{"id":21694,"date":"2010-08-31T03:57:55","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T01:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=21694"},"modified":"2023-04-04T18:48:01","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T15:48:01","slug":"lgbt-activists-in-turkey-launch-ground-breaking-publication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/08\/31\/lgbt-activists-in-turkey-launch-ground-breaking-publication\/","title":{"rendered":"LGBT Activists in Turkey Launch Ground-Breaking Publication"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\"\"
Hevjin, a magazine founded by Kurdish LGBT activists, hopes to attract about 2,000 readers and eventually bring about the kind of change that will allow lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual Kurds to march openly through the streets of Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey. (Photos: Alexander Christie-Miller and Hevjin)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by\u00a0Alexander Christie-Miller<\/p>\n

Speaking in his apartment in a suburb of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, Solin and his colleague Koya are so scared of being identified that they will not allow even an obscured photograph of themselves to be published. Nor do they want their real names to be known. \u201cPeople here see homosexuality as a poison – a disease,\u201d says Solin, the ash of his cigarette making a quick, quiet hiss as he taps it into a jar of water.<\/p>\n

For all their fear, however, the pair embarked on a radical experiment, launching the first-ever magazine for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) Kurds this July. Called \u2018Hevjin\u2019, meaning \u2018intercommunity\u2019 in Kurdish, the first issue of the free publication is available online and in a few bookshops and caf\u00e9s in Diyarbakir, a city with a large Kurdish population.<\/p>\n

It took three years of patient work before Koya and Solin, both gay Kurds themselves, were ready to bring out the first issue. \u201cThere are 15 million Kurds in Turkey, and one in 10 people is gay, but where are the Kurdish gay people?\u201d asked Solin. \u201cThat is the question that led to this. We wanted to find out how people express their sexuality in this culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the Kurdish east and the mass of rural Anatolia, Islamic values and extended family networks make it impossible to live an openly gay lifestyle. \u201cNo one is openly homosexual,\u201d says Koya. \u201cThere are a few, maybe a couple in our group, who are accepted within their families on the condition of not being open in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gays have good reason to be scared here. In July 2008, a 26-year-old Kurdish man, Ahmet Yildiz, became the victim of what many believe to be Turkey\u2019s first gay honor killing to be publicly exposed. Yildiz, who was openly homosexual and had even represented Turkey at an international gay gathering in San Francisco the previous year, had left his conservative Kurdish family in the southeast in order to live more openly in the West. He was shot dead as he left a caf\u00e9 in the Uskudar district of Istanbul. His own father Yahya, who disappeared after his death and has still not been found, is currently being tried in absentia for his murder.<\/p>\n

Going to great lengths to hide his sexual orientation, Solin said he got engaged to a lesbian woman from abroad in order to allay the suspicions of his own family. \u201cYou are always anxious, and I wish my family did not live in this area because I could be more open,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, Solin, Koya and others began to organize secret meetings in each other\u2019s homes to lay the foundations of a Kurdish LGBT activist movement. \u201cThere was no individual or political awareness of this issue at all. There was no healthy understanding of what it is to be homosexual,\u201d says Koya. A large percentage of the people they gathered were sex workers.<\/p>\n

Even in more liberal areas of western of Turkey, acceptance of homosexuality is growing fitfully. Though homosexuality has never been technically illegal in Turkey, vaguely worded \u2018public morality\u2019 laws have often provided a legal means for banning LGBT marches. In March this year, the Families and Children Minister for Turkey\u2019s Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party government, Selma Aliye Kavaf, angered gay rights groups when she described homosexuality as a \u201ccurable disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recent polling data indicates that a majority of Turks are approving of restrictions on gay rights. But Nevin Oztop, editor-in-chief of Turkey\u2019s only other LGBT magazine, Kaos GL, asserted that the country is undergoing a rapid transformation. \u201cThe western world went through this movement 40 years ago, but we\u2019ve started only in the last 10, even five years,\u201d Oztop said. \u201cIn Turkey it\u2019s happening very fast, which is why you have both progress, and violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Kaos GL magazine, which started 20 years ago, has for the past five years run a regular section called \u201cMy Lovely Family,\u201d in which openly gay Turks interview their own parents. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing today to see a macho Turkish father accepting his own gay son, and I think the same thing could eventually happen in Diyarbakir,\u201d said Oztop.<\/p>\n

But when Solin\u2019s and Koya\u2019s group first announced itself on Turkey\u2019s gay activism scene, its Kurdish orientation became a source of difficulty. \u201cMany organizations in the West of Turkey resisted us at first because we identified ourselves as Kurds,\u201d said Koya. \u201cEven within this community we\u2019re a minority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many Turks holding liberal personal views these days can be staunchly conservative in their approach to politics \u2013 something that Oztop contends is a legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, who blended liberal and secular social ideas with a decidedly authoritarian and nationalist approach to statecraft. \u201cIn the gay movement in this country, there are \u2018Kemalist\u2019 people who are not tolerant of minority ethnic identities,\u201d said Oztop. \u201cThey say the only politics we can do is for the rights of gay people – but they don\u2019t see the country as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to create a hierarchy in discrimination, but I would say that they [the Kurdish LGBT activists] are doubly discriminated against,\u201d Oztop added.<\/p>\n

For their part, Koya and Solin affirmed that they feel locked in a twin struggle, one ethnic, the other sexual. Upsetting gay Turks and straight Kurds won\u2019t stop them, they added.<\/p>\n

They expressed hope that their periodical, Hevjin, would soon surpass 2,000 readers. Over the longer term, they seek to bring about the kind of change that will allow homosexuals to rally openly in Diyarbakir some day in the not too distant future. \u201cIn the past it was very popular for Kurds to say that there were no Kurdish homosexuals. We\u2019ve already got to a point where it\u2019s no longer possible for people to say this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Editor’s note:<\/div>\n

Alexander Christie-Miller is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, where he writes for the Times.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

, 30 August 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Alexander Christie-Miller Speaking in his apartment in a suburb of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, Solin and his colleague Koya are so scared of being identified that they will not allow even an obscured photograph of themselves to be published. Nor do they want their real names to be known. \u201cPeople here see homosexuality as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":21695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[3550,3552,3549,3548,3547,3551],"class_list":["post-21694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-bisexual-kurds","tag-diyarbakir","tag-gay-kurds","tag-homosexual-kurds","tag-lesbian-kurds","tag-transexual-kurds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}