Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  They nodded. I wanted to know more but I also wanted to dance, so we agreed to meet at Şerif’s house the next day.

  Şerif lived on the Asian side of the city. To get there from the European side I had to take a ferry across the Bosporus Strait, which cost about £1 and was the kind of thing I’d want to do as a tourist anyway, for the panoramic views of the city, its mosques silhouetted against the sunset.

  When I arrived at the apartment, the guys sat round a table smoking out of the living room window. J-Lo videos played on a laptop in the corner of the room and a tiny kitten rolled around on the carpet. Kerim was sitting at the table waiting for me. He was a big guy, but not tall. He wore a white, faded T-shirt with a bunch of flowers on the front and the words ‘Late Bloomer’.

  Kerim told me he generally identified as gay – he was attracted to men. He was twenty-two years old and an architecture student, originally from the north of Turkey, near the Black Sea. Since he’d moved to Istanbul, he’d started doing drag on the side. I told him, no offence, but I couldn’t go anywhere these days without meeting a drag queen. He assured me that he hadn’t seen RuPaul’s Drag Race when he started.

  ‘How did you start then?’ I asked.

  He turned to Şerif, who would translate. He told him – us – that when he was in middle school, aged about thirteen to fourteen, his paternal aunt was a state teacher. At the time, it was illegal under Erdoğan’s then secular vision of Turkey to wear a headscarf in state buildings (in fact, this was banned from 1923 till 2013), and so she would hide her headscarf under a wig. It was these wigs that Kerim first used to play dress-up, sometimes adding lipstick for an extra-special look.

  ‘What did your dad make of that?’ I said.

  ‘He slap me,’ he said in broken English. ‘After that I didn’t show him.’

  Şerif explained that Kerim had since picked up drag again, performing in Istanbul at events like ‘Istanbul Is Burning’, a play on Paris Is Burning, and that Kerim had caused quite the stir when he performed in the final, beaten only by a drag queen who had the audacity to set fire to her own outfit while she was wearing it on stage. I gasped to acknowledge the scandal.

  ‘I know. It was so fucking insane – we were scared the stage was gonna burn,’ said Şerif.

  ‘Yeah, and after that the stage was so wet I couldn’t walk or dance. She fucked my performance up,’ added Kerim, as though he were talking about the film Showgirls.

  ‘She couldn’t win the contest but she made a huge impact,’ said Şerif of Kerim, switching pronouns to ‘she’ to denote that Kerim was in drag.

  ‘Do you perform to English songs or Turkish songs?’ I asked.

  ‘I prefer Turkish songs but just one song we were choosing and the other song the jury chooses, so one song was Turkish; the other was “Fergalicious”,’ he said. ‘You know, when you are drag queen they love you on the scene but on the street no. I can make a fuck buddy with this attire, for example,’ continued Kerim, gesticulating at his white T-shirt and jeans, ‘but in drag no. It’s like a no-femme thing.’

  This reminded me of what MJ had told me about femmephobia in drag, and what Seyhan had said about the hypocrisy that trans women face.

  ‘I know it exists everywhere but I feel there is a strong masc culture in Turkey,’ I said.

  ‘The same situation exists in all of Europe, going gym and being muscle gay,’ said Kerim, agreeing. ‘Actually I am drag queen and a bear – it is about being masculine. Being a drag queen and normal gay life are very different for me. Maybe if I’m skinny it can be different but when I’m bear I can’t be drag queen with my fuck buddies. It’s hard for me. Maybe if I can be normal gay, muscle gay, maybe I can meet with someone like a drag queen.’

  ‘These categories they have for gay men . . . they’re ridiculous.’ I sympathized but couldn’t empathize; I supposed other than ‘butch’ and ‘femme’, such strict categories didn’t seem to exist for lesbians. I turned to Şerif: ‘What are you?’

  ‘When I lived in the UK I thought I was a bear but then I got here and was like, OK, I’m a cub.’ We laughed. He called to his non-boyfriend, who was wandering around the flat somewhere. ‘You’re a twink!’

  ‘He’s an otter,’ I said.

  ‘You know some things about gay men!’ Kerim said, smiling.

  ‘All my friends are gay men, I have to listen to this shit all the time.’

  ‘I have not been in other countries, I’ve just been in Turkey,’ said Kerim, ‘but in Turkey the bear culture really is too much. A lot of people like bear and a lot of bear living here.’ I loved how, with his sincerity and his wobbly English, it sounded as if he was narrating a nature programme. ‘In Europe it’s different: they don’t like bears as much as Turkey.’ Before I got a chance to clarify why this was, Kerim continued: ‘But I don’t sleep with Turkish guys, I sleep with Middle Eastern guys . . . they like me because I’m blond and blue eyes.’

  ‘They fall in love with Kerim all the time,’ Şerif confirmed.

  ‘I have a lot of lovers from Dubai, Beirut, Saudi, Kuwait . . .’

  ‘This reminds me of the period when I was sleeping with an Israeli girl, a Danish girl and a Swedish girl,’ I said. ‘It was like a UN summit in my pants.’

  ‘Actually, they’re coming here for sex tourism. In Istanbul we have Bear Festival.’

  ‘He went,’ said Şerif, pre-empting my question. I had already somehow found myself on the Istanbul Bear Festival Instagram account, which was full of pictures of big hairy guys on a boat.

  ‘Of course he went – he is the Bear Festival,’ I said. Kerim seemed to like this.

  ‘I went with my ex-boyfriend,’ said Kerim.

  Şerif started laughing. ‘You’re always married to someone.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I like! But when he was in the toilet a lot of Middle Eastern guys came up to me . . . I love it.’

  ‘Why Middle Eastern guys? Is it the novelty of doing something naughty?’ I asked.

  Kerim also started laughing hysterically. ‘Maybe the first time, but now I’m used to it.’

  Kerim started to tell me the story of his coming out. He didn’t come out to his parents; he was ‘outed’ by his sister. When he went home from university in the holidays, his sister opened his phone while he was sleeping and saw messages from his boyfriend. A huge fight ensued. Kerim lost. His siblings sent him to see a conversion therapist in Istanbul, just as Ayman’s parents had.

  ‘We talked about my family. How, when I was child my father was old . . . my first big sister is thirty-eight now and has three children. My father retired, they opened some shops, and my sister was managing that. My father was not working; he was drinking raki every night and actually I didn’t see him, just Sunday morning and next Sunday morning, until I was sixteen. My therapist told me, “You are gay because you didn’t see your father and you saw your sister taking money for your family. You don’t know how you can be a man because you don’t have a male role model.” Then he told me, “You’re gay because you’re fat and your friends didn’t take you to play football, so you were playing with girls.” Then he told me, “You are gay because you were jealous of boys and it changed and then you were loving boys.” Then he told me I’m jerking off too much.’

  ‘Wow.’ We all laughed.

  ‘He told me I’m a narcissist,’ Kerim continued, pleased to be entertaining everyone.

  ‘Aren’t all drag queens?’ I replied.

  ‘And the next time he told me I’m a hysteric,’ Kerim chuckled.

  ‘This guy needs a new textbook,’ tutted Şerif, stubbing out his cigarette.

  Kerim ‘broke up’ with the therapist after three months, promising his siblings he could fix himself. On the one hand, he said, the therapy was helpful, because for a while the therapist told Kerim’s family that he would take care of it; they should leave him alone and not talk to him about his homosexuality. On the other hand, the therapist’s questions caused Kerim a lot of mental anguish. Plus, while
he was going through it, his sisters told his parents he was gay, and for a whole summer he felt pressured to act as if he was straight, in a concerted effort to become so.

  ‘How is it now?’ I asked.

  ‘My sisters told my parents, “He is going to gay clubs – if he doesn’t have money he will not be gay!”’ He laughed. ‘So three years later still they will not give me money. Three years later they’re calling me saying, “Do you have a girlfriend?” At first it was hard but now I don’t feel anything towards them, my parents. My sisters say, “I know you can’t change but to be gay it is too much wrong in our Islam, so please don’t do that. You don’t have to marry a girl or make a child with girl. Just don’t have sex with males. Don’t say you are gay in public. If you share that then people will say something about our family.”’

  ‘Because it’s a sin,’ Şerif chimed in, although I had understood this.

  Kerim then explained that, just as things were getting a tiny bit better with his parents, they found out he was a drag queen, which made everything a whole load worse. Some kids he’d been to school with had found pictures of him in drag on social media; they set up a WhatsApp group to share them and gossip about it. Someone showed someone else, who showed Kerim’s sister, who showed his uncle, who showed his parents. They didn’t even confront him at first, he said; they just fought about it among themselves. Until a week earlier, when he’d got the phone call. He seemed visibly upset for the first time in our interview while telling me this.

  ‘It takes time, you know. It’s a process of attrition,’ I said.

  ‘I think in time they will change. Maybe they will, maybe they will not,’ said Kerim hopelessly.

  ‘Were your parents very religious?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, too much. Really. Every day that I talk to my mum she tells me to read the Quran.’

  ‘And were you religious as a kid?’

  ‘Actually I was, but when I was thirteen I read letter to my counsellor at school saying I’m not Muslim, I’m an atheist, and he invited my parents to the school. They were annoyed so they sent me to Quran school for the summer.’

  ‘If you have religious parents, traditionally you will go to Quran school during summer break,’ explained Şerif for context, ‘but before that they used to send him to boating or swimming courses, so it was a change.’

  ‘I went there and fucked with boys,’ said Kerim casually. ‘I stayed one and a half months. It’s like seven floors and three floors in the basement, and the third floor in the basement they have a hammam – you should go in the morning at 6 a.m. when you wake up and then you go to pray blah blah, but we were escaping praying and going to hammam and having sex. The first day there were two people; the last day ten.’

  I was shocked by this information. ‘What, full sex?’

  ‘Yeah, weren’t you just jerking each other off?’ said Şerif, who had obviously heard the story before.

  ‘No, some jerking off, others oral sex, one full sex too,’ said Kerim proudly.

  ‘Were you thirteen?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, I was older. This was my second Quran course,’ said Kerim. ‘The first summer at Quran school we were touching each other with clothes on. The second time I went we did a lot of sex. It was good!’

  ‘Wow, I wish the convent school I went to was more like that,’ I said.

  ‘He was studying at an Islamic school for middle school, and the imam’s son was at the same school and they were fooling around for seven years,’ Şerif said.

  ‘Yeah, some days he is still writing me: “Where are you?”’

  ‘Is he out?’ I asked.

  ‘No! And I don’t write him back now because he’s not my type.’

  ‘Well, I suppose now you’re in Istanbul you have more choice.’

  ‘Yeah – too much!’ said Kerim. ‘You can go to Tek Yön, this gay bar. When I go there first time I think, wow! I couldn’t believe how many guys in Istanbul. This is too much! Too much.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to fuck them all at once,’ I replied.

  Before I left Şerif’s apartment I had to wash my face because I had had a huge allergy attack from the kitten. I splashed my eyes and looked into the mirror. They were bloodshot. Şerif and Kerim came to the door of the bathroom to ask if I was OK. I thanked them and asked when I’d see them next. They told me about a gay party the next day, and a drag event at the weekend, and asked if I wanted to come.

  ‘There are so many drag events here!’ I said, my eyes burning.

  ‘You know, it is very common for the rich conservative people in Turkey to go to dinners where drag queens are performing,’ said Şerif.

  ‘Ironically, in a way, I feel like this is the gayest country I’ve ever been to,’ I said.

  Kerim said something in Turkish. ‘What did he say?’ I asked Şerif.

  ‘He said when the government falls we will be the gay capital of the world!’

  I laughed for what felt like the hundredth time since I’d got there, said goodbye and left. I walked back to the ferry thinking about how much these guys reminded me of my friends back home. You could swap out the situation, the political climate, the level of rights, but when it came down to it, there was usually a shared sense of humour, and almost always a mutual sense of understanding. What I loved about them was that I felt they were – as Jeffrey had made me see it – doing gay, rather than simply being gay. Their sexual identity was a big part of who they were, they craved queer spaces, and, well, then there was the sex . . . and the talking about it, too.

  At first, it had made me feel uncomfortable when Kerim described straight people as ‘normal’ but then I began to realize that he was saying it without contempt, without shame. He was simply stating the facts, and the fact was, in Turkey, under Islam, to be straight was ‘normal’, and to be anything other than this came with great challenges. It made me wonder about Turkey’s potential, about what would happen if the government did fall. It made me wonder how many LGBTI people had discovered themselves after leaving Syria. If half of 18–24-year-olds in Britain said they were something other than straight, and 48 per cent of Gen Z in America, how many LGBTI people were hiding in Turkey? In other parts of the Middle East? In the world? How many more of us were waiting to come out, once we felt that we actually could?

  chapter eight

  A QUEER UTOPIA?

  They say you never really ‘come out’ because it’s a continuous process. Every time you find yourself in a new situation, with new people who assume that straight or cisgender is the default setting, you have to go through the rigmarole of coming out again. Each occasion comes with a new, unspoken requirement to push against the ‘norm’. For some people, whose bodies are perceived as queer or genderqueer, there’s a risk attached: you might not have control over your ability to come out, or over other people’s reactions. For others, whose bodies are not, there can be a quiet pressure to say something. To ‘own up’.

  It was in Turkey that I had most starkly been reminded of this. It was the place that I had visited where there was the least scope to deviate from what was thought of as acceptable within the heteronormative or patriarchal culture, and the friends I had met and the stories they had told me reminded me of the weight that is placed on the coming out process, the schism between life ‘in the closet’ and outside it. Members of Tea and Talk had been rejected by their families for being LGBTQ+ and travelled to Istanbul, where they hoped they could live more openly. And yet, many of them were still closeted when they got there, forced to hide the fact that they were gay or transgender for fear of contempt, violence, or even death.

  Talking to Ayman had made me think about my own coming out story for the first time in a while. Mostly, about how good I had it, comparatively. I came out youngish, at nineteen. After having feelings for the girl at college, it was becoming more apparent to me that a same-sex relationship was something I was going to explore. I moved back to London and basically fell in love with the first out lesbian I
met (which isn’t to diminish how great she was – I was just really, really keen). In the beginning, we hooked up in secret, in one another’s bedrooms, and acted like friends in public. A few weeks later, we were making out in a toilet cubicle at a nightclub and looked up to see a couple of our friends peering over the door. We had been caught, but their reactions were much kinder than I had expected – which was maybe what emboldened me to take my new girlfriend home to my mum’s house. There, I introduced her as my ‘friend’, but it took my mum less than twenty-four hours to work out we were more than that. Her reaction was probably the most relaxed she’s ever been about anything (although she has, ironically, insisted on calling my girlfriends my ‘friends’ for the decade since). Eventually, I told my dad that I wasn’t straight, and he took a little longer to come to terms with my sexuality. To be honest, I don’t think he fully understood it until I got a girlfriend that he fancied too.

  Coming out, for me, was like ripping off a plaster: painful, but after a while the sting began to fade. And in all my privilege, I didn’t always have to tell everyone about my sexuality or how I felt about my gender. I could move through the world like a straight person, relatively accepted by my friends and family, free from violence. And yet, for some reason – perhaps because of this privilege – I gradually chose to tell more and more people about this part of my identity: bisexual, lesbian, fluid, whatever I was (and it changed almost daily at that time). As I approached my twenties, I felt compelled to make it a big part of my life, writing about it for a living, or consuming queer art and films and books. I surrounded myself with gay boys, trans people and other queer women. I searched for a community, and because I lived in London, it was there to be discovered.

  My acceleration from 0–60, from not-gay to super-gay, didn’t go unnoticed by the people around me. As well as confusing the boys I’d slept with in my teenage years, my decision to immerse myself in queer culture confused a lot of the girls I started to go out with. To them, my behaviour was odd; why did I need to pathologize my sexual identity when no one else was seeing me in that light? Weren’t we in a time and place where I could live as an LGBTQ+ person without it having to mark me out as different? Or, as my mum would later put it: ‘Why don’t you write about something else? You sound like a broken record.’