MAN: Is there anybody out there?

Heterosexual Man, Homosexual Man, Bisexual Man? Who are these?

I am aiming at reading and describing the process of Homosexual Manhood in Turkey. Of course we will dwell with it within the politics of Homosexual movements.

 

It is the outcome of Turkey’s almost 2 decades of Homosexual Movements history that homosexual manhood in Turkey’s society was established, or that men who can only be related to their own sex could establish their homosexual identity and form a life style accordingly.

 

Kaos GL has been the leading organization in the history of homosexual organizations in Turkey. One of our founding principles is a critical attitude, the need for an active resistance against the societal gender issues and sexuality. The ultimate of Kaos GL is, naturally, a genderless utopic society.

 

As Kaos GL, we believe that demolishing the power of heterosexual men is possible.

 

This does not mean, pulling down one power and capturing it.

 

It can be defined as a metamorphosis, a process of change towards freedom for both heterosexual and homosexual men.

 

It is redundant to say but I still will to relieve heterosexual men that on the way to this freedom together, heterosexual men will not need to change their sexual orientation or identity.

 

 

I think we all know that we are born into an heterosexist and fallomorphic society and so “we all are” born as children of men.

 

The “manhood” we are guided towards, forced to or oppressed to accepting, entering or conforming to has long been designed before we were born and it does not include us.

 

This manhood is presented to us as if we are obliged to obey its rules, conform to and apply it, as if it cannot be changed or transformed; in other words, as if it is an ultimate, perpetual and eternal. 

 

 

However, manhood is a social category and is changing, being transformed and is reconstructed over and over again.

 

This process has also been proven to us by the Women’s Liberation Movement and also by the politics and practice of Feminism and Homosexual Liberation Movements.

 

For the last 15 years, male homosexuals in Turkey, doubt less about their manhood and can call themselves as “homosexual” and/or “gay”.

 

As a result of many sincere talks with the transvestites and transsexuals,  we have learnt that within the last 15 years there is a dramatic decrease in the number of transvestites or transsexuals who have been “converted” or have gotten their “thing chopped off.”

 

Many heterosexual men have started expressing more clearly their dislike with the present manhood or fallomorphic system that gives them power or at least provides them with some profit.

 

Amongst men who are sexually related to their own sex and amongst others who can easily define themselves as gay, new modes of manhood or masculinities manifestations can be seen.

 

 

Then what possibilities does the present condition provide for us?

 

What is the point of resistance of the present manhood?

 

I am happy to say that, in spite of all the discourse and applications of the heterosexual male power, the present manhood is not intact, it is not a complete, perfect whole.

 

We can now talk about not manhood but masculinities feeding the present manhood. These new masculinitiescan flow from various means.

 

We know that the present manhood produces homophobia, feeds it, and it reconstructs itself mutually with homophobia.

 

Here we can also depict that the present system also has the opportunity to oppress not only men who are not heterosexuals but also heterosexual men who do not fit into the patterns, those straight men who cannot adjust themselves to the discourse of the phallomorphic system.

 

The present manhood is described differently in various socio-cultural, socio-economic and socio-political sectors or milieu. This definition is naturally shaped by the new evolving quasi identities.

 

It is also natural that such social processes are valid for all men, regardless of their sexual identies’ being heterosexual or homosexual.

 

Although heterosexual manhood is not perfected and intact, heterosexist minds do not want to see homosexual men as “men”.

 

 

At the beginning of my paper, I claimed that the establishment of homosexual male identity in Turkish society is the product of Homosexual Liberation Movement during the last two-decades.

 

Then what was happening before?

 

The period “before” can roughly be divided into two and we can then try to answer the questions “which homosexuality?” and/or “the homosexuality in which period?”

 

The first period concerns the Ottoman, in whose reign the picture of homosexuality is a mixture of socio-cultural realities and the oriental legendary fantasies mingled with the love affairs in the palace or the hammam.

 

Fine, depending upon his own fantasies one may like to cruise in a world inhabited by men with moustaches and wearing the fez or boys who stroll around with their hairless, fragile, girlish bodies.

 

The second period is institutionalized with the Republic, or rather during the last period of the Ottoman Empire. In this period, a new age of invisibility for the homosexuals begins.

 

The reality of homosexuality is dismissed amongst the elite of the burocracy and in public domains the word “homosexual” is not even pronounced.

 

“The homosexual” is therefore put in a position of an innocent convict who has not committed a crime and this attitude has lasted to this day.

 

Due to the blockade of invisibility, homosexuals have been marginalized from social and cultural life completely.

 

Homosexual life gets encapsulated to dark park havens, a few hammams and is labelled as “immoral”, “sick” and “perverse”.

 

This has been the share for homosexuals in the new Turkish Republic that turned its face to the West.

 

During the whole of this period, homosexuality or rather man-to-man homosexual relationship has been oppressed by a socio-cultural clamp.

 

This naturally shaped a two-faced life-style.

 

The homosexual individual is forced to construct his life-style according to heterosexual life-style as this is considered “normal” and can at the same time live his homosexual identity without receiving any labels and/or avoiding the risk of marginalization.

 

So long as he does not stand to proclaim his homosexuality or as long as he fervently fulfills the demands of heterosexual life, he can easily find a place under the protective umbrellas of the social, moral, religious institutions.

 

Well, as every village has a mad man, there will always be a “faggot” who does not play the game according to the rules and who has to act as if he is chosen to relieve the conscience of the hypocritical society!

 

 

All of a sudden with the Sept.12 military take-over in Turkey, everything is topsy-turvy.

 

Like the rest of the society, homosexual men or transvestites have been subjected to great pain and suffering.

 

Those who cannot hide themselves by two-faced life-styles, or those who have been pushed to the margins, are forced out of the metropolis.

 

Meanwhile, however, the oppression put on transvestites received great resistance. The oppression, cruelty and torture applied to them by the moral police force, state TV channels and other state institutions, paradoxially led to centralizing the problem and making homosexuals visible.

 

Also with the military take-over, socio-cultural relationships start changing. The present organizations and the human relations they had shaped, start getting transformed.

 

Those who had kept silent, who had not been able to use their right to express themselves or who had been left in the shadows of the dominant ways of relationship, start coming out into social life as new voices and new perspectives.

 

The homosexual voice is one of them.

 

Being “out” may still be a nightmare for the majority of homosexuals in Turkey, but the threshold is left far behind.

 

Although it was subjected to arbitrary and physical cruelty, homosexuality has never been a crime.

 

For the homosexual who developed self-esteem and self-reliance, being labelled “sick”, “immoral”, “sinful” or “pervert” was to no effect.

 

 

The long hair of the rebels and the revolutionaries (and they were heterosexual too!) before the 80s got shorter or those who did not have a haircut gave it the shape of horse-tail.

 

If the young man with a horse-tail, let alone being labelled as a rebel, cannot escape by only being labelled as “pseudo-intellectual”, would soon be subjected to the labels “womanized”, “faggot” or “queer”.

 

In this same period, those “womanized faggots” start learning that they can be “homosexuals” without looking like Zeki Müren or Bülent Ersoy.

 

From their backs people may address them as “funky, homo, faggot” but they soon learn to speak for and about themselves as homosexual or gay.

 

The more homosexuality manifests itself as a separate ontological identity, the less the heterosexual men feel obliged to prove their “manhood” in myriad ways.

 

The media that describe a homosexual man as “half man, half woman” soon admit the fact that this picture does not fit the reality.

 

Now that they have long given up growing a moustache, heterosexual men soon discover that there is nothing wrong in shaving off the chest hair and this shows that they see no barriers on the way to becoming “different”.

 

On the other hand, while the heterosexual man gives up the moustache, the body hair etc., new modes of man-to-man ways of existence even by adopting macho attitudes vary the identities under the umbrella of homosexuality.

 

Of course we must keep in mind the relationship of this process with the socio-cultural and socio-economic means.

 

If these changes and practices of transformation are seen as a “problem” and are labelled from a moral perspective, it is clear that this is because such changes and practices have started being seen amonst the men of lower classes and/or the poor.

 

We all know that if these are done by the bourgeoisie or by rich men, they can be ignored.

 

In other words, people keep silent until after they see the men of lower classes are changing too. No sooner it is with the workers or other subordinate classes, than starts the clamour!

 

Here we must emphasize again the hypocrisy of the dominant morality.

 

The bourgeois side of this hypocrisy is an as-if secret!

 

On that side of the society, transvestism “only during the weekends,” or saying that “there is nothing wrong in trying it only once” are not to be judged at all.

 

If you can cover it in one way or another, you can try everything and the rest is only between you and the media members.

 

If it is one of them doing it, then it is adventure. If it is a worker, then he is a pervert!

 

If it is one of them doing it, he is crazy or delirious. If it is one of the poor, then he must be a fool.

 

If it is one of them doing it, it is nobody else’s concern. If it is done by one of the poor, it does not relate to general morality.