LGBTQ history in Turkey
The love and affinity that were, in Istanbul, notoriously and customarily directed towards young men have now been redirected towards girls, in accordance with the state of nature.Research shows that the decline is in close relationship to the criminalization of homosexuality in the Western world, which followed repression of the queer community.
[1] After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Turkey's first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced a number of reforms that impacted the view on gay relationships within the country.
With the establishment of the military regime, political parties were banned and the freedom of demonstration, association, speech, and the press were censored.
In the 1980s, the Radical Democratic Green Party openly declared to be against police brutality and expressed their support in favor of gay rights and the transgender community assaulted by the authorities.
[3] The first legal ban occurred on March 19, 1981, when the Interior Ministry prohibited Drag queens from performing on nightclub stages.
On June 13, 1981, the Istanbul governor stopped Ersoy from performing, because she was wearing a woman's outfit and, according to the law, she was a man.
Because of the increasing violent actions from the police, on April 29, 1987, trans people, lesbians, and gay men initiated a ten-day hunger strike in Gezi Park by Taksim Square.
However, the protest continued in different houses for weeks, and managed to get support from the Radical Democratic Green Party and some famous artists and intellectuals.
However, many gay and bisexual men who lived during this period have since said in interviews that they felt pressured, by social attitudes and government policy, to remain in the closet about their sexual identity.
In 1993, supported by the collaboration with the German initiative Schwule International, the Turkish queer activist organized their first Pride.
The governor of Istanbul banned the event, but in doing so the discrimination that the LGBTQ+ community faces in Turkey was brought in their annual progress report written by the Commission for Human Rights of the European Parliament.
In 1996, since the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements was taking place in Istanbul, the authorities carried out "cleansing operations" in central parts of Istanbul to free the streets from trans and other sex workers, street vendors, homeless people and drug users.
The same year, Hamam, a Turkish film featuring a gay romance, was released internationally and broadcast on state television.
Following Turkey's recognition as a candidate for joining the European Union, Ankara passed a series of "harmonization packages" to meet international expectations of improving the conditions for minorities and for civil society in general.
To respond to the impact of AKP's discriminatory policies, several queer associations created a coalition under the name Platform for LGBTI Rights (LGBTT Hakları Platformu).
[23] As a consequence, the following year, Turkish authorities stopped and the annual pride parade in Istanbul through violence, making use of tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons against the marchers.
Despite the ban, the organizers chose to march anyway, but Turkish police clashed with the crowd, using plastic bullets and tear gas to break them apart.
[30][31] The authorities banned in Ankara the screening of the movie Pride, a 2014 comedy-drama with LGBTQ+ themes, claiming it put at risk public safety.
[33] The opposition Member of the Grand National Assembly Sezgin Tanrıkulu of the CHP lodged a parliamentary question to the Vice President of Turkey Fuat Oktay asking for an explanation.
He also asked how many members of the LGBTQ+ community were killed in the last 17 years, the amount of time passed since AKP firstly won the elections.
[35] In the midst of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic Ali Erbaş, president of the Directorate of Religious Affairs(Diyanet) in Turkey, held a Friday sermon in April 2020[36][37] in which he blamed "immoral" sexual behaviour, including homosexuality, for "bringing illness".
[38] In July of the same year, the major Turkish clothing chain LC Waikiki banned all symbols that could be linked with the LGBTQ+ community.
[39] Also in July of the same year Netflix cancelled a series that was due to air in 2021, because the Turkish government objected to the fact that a gay character would feature in it.
[44] In 1926, Turkey implemented a new reform called the Turkish Civil Code (TCC) that established near complete gender equality between a man and a woman.
A new amendment to the TCC in 1988 allowed for a documented gender change in the legal registry as long as the transgender individual has already performed gender-affirming surgery.
