all about. He ended up going every week, eventually becoming the coordinator, or ‘mama’, as the group’s members call him, which was funny to me because Ayman wasn’t at all feminine or flamboyant. If anything, the razor eyebrow slits had the opposite effect.

  Most people would hear about Tea and Talk by word of mouth. If you wanted to go, you had to request to join the private Facebook group and Ayman, the admin, would admit you. You had to be friends with someone in the group to join, for safety. There were more than 700 members, not all in Turkey, but around the world – many had left Istanbul for Europe or Canada or America, said Ayman, more than 120. Sometimes, people travelled across the border from Iran into Turkey (easier than crossing the Syria–Turkey border) and came straight to Tea and Talk, as they had nowhere else to go in Istanbul first. Ayman showed me a picture on his phone of Katja, a beautiful trans woman in a blonde wig, explaining that she came over the border illegally into Idlib before her transition, and once in Istanbul he found her a place to sleep before she eventually left Turkey for Germany.

  Tea and Talk had helped other members with job searches, language courses, hospital access and Kimlik – a Turkish identity card that you needed to get work or to apply for asylum in a third country. Ayman took people to the police station to help them apply for it, which could be particularly difficult if you didn’t look like your picture because you were presenting your gender differently. Ayman even had a spare room in his apartment where people could stay until they found alternative arrangements. And if he needed something, he said, like a coat to keep someone warm in winter, he could just post in the Facebook group or on WhatsApp, and was usually offered a spare within hours.

  About fifty or sixty people would go to Tea and Talk each week; when Ayman started there were no trans people or lesbians, but now there had been many. ‘You’re comfortable and respected in Tea and Talk – we cannot see in LGBT community in any place masculine with feminine with trans woman all together. It’s not possible in Turkey or maybe all of Europe, all these communities, masculine men, feminine men. It’s like a family, really.’

  ‘What kinds of things do you do in meetings?’

  ‘We have a theme for the week – healthcare, legal status – or we just play games, or have a party and dance. Sometimes we make iftar after fasting, and we put on the Syrian TV to make it feel like home. Nobody comes one Sunday and doesn’t come back; all of them come again. It’s like therapy, this group,’ he said, echoing the words of Amy from Save The Joiners. ‘It’s two hours, for freedom, safe place. Many of them live here with their families and have a secret life. You should see it – one of them came with a normal look and when he enter through the door I have mirror and he puts make-up and earring. It’s like Shakespeare. Like a theatre move, the change.’

  I asked Ayman how this differed from life in Syria and he explained that, like him, many of the people in the group had left Syria because they were physically under attack, rather than because they were LGBTI. But in Syria, as a gay man, you would be expected to follow one path: go to work, find a wife, have children. The lowest on the food chain, he said, were specifically ‘bottoms’. To be a ‘top’ might be accepted because in the culture, if you were a man you fucked. For gays who got fucked, in Ayman’s words, ‘it’s a nightmare’. Feminine-presenting men in particular could face daily violence, physical or verbal, and it was, anecdotally, much harder to get a job. As a lesbian, you might be accepted more than some gays or your activity would be more likely to go unnoticed, because people wouldn’t suspect it. But it was much harder to leave Syria alone. It was unlikely you would go to war or go to study abroad. It was likely that you would have to move with your whole family, or a husband. Most of the lesbians who had come to Tea and Talk had done this; they lived with their families in the Syrian communities of Istanbul, like Fatih, an area Ayman described as like a displaced version of Aleppo. They were in the closet to their families: Syrian law criminalizes homosexuality as ‘unnatural sexual intercourse’ punishable by three years in prison, and these laws tend to be heavily policed; not just by the government and law enforcement but by the people around you too – families, communities, colleagues. Every year from 2011 to 2016, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association has found Syria to be the most dangerous country in the world to be LGBTQ+, based on the number of hate crimes and murders. I asked Ayman how ISIS made a difference, and he said of course they had made things worse, given that after they took hold of parts of Iraq and Syria they began systematically executing LGBTI people. However, if you came from an ISIS-occupied area with your family, you were probably living like a straight man
or straight woman. ‘To face ISIS you would have to be openly gay or look like you’re gay,’ he said, adding that this would be extremely unlikely because you probably wouldn’t even risk that in your own community.

  ‘How different is it here?’ I asked him. It sounded as if Turkey gave most of the people at Tea and Talk a chance to explore parts of their gender expression or sexuality for the first time.

  ‘It’s a great chance here,’ he said, beaming, as though he was used to being asked this. But then he hesitated. ‘Actually, I don’t know if it’s bad or good. Some of them are killed. We had three members killed, two trans women and one gay in a two-year period in Istanbul. That means there’s twenty across Turkey that we don’t know.’

  It was hard to know because some people were in the closet, of course; others were undocumented migrants with no legal status, and therefore ignored by the police. As I was considering this, Ayman started to tell me about one member of Tea and Talk who had been killed in Istanbul: a gay man. ‘We don’t know what happened. The killer had Turkish judgment before Turkish court, and they give him ten years in prison, because it’s honour reason. It’s good reason they kill him.’ Muhammed Wisam Sankari, the gay Syrian refugee Ayman was talking about, was beheaded in Istanbul in 2016. He’d told the police he was in danger after being abducted, taken to a forest and raped five months earlier, but that hadn’t prevented his death.

  The only upside of this horrifying climate of transphobia and homophobia, said Ayman, was that it could help you get asylum somewhere else. ‘If you apply to go to third country you should write you are LGBT,’ he explained on this point. ‘If you just put you are Syrian refugee they don’t accept. But you are special case LGBT because your life is dangerous here.’ According to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which outlined how countries are supposed to protect people fleeing from danger, a refugee is someone who has ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’, and an EU directive in 2011 specified that persecution for sexual orientation or gender identity is solid grounds for asylum. The problem was, you had to prove you were LGBTQ+, and how could you do that?

  ‘Do you feel like it’s getting worse here in Turkey, with the government I mean?’

  Ayman shook his head. Despite the murders, to him, Turkey was safer than Syria. ‘If you came from Syria you feel here more liberal and comfortable, even now. Not in all Turkey, just in Istanbul,’ he qualified. ‘Ankara too, maybe, or Izmir. In the south of Turkey it’s like Syria. Because we are coming from such a dark place it’s just better. We can be half out the closet. We find people with the same problems, the same questions, the same future.’

  ‘What about you? It sounds like you have found your people.’

  He smiled, put out his cigarette and got out his phone again. He started showing me a photo slideshow he’d made of the Tea and Talk group – it had an Arabic song playing over it and lots of goofy colour filters. It reminded me of my dad showing me slideshows of his holiday pictures. The photos included lots of group selfies. Some were taken at leaving parties for those about to move on to Europe.

  ‘I know their details. I feel proud when they tell me secrets. I feel like, wow, why? But thank you,’ said Ayman, as the faces flashed up on his screen. He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I don’t know why we are such a strong community,’ he mused. ‘Maybe because we haven’t support from outside. Maybe because we have the same pain and suffering.’

  ‘Can we go clubbing while we’re here?’ I had asked Şerif as we left our meeting with Seyhan.

  ‘Of course!’ he smiled, in a way that said: What the hell else are we gonna do?

  Now, a few days later, he was kindly fulfilling his promise. He told me that there were a couple of big clubs for gay men in Istanbul, Tek Yön being the best known. As a woman, I would not be allowed in because I would stand out like a sore thumb, make people feel uncomfortable, and essentially cock-block hundreds of Turkish men at once. Other LGBTI-friendly bars with brilliant names like Jasmin Highheel’s, Cheeky Club and Love Dance Point had either closed or fallen out of fashion (which was hard to imagine, with names like that), so instead, Şerif decided to take me to a queer club on Mis Sokak, the street where I had gone for a drink with Ayman.

  I didn’t know Şerif well. I had met him in London after he took my bedroom in my old house, and we had hung out maybe twice before he moved back to Turkey. As we rode the subway and chatted, he seemed to open up, as if he was starting to see me more as a friend than the journalists he was tired of talking to. He explained that by day, he was a video editor, but by night he moonlighted as a YouTuber, making videos about campy feuds between Turkish celebrities. In his spare time, he volunteered at the LGBTI phone line, because he used to call it for advice when he was a teenager, and wanted to give something back.

  Şerif had lived in London for six years as a film student, moving back to Istanbul in 2015, just before the coup d’état attempt in 2016, launched by a military faction to topple the government. When it happened, Şerif was working for a Turkish media company, and although he wasn’t in the office at the time, the building was stormed by the soldiers who were trying to seize power from the AKP. The coup ultimately failed, and Erdoğan’s grip on the country tightened as he threw a reported 70,000 perceived traitors in jail. A little while after the attempted coup, Şerif quit his job, frustrated with how the publication had caved in to state censorship. Now, he was feeling even more disillusioned with Turkish politics. As a gay man, he had everything he’d had in London: nightlife, a community, two boys on the go at once. But he was deeply concerned about the rise of state-sanctioned homophobia, which was, he said, one of the reasons he’d offered up his time to be my guide, and to get me drunk.

  When we arrived at Mis Sokak, the street was packed, which I wasn’t expecting, partly because I’d seen in the news that alcohol prices in Turkey had risen sharply under taxes imposed by the AKP, and partly because I wasn’t sure that club culture in the city would have recovered after the terror attack on the Reina nightclub down by the water, where an ISIS gunman killed thirty-nine people on New Year’s Day 2017.

  Şerif led me through a dark doorway, and up three flights of grimy and graffitied stairs vibrating with bass. We walked into what looked like the living room of a house, with wooden floors and stripped concrete walls, and ordered beers from the bar in a side room. The music was a blend of house and techno with Arabesque music mixed in. The clientele were gay men, trans women and lesbians; seemingly it was a small community because everybody was talking to one another. The room was full of cigarette smoke, making it hard to see properly. If Jeffrey were here, he would approve: the bar was secluded, in no way commercial; it felt non-conformist, non-judgemental – all a result, perhaps, of the fact that the scene here was forced underground. We danced, with cigarettes hanging out of our mouths, always a novelty when you’re from a country where smoking indoors is banned. At one point, the trans woman who ran the place came up to Şerif and told him she fancied me, but by the time he had come over to tell me and pointed her out, which took about forty-five seconds, she was already making out with someone else.

  ‘Seriously?’ I joked to Şerif. ‘This whole journey to meet queer people and the first person to fancy me does so for less than one minute.’

  Privately, I wished Emily was there with me, not stuck working late nights at her law firm. After our takeaways and sex-heavy honeymoon period had ended, we had fallen into a nice habit of going out to gay bars together, and it was as though I had finally realized you can actually go gay clubbing with your partner, their friends and your friends and have a good time in the process. What had taken me so long to reach this conclusion, I wasn’t sure.

  At some point in the early hours, Şerif introduced me to his gay friend Kerim and we sat on the pulsating stairwell that ran through the middle of the building, blocking everyone trying to get to the toilets and tal
king at speed. A little drunk, and a little more forthright, Şerif seemed more concerned about the situation in Istanbul now. They told me that PrEP, the HIV-prevention drug, had just made its way to Turkey, but it was still hard to get it. They told me that Grindr had been banned by the government in 2013, so now they all used an app called Hornet. They told me that a queer film screening in the district of Beyoglu had recently been cancelled by local authorities, following bans on any LGBTI event at all in the city of Ankara.

  ‘They banned Pride. There are hate crimes. The Islamic media publish homophobic things,’ said Kerim.

  ‘The conservative media have chosen us as a target, “perverts are doing this and that”,’ added Şerif. ‘They always print photos, too. Some guys I know went to the Lady Gaga concert in drag, and ever since that summer the same photo has been constantly used by conservative newspapers in every article where they mention perverts.’

  ‘CNN maybe five years ago can be doing news about LGBTI community . . .’ Kerim chipped in.

  ‘Before the coup many influential public figures of the LGBTI community could go on TV and talk about the rights we’re seeking and what is needed for the community – but right now we don’t exist in the mainstream media, just small online news portals.’

  ‘And you don’t exist on the street at Pride now either, just in places like this?’ I said.