It was a very emotional moment outside the Palace of Justice in last Sunday. Two men ran toward each other, brimming with impatience; they hugged, and just stood there for a moment, clasped together. The taller man was visibly fighting back tears, and kept wiping his eyes, but the smaller of the two appeared relaxed. He turned with a smile to the group nearby: “Nobody is allowed to criminalize us LGBTQ+ people,” he said resolutely.
This gray-haired man in his late 40s is Irfan Degirmenci, a well-known TV presenter in . He presented news broadcasts for more than 25 years until he came out at the end of last year and moved into politics. Degirmenci was the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TIP) candidate in the mayoral election in the capital, , and although he lost, he remains politically active. Last Saturday, he — along with 41 others — was arrested while giving a speech at an LGBTQ+ event for Istanbul Pride Week.
Bans and police action
The governor of Istanbul, Davut Gül, had made threatening statements beforehand.
In a reference to the LGBTQ+ community, he wrote on X that “some marginal groups” had called on people to assemble for a rally. Governor Gül asserted that these calls “undermine social peace, family structure, and moral values” and would not be tolerated.
The police, he said, would take action against anyone who did not abide by the ban on events.
The very next day, the security forces went ahead with a crackdown on those who participated in the Istanbul Pride parade. The march was announced in advance, but it wasn’t given permission to go ahead.
Despite the threats, some people still took to the streets, chanting, “We insist on life!”
More than 50 demonstrators .
“Insisting on life”: The theme for 2025
“Insisting on life” — “Yasamda Israr” in Turkish — is the slogan of this year’s Pride Month. The LGBTQ+ community wants to stress that it still exists, and is still active, in spite of repression and attempts at intimidation.
This takes a lot of courage, as was apparent once again in mid-June. In the run-up to , the homepage and social media channels of news magazine Kaos GL — the oldest magazine in Turkey with an LGBTQ+ focus — were blocked by court order. The magazine has been reporting on discrimination and violence against this community since 1994, as well as campaigning for . There is now also a non-profit association of the same name, offering services that range from a hotline where people can report hate crimes to advice and information.
For Yildiz Tar, editor-in-chief of Kaos GL, the blocking of their online portal is not just censorship, but part of a systematic mechanism attempting to erase the very existence of the LGBTQ+ community.
Demonization of LGBTQ+
The association ÜniKuir also reports being targeted by hate campaigns. It advocates for the equal rights and participation of LGBTQ+ people in higher education. Its current report says that between June 2023 and September 2024, 41 members of the Turkish parliament openly opposed the rights of LGBTQ+ people. In particular, MPs from the government alliance of the Islamic-conservative AKP and the ultra-nationalist MHP used words like “deviant” and “perverse” to portray LGBTQ+ people as a global threat.
ÜniKuir says there has been a huge increase in verbal attacks. It adds that the murders of trans women, as well as other hate crimes and crimes against LGBTQ+ people, especially in the big metropolises like Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara, did not even make it onto the parliamentary agenda.
” hardly report on hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people and events, or Pride marches,” complains Yildiz Tar from Kaos GL. There are also no LGBTQ+ characters in films or TV series, he points out, which is why news portals like his are so important: “Instead, hostile rhetoric and targeted verbal attacks and discrimination are getting worse.”
Tar says the persecution has assumed a dimension that can’t be explained by prejudice or ignorance alone.
Politics has contributed to the dangerous atmosphere
Observers are also convinced that the government’s decision to declare 2025 the “” is no coincidence.
At the ceremony to launch this initiative, Turkey’s Islamic-conservative president, , stressed that his government wanted to protect families and children at all costs. He described the LGBTQ+ community as a great threat to the family, and claimed that digital platforms and articles devoted a great deal of space to LGBTQ+ interests.
According to the journalist Irfan Degirmenci, violence begins with the language coming from the top. “We’re described as deviant, perverse,” he says, and warns that LGBTQ+ people are dehumanized on a daily basis by Diyanet, the state institution that oversees religious affairs, as well as by the ministries of family and education, and by provincial governors.
Lawyer Nilda Balta confirms this. There are many disturbing developments in the country, she says, such as the family ministry’s decree that people should stop using terms like gender equality, LGBTQ+, and others that it claims harm the image of the family.
Other important problems are overshadowed
Semih Özkarakas, who works for a non-governmental organization, describes the current mood in Turkey as being like a “live hand grenade” about to explode. “As LGBTQ+ people, we feel only as safe as a Kurd, an Alevi, a refugee, or a woman does. That safe — or rather, unsafe.”
He stresses that, because of all this, people don’t even get around to talking about . They should really be discussing poverty among LGBTQ+ people, the housing shortage, lack of access to healthcare and education, , abuse, and forced prostitution. Instead of this, says Özkarakas, all the talk is of arrests, events that have been banned, and the blocking of online portals.
Pelin Ünker contributed to this report, which has been translated from German.
The post LGBTQ+ in Turkey: Insisting on life appeared first on Deutsche Welle.
