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Abstract

COVID-19 has precipitated an increase in political homophobia in Turkey. This article focuses on the interlocking processes of LGBTQ marginalization and exclusion in Turkey with the purpose of uncovering how political homophobia is enforced, experienced, and navigated by LGBTQ people in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of two critical conceptual tools, pink line and queer strategies, I first propose a multi-layered conceptualization of political homophobia that is drawn through (1) anti-LGBTQ boundary regimes that shape the everyday lives of LGBTQ people and (2) sexualized bordering processes that filter and block digital LGBTQ representation and visibility in Turkey’s digital publics. I then analyze the everyday strategic uses of digital platfroms by LGBTQ activists and community organizers in Turkey. Invested in this complexity, this article draws from the ethnographic data of 20 interviews with LGBTQ people whose lives have crossed paths in several digital LGBTQ groups during the pandemic. Henceforth I argue that these digital LGBTQ groups have facilitated ways of connectivity among LGBTQ people in Turkey which limit exposure to the COVID-19 virus while partially freeing them from the restrictive limits of the nation-state and its political homophobia.

Keywords

homophobia political homophobia COVID-19 LGBTQ digital Turkey

On 24 April 2020, Ali Erbaş, Turkey’s most senior government-appointed Muslim cleric, incited a homophobic moral panic during his sermon addressing COVID-19 (Duffy, 2020). At the time, Turkey was in the midst of a social crisis, with increasing numbers of COVID-19 patients, stay-at-home orders, and 48-h lockdowns. Under these vulnerable circumstances, Erbaş took the stage and blamed adultery, sodomy, and homosexuality for “bringing illnesses”, and warned the community to protect itself from “such evil” while insinuating a hidden connection between the HIV epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Erbaş’s comments created the impression that rejecting such “morally diseased” behaviors would protect the public. This framing of COVID-19 thrust communities marked by these sexual practices into the political limelight. The months following the cleric’s comments showed a conspicuous uptick in “political homophobia”, a purposeful practice of scapegoating sexual minorities and expressions of sexuality as a tactic for state building and retrenchment (Weiss and Bosia, 2013). The public controversy over LGBTQ people in political discourse grew to such a decibel that even LC Waikiki, one of Turkey’s flagship clothing brands, decided to pull all its items with rainbow colors to avoid upsetting the government’s stand against LGBTQ people and its strictly patriarchal and heteronormative views on Turkish culture.

The scapegoating of LGBTQ people for political and social ills is neither new nor uncommon. In recent years, however, increased visibility and activism by the LGBTQ community has precipitated a concomitant increase in the use of political homophobia by Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP) and its coalition partner Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, hereafter MHP). Many right-wing governments and political parties have used the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to demonize immigrants, women, racial and ethnic minority groups, and the LGBTQ community. In Turkey’s case, however, the pandemic coincided with an unprecedented economic crisis which affected disadvantaged and marginalized communities disproportionately and raised questions about the government’s handling of the pandemic in general. It is under these vulnerable circumstances that the Istanbul Pride Committee held a digital Pride Month in June 2020. This year’s theme was “Where am I?”, a nod to both the pre-existing restrictions on LGBTQ public gatherings in effect since 2015 in Turkey’s major cities and the new challenges posed by the pandemic. I participated in Istanbul’s digital pride and other online LGBTQ events which began as early as March and was struck by the marked disjuncture between government-incited political homophobia and the everyday-life strategies of resistance, revival, and LGBTQ identity-making in Turkey’s many digital publics.

By approaching digital publics as integral to the political debate over LGBTQ lives in Turkey, this article draws on an eight-month ethnography of digital spaces created and used by LGBTQ people who organized, performed at, and attended events during COVID-19. Borrowing the notion of the “pink line” from South African journalist Mark Gevisser’s (2020) book, I develop it as an analytical concept to offer a multi-layered conceptualization of the political homophobia of the Turkish state and the processes of marginalization and exclusion of LGBTQ people from the level of political discourse to the everyday life in Turkey. In Gevisser’s work, the pink line constitutes the global cultural fault lines over LGBTQ acceptability in which LGBTQ-friendliness is politicized to be the marker of globalization and Western cultural colonialism and is confronted by moral panic and nationalist politics in many parts of the world. According to Gevisser, the pink line divides the world through the intimidating complexities of international and domestic politics that are shaped by the legacies of colonialism, racism, and border politics.Yet its traces are visible, and sometimes negotiable, in the everyday lives of LGBTQ people, captured by case studies in Malawi, South Africa, Egypt, Russia, India, Mexico, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Within this complexity, I am interested in exploring the pink line both as a border and a boundary, marking experiences of exclusion and marginalization of LGBTQ people while constituting the stage in which they build liberation and community in their everyday lives (Gevisser, 2020: 23).

At its core, the pink line that is drawn and reinforced by the Turkish state operates both to demarcate and regulate LGBTQ people as (hetero)normative subjects by presupposing that “Turkish” and “LGBTQ” are two mutually exclusive categories. Given that the Turkish pink line blocks LGBTQ visibility by belittling them as passive replicas of the West and marginalizing and excluding them from the heteronormatively-defined Turkish public, this study interrogates the everyday queer strategies that bend the divide between this three-termed binary: local/heteronormative/Turkish versus global/degenerate/Western. But how can the everyday disruptions and challenges introduced by the pandemic be taken into account? Here, I am drawn to Ghassan Moussawi’s al-wad’ (the situation), which describes the context of precarity intertwined with uncertainties, disruptions, and violence in Beirut. In his study, Moussawi’s al-wad’ brings forward the geo- and socio-political context which is often treated as the backdrop for studies on gender and sexuality (Moussawi, 2020: 78). Considering the enhanced experiences of precarity during COVID-19, I see a similarity between Moussawi’s Beirut and the sense of perpetual instability in everyday life in Turkey during my fieldwork. Thus, I decided to carry this complex web of uncertainties and disruptions into the forefront of my study as a layer that shapes, and is shaped by the pink line. How do LGBTQ people in Turkey utilize digital publics in their everyday lives to navigate the pink line? Following this question, and borrowing Moussawi’s conceptualization, I use queer strategies to define practices of Turkey’s LGBTQ digital groups that navigate the everyday life disruptions and the pink line in Turkey. The queerness of these practices lays in their innate refusal of the normative order and their connectivity with LGBTQ outness and visibility, the components of LGBTQ identity-making practices which, in Turkey’s case, transcend the local-global dichotomy and address the complex and heterogeneous set of discourses and praxis that display and perform LGBTQ existence and retain possession over queer and nonnormative narratives in Turkey.

With this study, I join a group of scholars who seek to understand political homophobia as a state strategy, a social movement, and a transnational phenomenon that structures the experiences of LGBTQ people and other nonnormative expressions of sexuality (Altman and Symons, 2016; Weiss and Bosia, 2013). While developing Gevisser’s pink line as a conceptual tool to explain political homophobia in Turkey, I first turn to the literature on borders and boundaries, which unravels the multivalent and everyday constitution of exclusion and marginalization (Aizura, 2006; Fassin, 2011; Fischer et al., 2020). In Turkey’s case, the co-constitution of borders and boundaries in the making of the pink line is enforced by anti-LGBTQ boundaries as well as by Turkey’s heteronormatively defined policing of its sexualized digital “borders” which aim to block the LGBTQ visibility in Turkey’s digital publics. Ultimately, my investment in the complexity captured in Turkey’s political homophobiaand the queer strategies that navigate and disrupt the pink line speaks to the growing scholarly interest in decentering the US and Europe while de-exceptionalizing the Middle East in the study of sexuality and gender (Atshan, 2020; Mikdashi and Puar, 2016; Moussawi, 2020; Savcı, 2021).

Tied in with questions of globalization, heteronormativity, and nationalism, the pink line in Turkey is intimately bound up with the perception of the “West” and the “global” in the AKP-MHP government’s isolationist, anti-Western politics. I argue that the pink line in Turkey operates on multiple levels: (1) as symbolic and material boundaries that produce, maintain, and institutionalize the social differences that further marginalize Turkey’s LGBTQ people; and (2) as digital borders blocking, censoring, and penalizing the LGBTQ representation in Turkey’s digital publics. Moreover, the pink line propagates a moralist divergence between the “local” and the “global”, ascribing the former with heteronormative moral superiority and the latter with immoral degeneracy. This divergence traps LGBTQ people in a three-termed binary created, maintained, and strengthened by political homophobia: local/heteronormative/Turkish versus global/degenerate/Western. I argue that the queer strategies that the LGBTQ digital groups offer—the online possibilities they provide for their patrons and the actions they either enable or constrain—cluster specifically around the issues of safety and management, facilitating news ways of being together that limit exposure to COVID-19 and homophobia while allowing LGBTQ people in Turkey to negotiate outness and identity-making practices. These queer strategies demonstrate the porousness and fluidity of the pink line and the potential for LGBTQ people to become agents of change, even under the exacting circumstances of COVID-19.

Methods: ethnography, digital spaces, and the pandemic

The core of my empirical data was collected between 11 March 2020, the date of the first officially announced COVID-19 case in Turkey, and 25 November 2020. Since then, the number of cases has increased rapidly, exceeding 120,000 in June, halfway through my fieldwork (Republic of Turkey Ministry of Health, 2020). Turkey implemented various COVID-19 measures: those that aimed to minimize the public’s exposure to the virus (social distancing, closure of public spaces, travel restrictions) and those that related to the nation’s recovery and maintenance (economic stimulus measures). Nevertheless, these measures often failed to meet the communities in need, and COVID-19 enhanced experiences of intersectional injustice and dispossession that are part of the social and economic precarity of the late-AKP era. The pandemic has had a devastating impact on the employment status of students, freelancers, and the working class (DİSK-AR, 2020). For the many LGBTQ people who earn their living in the nightlife economy and in sex work, the closure of nightlife venues caused their finances to suddenly plummet. The lack of economic support from the government meant that many found it difficult to cope. By the time I finished my fieldwork in November, Turkey had recorded nearly 1.43 million cases (Republic of Turkey Ministry of Health, 2020).

From the beginning of lockdown in March through to the end of Pride Month in June, I attended events organized by five LGBTQ groups based in Turkey. The groups were founded, curated, and maintained by LGBTQ people whose purpose is not-for-profit and community oriented. Two of these groups, Queerwaves and the Istanbul LGBTI+ Pride Committee, were founded before the pandemic and began organizing digital events following the COVID-19 regulations. Of the remaining three, two continued as event-based groups (Through the Window Project and Planet Lubunya), and the last, Club Coweed, continues at the time of writing as a regular group hosting weekly events. I attended the digital events organized by these groups and conducted 20 in-depth and semi-structured interviews (Roulston and Choi, 2018) with organizers, performers, and attendees of these events.

Given the difficulty of securing collective informed consent (Crow et al., 2006) for events with 50 to 100 attendees, I chose to conduct my ethnography via interviews so that participants would be informed about and have control over the information they chose to share. This clearly distinguished my role as a researcher and the purpose of my attendance at the events. Each of the online interviews lasted between one to two hours. I took extensive notes and analyzed the data using inductive coding (Seidman, 2006). All the interviews were conducted in colloquial Turkish with terms from Lubunca, a queer slang in Turkey often used among LGBTQ and sex-worker communities in Turkey. These interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and coded using the qualitative analysis software MAXQDA. The interviews focused on the life narratives and everyday experiences of the participants during the pandemic. To grasp the al-wad’ that form the participants’ everyday lives, as in, the context of continuous precarity that is not limited to a flattened understanding of LGBTQ identity and experience, I drew elements from qualitative life course methodologies (Elder, 1995; Locke and Lloyd-Sherlock, 2011), probing trajectories, turning points, and qualitative life histories. Here, I use pseudonyms in place of names. While the interviews should not be viewed as broadly representative of LGBTQ people’s experiences in Turkey during the pandemic, they do serve to contextualize the political homophobia and the queer strategies of everyday life across Turkey’s digital publics.

Grounded in the complexity of LGBTQ experiences, I use the LGBTQ category to designate participants who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans*, queer, non-binary, and pansexual. The ages of the participants varied between 21 and 48, with a median of 26. Thirteen participants had undergraduate or postgraduate degrees, two had high school degrees, five were enrolled in universities as undergraduate students. While such a high education level would typically suggest financial security, rising unemployment among university graduates in Turkey means that university degrees no longer equal financial opportunities or social security (see DİSK-AR, 2021; TurkStat, 2020). While three participants had full-time jobs, 17 participants suffered financially due to COVID-19, facing eviction and loss of livelihood (see Derin Yoksulluk Aği, 2020). As a Turkish researcher who is part of the LGBTQ community and most recently resided in Istanbul from 2009 to 2017, I was able to use my network to connect with research participants. But unlike my participants, I conducted the fieldwork from Germany where I have access to healthcare and a stable income, a fact which created significant differences between my experiences and those of the participants.

Situating the pink line

The 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum, which increased the powers of President Erdogan, and the 2018 coalition government between Turkey’s Islamist AKP and ultra-nationalist MHP altered, if not expanded, the repertoires of political violence in Turkey. Koray Çalışkan (2018) describes the post-2017 era as a shift towards a full authoritarianism, with the government increasingly narrowing the channels of political opposition and further silencing and punishing political dissent. In this context, the co-option of MHP, a former opposition party into government further radicalized nativist, anti-West, anti-Kurdish, and anti-elite actors and anti-LGBTQ discourses and policies. But how could two opposing political parties come to terms to form a coalition? In a 2021 study, Yilmaz et al., argue that the political alignment of Islamists and ultra-nationalists was made possible through “securitizing” other political minorities that had been targeted by the MHP, mainly the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), thereby constructing Turkey’s political minorities as existential security threats that have to be fought together with the ultra-nationalists. Within this logic of strategically tailoring “enemies” in Turkey, the political homophobia that is disseminated from the center should also be considered alongside Yilmaz et al.’s argument on co-option, where identity-based legitimacy claims (in this case heteronormativity) are used to legitimize the coalition and to obtain loyalty and allegiance from the Turkish public.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Turkey coincided with this shift towards total authoritarianism in the marriage between political Islam and ultra-nationalism and has worsened some of inequalities while laying bare the continued precarity of marginalized groups. Within this complex socio-political backdrop, Turkey’s pink line is both a manifestation of the political homophobia and the precarity of LGBTQ lives due to factors such as poverty, non-conformity, and political dissent. Among the many experiences of the pink line, I make visible the following two for the purpose of this article: (1) boundary regimes that articulate the difference and marginalization of LGBTQ people by marking them as “immoral”, “foreign” and “Western” and (2) sexualized digital borders processes that constrain, penalize, and block LGBTQ visibility and representation in Turkey’s digital publics. One incident in particular that occurred during my fieldwork clearly demonstrated the contours of the pink line. Under pressure from the government, in July 2020 Netflix announced the cancelation of a much-anticipated Turkish series. Due to air in 2021, the series featured a gay character named Osman. Although the character had only a supporting role, the Radio and Television Supreme Council of Turkey (RTÜK) demanded the removal of the character or the cancelation of the series. A few days after its cancelation, Erdoğan addressed the nation in a live-streamed speech castigating Netflix, Twitter, and YouTube for “attacking Turkey’s national and spiritual values from the shadows again” (Neugeboren, 2020). Erdoğan also made it clear that he aimed to rid the nation of “immoral and dishonorable people”, who use digital platforms to voice opposition and remain beyond the reach of Turkey’s strictly censored and regulated print and broadcast media.

It was a two-pronged attack designed to advance the pink line further by purposefully constructing LGBTQ people as “enemies” of the nation, aided by the digital media to attack Turkey’s national and spiritual values. Here is how this (heteronormative) policing has drawn the pink line: Erdoğan’s vehement opposition to the fictional character of Osman reproduced the boundary regime that marginalizes LGBTQ people in Turkey, while RTÜK’s decision to cancel the show enforced a sexualized digital borders that both filters out and blocks LGBTQ representation in Turkey’s digital public. I argue that these two actions are intrinsically linked, but often their difference is not accounted for due to their shared articulaton of political homophobia. However, a close reading of repressive and restrictive policies that control the circulation of images and prevent the entry of fictional LGBTQ characters into Turkey’s digital public shows that these acts are connected to the protection of Turkey from “enemies”. The government used the Osman character as a pretext to depict LGBTQ people in Turkey as Western-oriented conspirators who want to undermine Turkey’s homogeneous/nationalist/heteronormative public. It could then claim moral superiority over the West by legitimizing its anti-LGBTQ politics and weakening its domestic challengers: LGBTQ activist groups, human rights organizations, and their supporters. The question of how these homophobic political strategies inflect the lives of the LGBTQ people in Turkey is bound up with the everyday-life experiences and the queer strategies of resistance and revival in Turkey.

Queer strategies of everyday life

Shrinking publics and the role of the digital

The importance of digital publics to LGBTQ activism and sociality in Turkey is well established, with studies demonstrating the use of digital publics for a range of activities from dating to political organizing (Atuk, 2020; Bayramoğlu, 2021; Gorkemli, 2012). As in other parts of the world, the importance of digital publics has grown exponentially since the imposition of COVID-19 restrictions in March 2020. This has especially been the case for LGBTQ people who have been marooned in lockdown away from supportive communities. In studying the role digital publics play in a time of increasing political homophobia and COVID-19 restrictions, I have access to LGBTQ peoples’ everyday lives, which are now lived in isolation online.

Among the 20 participants in this study, 11 were performers and nightlife workers whose livelihoods were put on hold due to COVID-19 restrictions, particularly the government decree banning live or recorded music after midnight. In August, I interviewed Lona, a 29-year-old trans woman, activist, and DJ. Upon hearing my question about her experience over the previous months, Lona took a deep breath and fixed her eyes on an offscreen corner. After a moment of silence, she answered, “I’ve experienced so many hardships in Turkey, but I’ve never seen such a systematic and open attack on LGBTQ people before. Nothing like what we’ve been through this year”. Explaining further, Lona said that due to her trans identity it was almost impossible to find a job outside of the nightlife industry and her last paid job was in March. In the intervening six months, Lona hadn’t made any money at all and was able to survive only with the support of the LGBTQ community. Lona also described feeling “cornered” as a trans woman in Turkey, especially after Ali Erbaş’s comments and the ensuing political homophobia, which made her now-limited experiences out and visible on the streets of Istanbul even more perilous. Lona’s feeling of being “cornered” makes apparent the subjective quality of the pink line and its interlocking dynamics of marginalization and exclusion.

Although COVID-19 restrictions on in-person gatherings gave rise to the launch of numerous digital events, the participants emphasized the effect of prior bans on the gradual shift to digital spaces. Ekin, one of the organizers of Queerwaves, commented on the shrinking of LGBTQ publics in Turkey: “The past years have pushed LGBTQ people into a very tight corner. We used to have workshops, gatherings, political meetings. Now all we have left is the nightlife”. Echoing this, Sevim, a 50-year-old trans woman activist and DJ, shared that queers have always a found a way to cope: “All the queers in our region have suffered so much. Adapting to injustice and hardship is a part of our lives”. Sevim sees LGBTQ digital groups as part of queers’ adaptability, and in an authoritarian regime which requires LGBTQ people to continually and strategically negotiate a pink line that precludes their identities and desires, adaptability may well be a matter of survival.

Lona performed at one of the digital parties I joined, Club Coweed. She later told me that the moments when she is again able to DJ, even if only digitally from home, are a relief, a way to be herself in front of an audience again. After the party, I invited Club Coweed’s organizers for an interview. Club Coweed is organized by four LGBTQ people between the ages of 23 and 25 who know each other from Istanbul’s nightlife scene. It opens its digital stage late every Friday through to the early hours, connecting queer performers, DJs, and LGBTQ people from cities across Turkey. Their social media accounts state that the group aims “to transform your living room, sofa, and bed into your favorite place where LGBTI+ can exist, socialize, and dance”. With a sizeable, stable base of LGBTQ users, Club Coweed events sometimes reach up to 200 attendees. Begun immediately following the first COVID-19 curfew in Turkey, Club Coweed offers its users the safety and comfort to express their identities, try on drag make-up, and explore their sexualities by way of storytelling sessions and erotic performances. Finding solace in the company of other LGBTQ people, Lona and other participants have chosen to meet regularly at the club’s digital events to attenuate the overwhelming experience of the pandemic and feeling cornered due to their identities.

Expanding on the spatial function of digital publics during COVID-19, one of the co-organizers of Planet Lubunya, an event-based digital LGBTQ group, shared the following: “With the heavy apocalyptic feeling of 2020, we imagined Planet Lubunya as a way to flee Planet Earth and explore a third space, an intergalactic journey, a digital public beyond state borders and homophobia”. Therefore, like in other countries, COVID-19 has triggered a period in which people are exploring forms of connectivity that limit their exposure to risk while freeing them from the restrictive limits of the nation-state and its “public sphere”, which are inherently unsafe for the marginalized communities (see Tudor and Ticktin, 2021). As imagined by the Planet Lubunya and Club Coweed groups, digital events organized by LGBTQ people were borne from an urgent need to reconnect with a community that had been torn asunder and lessen the social and psychological burdens posed by the al-wad’ in Turkey. They have done so by embracing the needs of the people and adopting queer strategies to navigate the pink line and disrupt the precarity and homophobia that ruled LGBTQ lives during COVID-19 in Turkey. The queering of these strategies is embedded in the participants’ practices, where the “normal rules of social intercourse [a]re suspended, especially those defined by heteronormative ideals” (McGlotten, 2013: 4). The suspension of the normal rules is reflected in Planet Lubunya’s stated missions: to create a space in which “LGBTI+ can exist, socialize, and dance” and to claim a “third” public beyond “state borders and homophobia”.

Digital affordances and their limits

During the interviews, participants expressed intense feelings of digital connectedness. As Sevim noted, “With the digital events, we saw that there are deliler (crazy people) not only in Istanbul, but in fact all across Turkey”. These expanding networks were the direct outcome of people’s digital interactions and their experience with outness and community. To probe deeper into this issue, I asked participants how they utilized digital groups to express and experience their identities and the digital community they found themselves in. I approached this question through the lens of digital affordances (Kaun and Uldam, 2018; Shaw and Sender, 2016) as a way of describing the digital possibilities which the participants developed into queer strategies to navigate the pink line. The strategies my participants recounted revealed the porousness and fluidity of the pink line: crossing it allowed them to minimize the risk of violent forms of surveillance or legal ramifications and at the same time to express their freedoms. Safety and management emerged as the key factors to aid them in navigating the pink line. Yet these affordances had limits: crossing the many social, political, and legal boundary regimes that demarcate the pink line was not always successful. Digital outness sometimes resulted in cyberattacks or criminal prosecution under the contested legal interpretations of “attending unlawful assemblies and marches” (Law no. 2911 on Meetings and Demonstrations) and “spreading obscene images” (Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code).

The organizers of LGBTQ digital events emphasized the role of safety in sustaining their digital groups, safety that was often achieved through digital door policies and collective moderation. Digital door policies varied. Some only accepted attendees with prior registration, others checked identities through the use of a digital waiting room, only allowing entrance to those known by the moderators. Club Coweed’s organizers chose to publish the event link publicly, but for safety reasons also required that attendees keep their video turned on at all times. They also had attendees collectively moderate the events through active use of the chat function for reporting discriminatory incidents. One participant who moderated several parties explained how successful this approach was: “Collective moderation is great because it’s done digitally by the community for the community—by queer people for queer people”. Here, safety indexed freedom from homophobic, transphobic, and sexist assaults with the goal of maintaining digital groups where attendees can feel comfortable expressing their identities and desires while minimizing their risk of contracting the COVID-19 virus.

The second queer strategy, management, emerged as an important affordance for drag performers and regular patrons, who cited digital image manipulation tools and anonymizing digital filters as being useful to their outness. Image manipulation tools that display virtual backgrounds, modify the camera image, or shapeshift the participants into abstract or otherworldly figures were reportedly particularly useful for those attendees who wished to claim their queer subjectivities but felt constrained by the pink line, which manifested in the potentially negative consequences of their outness (bullying, digital or physical attacks, legal penalties, professional setbacks). One of Club Coweed’s organizers, a 22-year-old queer woman named Elif, spoke of how this affordance helped participants to reinvent and transform their digital presence: “By using filters and digital backgrounds, attendees feel freed from who they are or have to be in their everyday lives. It’s like a break from reality, a freedom attendees are offered to decide who they want to be in the digital world of Club Coweed”. Club Coweed attendees who spent time tweaking their avatar or embodying a character were escaping not just from their non-digital realities but also from the delineated zone abutting the pink line.

Kamuran, a popular drag performer known for her naked yet visually distorted performances, explained the confidence these queer strategies inspired: “Not many women would feel comfortable taking off their clothes in a club in Turkey, let alone performing a queer show naked. But in our digital events, you can be naked without worrying about losing the control”. As a queer strategy, digital image manipulation tools work to calm participants’ anxieties, which at their core are embodiments of the pink line that marks anti-normative, sex-positive, and LGBTQ representations as “immoral” and therefore unacceptable in public. While participants’ digital practices demonstrate that digital affordances do grant partial and periodic relief, for some, the ability to digitally manage their outness was not enough to ameliorate their anxieties about potential negative consequences. At the end of our interview, Lona struck a solemn tone while reflecting on her digital activities and outness as a queer trans activist in Turkey: “Who knows? Perhaps I’ll end up in jail. Who can guarantee that I won’t be in jail a year from now? I know it’s possible, and it terrifies me”.

The pink line and the immediate effects of political homophobia hover over the participants. There have been several criminal prosecutions of LGBTQ activists and digital influencers in Turkey. In 2019, 25 students from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara were violently detained for organizing a pride parade (Orman, 2019). The well-known LGBTQ social media influencer Gaga Bulut was accused of inciting child sexual abuse and spreading obscene images following his video showing two underage boys kissing on YouTube. Sentenced to 17 years in prison, Bulut remained in detention for two years until December 2020. Participants are hyper-aware of cases like these, evidence for them of the heavy-handed policing of the pink line by the state.

The duality of outness

The majority of the participants confirmed that the new LGBTQ digital groups assembled the ideal audience before which they could claim and explore their identities and desires, thereby expanding the publics for their communities. In addition to the digital strategies of safety and management, participants also noted that a growing sense of duality permeated their digital excursions across the pink line. I first met with Hikmet, a 22-year-old non-binary queer performer, in May for an interview. Hikmet was raised in a conservative family in a rural area of Southern Anatolia, then moved to Istanbul to study fashion design. Finding a supportive community, they said, had been decisive in allowing them to explore their non-binary and queer performer outness(es) and other identity-making practices. Hikmet’s family has been less than accepting and has voiced sympathy towards the AKP government and its political homophobia. “My family once saw my digital profile where I displayed my drag performances. It created a huge problem. I even received death threats and verbal assaults from distant relatives”, recounted Hikmet. “Now I use two accounts: one public, the other private; one for family, the other for being who I really am”. This duality, according to Hikmet, turned into an urgent matter after they were confined to their family-home due to COVID-19 restrictions and had to navigate the pink line dividing the safer zone of their bedroom from the rest of the house.

Similar to Hikmet, the majority of my participants’ relationship with outness operated in grey zones that disrupt the binary of “out” and “closeted” from a strategic distance. While some participants presented a more homogenous expression of outness to multiple audiences both online and offline, others kept their digital lives separate: one for family and colleagues, the other for their community. Applying these queer strategies often requires a very nuanced understanding of the pink line that forms the everyday experiences of the participants. Like Hikmet, some other participants appear to embody a duality with one digital persona adhering to mainstream moral codes and the other crossing the pink line to practice outness and community digitally. Jale, a 34-year-old queer woman and performer, is a government employee. Like Hikmet, Jale also has two online accounts, one for her drag persona and the other presenting her more normative, progressive, non-LGBTQ but LGBTQ-friendly persona. Hikmet and Jale’s experiences demonstrate how some queer strategies are able to straddle the pink line while negotiating and experiencing their identities and desires.

Mindful of their experience in Turkey, I asked participants about how embodying their queer strategy of outness(es) affects their everyday lives under COVID-19 restrictions. Similar to Hikmet, Mayle Kuku, a 20-year-old queer woman and one of the most colorful faces at Club Coweed, had been confined to her family’s three-room apartment since March. As a young queer woman living with her family, Kuku noted it had always been a challenge for her to be “fully public” with her drag persona, which plays between masculinity and femininity. “After days of putting on make-up for the events behind closed doors, I decided to show my mother the make-up I had put on for Club Coweed”. In Kuku’s case, her attempt to cross the pink line was met with acceptance and tolerance. “I can see how this experience has changed their ideas about the LGBTQ community and drag queens”, said Kuku in a hopeful tone. By approaching this complexity as a queer strategy for navigating the pink line, I propose that the practice of outness(es) in these digital groups has been untethered from the binary of out and closeted (Darwich, 2010; Moussawi, 2020; Savcı, 2021) which consolidates a flattened US and Eurocentric “gay subject”. Outness(es) thus refers not only to the making of LGBTQ identity, but also to drag-performer, sex-worker, anti-nationalist, and even anti-AKP identities and opinions that participants selectively and strategically chose to communicate to their digital audience.

Not every practice of outness(es) results in positive outcomes. Gani, a 24-year-old queer man and drag performer, has been performing at the digital events since March. He has also been managing the same social media account for his drag persona for several years now. Because many drag performers were already online and the competition is fierce, Gani made a special effort to keep his profile active in the hopes of booking more digital events and surviving the financial crises many nightlife workers have suffered. “I don’t know why or how, but my account was targeted by a conservative pro-AKP person with 60,000 followers. I received loads of hate messages”. He shared a screenshot of one of the messages with me. It read: “Turkey is no place for your moral degeneracy. Go f* yourself in Amsterdam”. By marking Gani as “morally degenerate”, symbolically pushing him out of Turkey, and rendering him as both foreign and Western, this message reiterates the political homophobia disseminated from Turkey’s political center and enforced in the everyday lives of LGBTQ people as in the form of the pink line.

Concluding remarks

This research has offered a multi-layered conceptualization of the Turkish government’s political homophobia through the lens of the pink line. As shown in Ali Erbaş’s targeting of LGBTQ people, President Erdogan’s political homophobia, and RTÜK’s censoring of the fictional LGBTQ character of Osman on Netflix, the Turkish government’s purposeful and strategic use of anti-LGBTQ discourses and practices had contributed to the pink line, which proscribes LGBTQ visibility and outness in Turkey. With inequalities heightened by the pandemic and the continuous precarity LGBTQ communities face, combined with the everyday uncertainties, disruptions, and violence in Turkey, the people who were part of this research are partially excluded and marginalized by a complex set of causes, including the anti-LGBTQ boundary regimes and sexualized digital borders.

The second part of this research showed how LGBTQ digital groups and LGBTQ people have developed queer strategies to navigate the pink line and the perpetual instability in Turkey. Despite increasing government-incited political homophobia, COVID-19 restrictions on social gatherings, and the shrinkage in recent years of queer publics due to bans and persecution, in 2020, digital groups initiated by LGBTQ groups prospered. Similar to Moussawi’s findings in Beirut, LGBTQ participants in Turkey’s digital groups decenter the division between “closeted” or “out” by adapting their identities to the fluid conditions of Turkey’s al-wad’. As hubs where people may explore their identities and desires as LGBTQ people, partygoers, drag performers, sex workers, and lustful subjects, the findings suggest that these digital groups and their queer strategies may temporarily suspend and bend the pink line. The digital affordances of safety and management these new publics offer are key strategies to LGBTQ people’s ability to cross the pink line. Yet while these strategies do have life-enhancing effects, the pink line continues to manifest in the participants as embodied forms of anxiety about possible negative legal and social consequences. As a counter to the pink line, which, through sexualized digital borders, increasingly entails surveillance and policing, Turkey’s LGBTQ digital groups have become more heterogeneous, and queer strategies to navigate outness and visibility more fluid, similar to the formation of the bubble as a support system and network of like-minded people in Beirut (Moussawi, 2020). To cross between digital and non-digital publics, many participants chose to treat strategic outness as a duality, a move that allowed them to navigate their presence along and over the pink line, albeit not unproblematically. Although these LGBTQ digital groups do not reach a wider audience, such practices of outness and visibility appear to be instances of “transgressive visibility” that may challenge culture “head on” (Ayoub, 2016: 48) in which digital spaces accelerate the speed of exchange and information between LGBTQ actors and mobilization (Ayoub and Brzezinska, 2015). In this way, participants’ crossings over the pink line may entail not just the movement from one fixed space to another, but also the bending of the line itself, and the creation of new spaces of queer expression and experience transnationally.

Globally, the dark times of the pandemic have been further troubled by the homegrown resurgence of nationalism and homophobia, a trend that negatively impacts already marginalized communities. Future research on political homophobia in Turkey should consider the role of the MHP and its ultra-nationalist ideology in reshaping the Turkish government’s position towards political minorities. It will also be important to investigate the transnational ties beneath Turkey’s political homophobia, rooted as it is in legacies of colonialism, racism, and border politics, and informed by emergent isolationist far-right parties in Europe and the Middle East. These far-right parties share core ideological elements, such as homophobia, which wind through different political contexts and regions.

The uptick in local and transnational connectedness among LGBTQ digital groups, partygoers, and performers suggests a creative collective resilience that is able to both bend and suspend, at least intermittently, the pink line in Turkey. Commenting on the unprecedented challenges introduced by COVID-19 and the intensification of political homophobia in Turkey, Kika, a queer drag artist, reminded me of a popular saying in the Turkish drag scene—Abla, yaşadin! Translating into English as “Sis, you’re alive!”, this saying expresses drag performers’ simultaneous attachment to fantasy and reality, a duality that allows them to transcend and even transform the limits of physical and digital publics. As the music plays on in Turkey’s pandemic-induced digital clubs, online screens showcasing LGBTQ people continue to proliferate in the borderlands that abut the pink line of another duality—that of the queer imagination in search of freedom under the tightening grasp of an authoritarian government. Pushing and pulling insistently at the re-energized political homophobia that holds the pink line in place, Turkey’s dogged LGBTQ continue to take to the stage in force.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Shireen Hassim, Phillip Ayoub, Sa’ed Atshan, Gökçe Yurdakul, Olimpia Burchiellaro, Yener Bayramoğlu, Eylül Iscen, and the anonymous readers for European Journal of Women’s Studies for their feedback on this article. Their valuable suggestions have been crucial in developing my ideas. I would also like to thank Michèle Lamont and Harvard University’s Weather Center for International Affairs for inviting me to present an earlier version of this article. Finally, I thank the editors of this Special Issue, Tara Mehrabi and Luca Tainio, for their continuous support.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tunay Altay

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