Turkish Awakening (9 page)

Being a woman with a firmly secularist outlook and a Muslim mother, I have a rational respect for religious Turks
but am often surprised by my unexpectedly strong emotional reactions to being treated as an alien entity by certain Turkish men. I have already spoken of my sad, one-sided friendship with the Cheese Man – that I have become used to. But odd occasions catch me out; for instance, in Urfa my boyfriend and I were given a tour of the nearby Atatürk Dam by a friend of a friend called Burak (incidentally, the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s horse). An otherwise lovely man, I noticed he never directly addressed me or really looked at me. When it came to our goodbyes, I thanked him profusely and held out my hand. He looked away and made no move to meet it, leaving me to lamely back away. In hindsight, it must have been quite a comical scene, and indeed my boyfriend joked about it as we walked off, but I was upset. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I had felt like an Untouchable – which, of course, I was. In my hitherto sheltered state, I was convinced that some great outrage had taken place – an offence to my sex and my status, something that must surely be illegal in modern society. When I asked my more knowledgeable friends about this behaviour, it turned out that the man was probably a Shafi’i (a member of a certain school of religious law within Sunni Islam); if I had touched him (or, worse, the other way round), he would have had to wash and pray to cleanse himself.

Since then, I have grown more used to examples like this, and have learned, at least in part, not to take offence from individuals. Islam should not only be thought of in terms of crazy fundamentalist examples like this. Mehmet Bey, for example, was the model of gentlemanly behaviour, kind, patient, working for very little money with women on the
TGMP project, a typical AKP-supporting, moderately religious Muslim. How these two men could identify with each other is slightly beyond me.

There are plenty of liberal women like me in Turkey, but they are more equipped to deal with the gamut of social and religious etiquette, having grown up with it. In a way this makes life easier for them, but they are also judged unfavourably by the Turkish standard, which I am not. They are often in the slightly uncomfortable position of having Western aspirations fettered by the expectations of their family and social group, in some cases, or even just by their colleagues and acquaintances. Even if these expectations are not expressed, women like Selin, my ex-flatmate, are acutely aware of what is expected in Turkish society, and are either consciously or unconsciously shaped by that.

Recently I had an enlightening conversation with a Turkish gardener called Murat, who worked for a friend with whom I was staying in a village on the Aegean coast. He was enquiring about the other guests, and the conversation turned to who was sleeping in which room. It was clear that he was rather shocked that unmarried young couples were sharing rooms, and I took the plunge and asked him to explain why.

‘These people are in love, but not married?’

Yes.

‘And tomorrow they might love someone else?’

Maybe.

‘In Turkey, we men like to know we are the first, we look for
kızlık
[literally, ‘maidenhood’]. In England, don’t they look for that?’

I tried, hesitantly, to explain that people change, love fades
and blossoms again, etc., but was aware of sounding rather lame and Bertie Woosteresque after Murat’s unapologetic, hardline logic. I must point out that he was not condemning our lifestyle, and did not mention religion once – he had the slightly prudish outlook of many Turks, but I think he genuinely wanted to know why it didn’t bother us that our partners had previously loved Another, or even Others.

Critics of traditional Turkey are cynical about this obsession with
kızlık
(virginity, basically), saying that Turkish men feel secure marrying virgins because there is no chance that they will be compared unfavourably, as a lover, to another man. Whether or not that is true of the majority of cases, I am not convinced that such a premeditated concern is at the root of it. It is not such a peculiar phenomenon, and while to an English ear it may sound rather Victorian, you just have to look at the Bible-bashing belt of the US today, or the Catholics of southern Italy, to see that it is far from being particular to Turkey or indeed Islam. I think it is rather a primeval instinct, and in the case of Turkey, at least, it has only a coincidental religious slant; in an archaic society, everything you do is part of your religion, because your religion is formed by what you do – relatively few people actually read the Koran, but many of its edicts are part and parcel of their communities, which have been formed over thousands of years. Mores like the prizing of virginity pre-date formal religion across much of the world. It must also be said that Turks are indescribably romantic – ‘my one true love’ is the sentiment that no doubt reinforces this particular tradition (to suppose that it created the tradition would be appropriately but misguidedly romantic in itself).

To return to Murat’s attitude, which mirrors that of many Turks I have met, I would like to make clear that I was not, and very rarely am, made to feel judged for being different. Murat, for instance, was almost childlike in his quest to understand my attitude, and to explain his own, with not a hint of rebuke in his voice or expression. I had a long girly gossip with his wife the following afternoon, and when she expressed the hope that my boyfriend and I would get married it was in no way a holier-than-thou, ‘lest you rot in hell’ hope, but the genuine, generous impulse of one human being wishing happiness for another. I have often felt that, despite my supposedly open mind and liberal attitudes, I am much quicker to judge these people than they are to judge me.

Too often people in the West, and indeed some from the East, regard women in headscarves as fettered, unhappy, symbolic of some dark Islamic threat, as though the headscarf were as simple as a uniform of repression. In Turkey this is even more the case because Atatürk’s anti-religious rulings emerged in conjunction with unambiguously progressive changes such as granting the vote to women; in the 1935 general election, eighteen female MPs joined the Turkish Parliament before women in many European countries even had the right to vote. Thus (anti-)religious reforms and social reforms have been mixed up in the Turkish psyche for a long time, leading to a deeper distrust of religion among some circles than seems reasonable. The current government is attempting to solve this, but it still remains to be seen if it will succeed. More to the point, I am not convinced that religious and political figureheads have done an awful lot to support women.

I wonder if Prime Minister Erdoğan ever thinks of Atatürk’s stirring words in the early days of the republic: ‘If, from now on, women do not share in the social life of the nation, we shall never attain our full development. We shall remain irremediably backward, incapable of treating on equal terms with the civilisations of the West.’ Depressingly, things have regressed since then. In July 2010, at the International Women’s Meeting in Istanbul, Turkey’s current leader proclaimed: ‘Men and women are not equal. They only complement each other.’

I find it even more frustrating when Turkish women merrily jump on the misogynistic bandwagon. In 2012 the head of Erzurum’s Women Entrepreneurs, Zeynep Çomaklı, gave a speech in which she said: ‘Woman should not be governors or district governors. You should make a sound when you slam your fist on the desk. Not every post is a post for a woman.’ Çomakli may not be as public a figure as Erdoğan, but she is a woman, supposedly a role model for ambitious women in Turkey. The struggle to achieve sexual equality seems even bleaker when women are fighting themselves as well as male politicians and family members. With or without headscarves, sexual equality remains an important goal in Turkey and, unfortunately, it sometimes feels like a goal which is very distant.

A male friend of mine who used to live in Syria once said to me: ‘It's very easy to be gay in Syria. Men are so affectionate with each other that it goes unnoticed. Besides, homosexuality doesn't officially exist, so really . . . what's to notice?'

Striking though this revelation initially was, I realised that there is a similar situation in Turkey, definitely a Middle Eastern country in this respect. There is plenty of what in a Western country would be thought of as homosexual behaviour, but relatively few of the men having sexual relations with other men would consider themselves gay. They are probably married fathers of four, their sexuality not in question either to outsiders or to themselves. Turkey is relatively free of the strict classifications of sexual behaviour that are in place in Western societies, but it is equally free of the Western tolerance for men who openly profess a preference for men over women. In a country where many young men in conservative communities are either in arranged marriages or unmarried, without the option of casual relationships with women, a kind of homosexuality of convenience is not a surprising outcome. It is accepted as normal in practice (rather like old-fashioned English attitudes to boarding school and the navy), but not in theory – homosexuality ‘by choice' is first ignored, then condemned, which is bad news for gay rights.

Physical affection between Turkish men does not have the same implications as it does between Western men, where it is unusual and therefore must be classified as gay. Turks in general are very affectionate, and what Americans call bromance is absolutely the norm. Men unselfconsciously link arms while walking down the street, kiss each other on the cheek, give a gentle squeeze to the shoulders of a seated friend. I have to admit it was odd for me at first, used as I was to the chilly timbre of most English interactions, but now it is perfectly normal, and I have got used to regarding affection between men in the same spirit as affection between women. When I am in England I miss the displays of public affection which are symptomatic of the warmth felt between men, women, friends, even the most casual of acquaintances in this hot-blooded country. This warmth does not equate to sexual interest, but sometimes they can overlap. What is refreshing is that there is not the same stigma attendant on male affection that still persists in, say, the UK, despite the politically correct attitudes that have been encouraged in the last few decades to remove it.

I live in Beyoğlu, which is the gay hub of Istanbul and full of areas which resemble very down-to-earth versions of Old Compton Street in Soho. A couple of years after I moved to Istanbul I met Ami Nouvel, a documentary maker based in Berlin who was making a film about Kurdish ‘gay for pay' sex workers in Beyoğlu. I was intrigued by the project and joined him on set.

Ami's main focus was Aquarius, a gay brothel in Beyoğlu. It has a licence for a sauna but is in fact very well known on the grapevine (and indeed now in
Lonely Planet
) as a
brothel. I was absolutely not allowed in by the owner, who threatened to call the police when he saw me, but I managed to sneak in a side door with Ami and his crew when the owner was welcoming two Japanese tourists in. We entered into a long, dingy hall filled with wet towels being dried by two industrial-sized fans at either end, and as we walked along, these swirled to reveal young men in tiny
hamam
-style towels wandering to and from clients in rooms off the hall.

We found out that the six employees of the sauna were all brothers of varying ages, from a big Kurdish family which had moved to Istanbul from the south-east around fifteen years ago when the father was jailed for having ‘terrorist sympathies'. The second eldest brother runs the joint (but does not work there as his brothers do), and looks like a typically conservative, religious Kurd. At one point I was astonished to see him perform his prayers in a corner of the reception room as we chatted outside to his young brother who was offering his services to both Ami (who is gay) and me. What I soon realised was that these men did not consider themselves gay – they were merely doing a job, and getting paid very well by Istanbul standards. They were at pains to distance themselves from their professional persona when they talked to us, flirting outrageously with me to prove their heterosexuality, which was rather strange. The eldest of them, Sabri, confided to us that two of his brothers had never been with a woman and this was a source of great misery to them. They were clearly confused about their sexuality but wanted to class themselves as straight to outsiders, and I think a great part of this was because they were from a conservative family. They claimed to only ever act as the active partner, because
they saw that as the more masculine of homosexual roles, but it is really impossible to know whether that was just an attempt to save their pride.

Sabri was wonderfully open with us, probably flattered to be treated as a person rather than a sex worker, and eager to discuss the peculiarities of his trade. He told us that twenty years ago there was much less competition in the sauna industry and the service provided was much more perfunctory. Competition is now fierce, and clients demand more – they want ‘love', some semblance of affection and conversation, so that it has become about more than the act itself. Sabri's brother, Mustafa, had just come back from Singapore, where he had been taken by an overly attached client who now referred to him as his ‘boyfriend', taking him on long holidays because he didn't want him working for anyone else. Mustafa had mixed feelings about this. He was unhappy because he saw himself as a straight man working for money, but this particular job overlapped into the realms of relationship. He was adamantly straight, but appreciated the money and the lifestyle – a tricky dilemma. One comfort, at least, was that he was the active partner in this particular sexual relationship.

Crucially, there is a big difference in Turkey between a man's possible roles in sex: the
aktif
(‘active') participant is adamantly a Man –
Erkek
, executing his manly duty, notwithstanding who his sexual partner is. He might be rather embarrassed to be discovered with a man rather than a woman, but his (hetero)sexual identity would not be in question, as it would in the West. The
pasif
(‘passive') participant is the ‘unmanly' one, who might suffer prejudice. In Ancient Greece, a similar hierarchy existed in relation to the active and passive
roles of homosexual lovers: in brief, the former were respected and the latter were not. To illustrate the current attitude in Turkey, one only has to look at Tarlabaşı Boulevard in Beyoğlu, which is liberally scattered with transvestite prostitutes at all times of day. They quite regularly pick up customers, who do not seem unduly worried about being spotted going off with a faux femme fatale. The transvestite is probably cheaper than the female prostitute in a brothel nearby. That is about as complicated as it gets, for the punter. Interestingly, the gay brothers in Aquarius charged considerably more than transvestite sex workers; the former charged 250 lira an hour, whereas transvestite workers charge around thirty (pre-bargaining). I learnt the latter by persuading a very embarrassed male friend to ask one broad-shouldered lady her price late one night in the street as we passed; I followed at a discreet distance so as not to blow his cover.

I occasionally go and drink tea with a traditional Turkish tailor called Selçuk, a small, bespectacled and very respectable elderly gentleman with a surprisingly naughty twinkle in his eye, whose office is in Tarlabaşı. We chat of this and that, and one day he related an anecdote that could only have happened in Turkey. The previous evening he had left work and was walking to the bus stop on Tarlabaşı Boulevard when one of the transvestites on the street corner opposite his office yelled out: ‘Oi, four-eyes! Let's make a baby!' Selçuk had seen the funny side of this, declined the offer and trotted on his way, but I found it astonishing that a man who prays five times a day did not have a more outraged reaction. When Selçuk was telling the story, he used the word
yumuşak
(soft) to describe the transvestite, in this case meaning
effeminate or camp. Selçuk's tone was amused rather than aggressive or disgusted, and about as far from the menace of ‘faggot' as possible.

There is definitely homophobia in Turkey, but it usually takes the form of childish teasing of men who are openly camp and therefore deemed ‘unmanly', as opposed to those who simply want to have sex regardless of with whom. When there is discrimination or hostility, it is reserved for those who make their homosexuality part of their public persona, and the most hardline reactions come from very conservative circles (Selçuk excluded), just like in the West. Strangely for a Westerner, men having sex with men per se is not such an issue. Here, men are defined fundamentally by their
erkeklik
‘manliness' and not (necessarily) by their sexual partners, while in the West it is often seen as an admirably modern virtue to be ‘in touch with one's feminine side' and yet, technically, straight.

The attitudes of Turkish authorities on the subject are rather Victorian. For a start, homosexuality has never been outlawed in Turkey, as it was in, say, Britain. That is mainly because it has never been legally acknowledged, much like lesbianism in Britain. There is a popular legend that Queen Victoria, when asked to sign a bill outlawing all forms of homosexuality, struck out the references to women because she thought the concept of a lesbian was ridiculous, rather like that of a unicorn. How can you outlaw something that does not exist? In fact, references to female homosexuality were never included in that law in the first place. The same has been true in Turkey of male homosexuality, a concept historically disregarded or rather, unchallenged by authority. Lesbianism,
of course, was also ignored. The lack of legal recognition means that homosexual couples have no representation, and their partnerships are not accepted in law, nor their right to adopt. There is also no legislation to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Interestingly, the army prohibits passive homosexuals from signing up – or, alternatively put, lets them get out of conscription – but active homosexuals and bisexuals have no such allowances made.

As there is no conscription for women in Turkey (although there are women serving as officers in the armed forces), it is difficult to know what the equivalent rules would be for lesbian conscripts. My guess is that there would be no such rules. The asymmetry between gay men and gay women the world over is fascinating, but it is particularly striking in Turkey. A Turkish friend of mine, Merve, has not come out as a lesbian to her parents because, she says, they would simply not comprehend what she was telling them. Lesbianism is an even more uncharted and unrecognised concept than male homosexuality in most parts of Turkey. Merve comes from a traditional working-class family from Mersin, in the east, but she has many lesbian friends from Istanbul and more open cosmopolitan areas who are in exactly the same predicament.

There are several elements to this non-recognition of lesbians: on a practical level, according to Merve, being a lesbian in its most stereotypical form simply goes unnoticed because lesbians are less alarming to a traditional Turkish eye. People seem more sensitive to and less forgiving of a man appearing effeminate than a woman appearing un-made up and butch – she is less obvious and, crucially, less offensive to the average Turkish observer than a higher-status person (man) pretending
to be lower-status (woman). Among those who are aware of their existence, lesbians also have the reputation of being less exclusively gay than men, in that they tend to have relationships with people of both genders more often than men do. Whether this is socially circumstantial or a natural biological preference is open to debate, but either way it makes lesbianism seem more like a lifestyle choice, and therefore less threatening to a homophobic person, than a gay man exclusively having sex with men, who might be viewed as beyond redemption.

Because women in Turkey are simply less in the public eye than men, there is less discourse about their private sexual preferences and habits. Lesbianism is not much talked about, and perhaps this is cyclical: women are less willing to drop the bombshell that they are gay because it would be so unprecedented, therefore it is not discussed, and so the veil of ignorance is preserved.

In much of the Middle East, lesbians are simply not accepted in any sense, because women are not deemed to have the right to choose their own identity. A woman cannot declare herself a lesbian because that is not within her remit as a female who is de facto ruled by a man (be that her father, another male relative or her husband). The man in question makes all her decisions, so an identity-defining choice like declaring herself a lesbian is simply unheard of. Therefore, while a man declaring himself gay is worrying and certainly not welcomed, it is at least accepted as a choice. A woman does not have that luxury.

When a Moroccan acquaintance of mine (reluctantly) decided to come out to her parents, she was very apprehensive
about their reaction, even booking herself a flight the following day so she could drop the bomb and escape immediately. As it turned out, they were relatively relaxed about the revelation, and her mother even teased her for being so melodramatic in announcing her sexual preference: ‘Do you think you invented this? Your aunts were up to the same kind of thing, but they grew out of it. If you don't, that's OK.' This is another attitude towards lesbianism that must be both patronising and strangely liberating: the sense that sexual contact among females is simply a phase, not amounting to much, and definitely nothing to threaten the union of a man and a woman that is a Middle Eastern woman's duty and indeed destiny. The upside of this depressing dismissal is a freedom to indulge in what is seen as innocuous behaviour. Of course, this should not be the case but, currently, it is preferable to the hostility which would be shown if lesbianism was revealed as something to be taken seriously, a real preference for women to the exclusion of men.