15/12/2023 | Writer: Umut Güner
Because Murtaza was a lubunya (queer) and like any lubunya, they are easy to sacrifice so it is easy to blow the whistle on them. Had Murtaza not been a lubunya, that is to say someone easy to sacrifice, I am not sure we would have found out about HIV issue so easily.
Murtaza Elgin leaving the hospital where he was forcibly kept under observation and isolated (Cumhuriyet Newspaper, November 8, 1985).
When we talk about the history of HIV in Turkey, it is important to mention the story of Murtaza. Murtaza was the first HIV-positive person to be exposed in the media. In my opinion there is a homophobic motive behind the disclosure of Murtaza’s HIV diagnosis and the introduction of the HIV issue to the public in a tabloid way through Murtaza. Because Murtaza was a lubunya (queer) and like any lubunya, they are easy to sacrifice so it is easy to blow the whistle on them. Had Murtaza not been a lubunya, that is to say someone easy to sacrifice, I am not sure we would have found out about HIV issue so easily.
The course of the LGBTI+ movement in Turkey and the HIV struggle are two separate movements that bear witness to each other and draw strength from one another. In terms of my personal history and the history of Kaos GL, they can be described as two fields of struggle that walk side by side.
Kaos GL Group, which in 1993 put out a call to lubunyas who wanted to organize themselves, is celebrating September 20 as its birthday since 1994. We share the excitement of putting 29 years behind us and celebrating our 30th anniversary. When Kaos GL started as a fanzine in 1994, it addressed HIV/AIDS as a human rights issue. While trying to decipher discriminatory attitudes in individual, organizational, social or public responses to HIV, it also produced informative content for its readers, volunteers and the LGBTI+ community at large. They distributed the condoms they received from family planning centres with the magazine, and together with the Hacettepe University AIDS Fighting Club, they opened a stand on Yüksel Street and organized awareness-raising events. In Istanbul, LambdaIstanbul also organized similar events.
So what were the rest of the actors doing while the lubunyas were dealing with these issues? They were talking about HIV as a “gay/transvestite disease” in closed-door meetings. Without making any effort to reach out to gays and transvestites, they agreed that it was a gay disease.
I attended the peer educator training at Hacettepe University HIV-AIDS Treatment and Research Center (HATAM) in 1998. During this training, there was no mention of Murtaza, Kaos GL or the lubunya organization in Turkey. They spoke about the psychiatric aspect, the social aspect, this aspect and that aspect of HIV. Some trainers said “it is not a gay disease”, but since most of the trainers talked about “the risks of anal sex”, “the prevalence among men who have sex with men” and fed our homophobic perceptions, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, AIDS automatically became a “gay disease” for us.
When I came Kaos GL in 2000, I was a student at Hacettepe University and our lecturer asked us to write a small project text for animation class. I wrote something about peer counselling in Kaos GL, based on my knowledge in HATAM. It was published in the Kaos GL magazine. That really made me happy.
In 2002, Kaos GL was invited to the AIDS Congress. At that time, those who were going to get involved in AIDS activism were mostly health workers, mostly doctors. Within Kaos GL we wrote the speech that I would give at the AIDS Congress. The Congress was the first event where I was going to speak on behalf of Kaos GL, and also the first event where I was going to speak as a queer.
My assumption was that the doctors there knew at least as much about HIV as Kaos GL, if not as much as me. They disappointed me with their openly HIV-phobic, homophobic, transphobic and bi-phobic questions. Their questions about protection were based on whether I was protected or not. And there was only one question that all of them were curious about and that they didn’t feel comfortable to ask openly: “Did I have AIDS?” If I was not HIV+, why was I at the AIDS conference? And why did it not make me feel uncomfortable to talk about myself as a gay man?
I also want to talk about a protest I witnessed in 2002. When an HIV+ trans woman was kept waiting at the emergency entrance of a hospital for 3 days and was not admitted to the infectious diseases department with the excuse of “there is no room”, trans people in Ankara said, “If our patient cannot enter this hospital, no one can enter” and called all trans people and told them to “spread out on the floors”. Three days later, while they were claiming that there wasn’t a room in the infectious diseases department, a special room was immediately allocated and our patient was admitted to the unit.
Speaking of the AIDS Congress, we should of course talk about the Fighting AIDS Associations. Turkey had declared a war on AIDS because AIDS was something that had to be fought against for them. The Istanbul-based Fighting AIDS Association was a non-profit association with 16 branches, and in Izmir there was the Association for Fighting AIDS founded by Melahat Okuyan. Melahat Okuyan was of the opinion that all homosexuals had AIDS and that all people who had AIDS were homosexuals. I heard her say at the AIDS conference, “Don’t hit your kids’ bottoms while burping them otherwise they will turn gay.”
In the meantime, a multi-sectoral AIDS Commission, which doesn’t include lubunya organization, was set up within the Ministry of Health at a time when there was no self-organization of people living with HIV. We still hear that they meet occasionally. The Presidency of Religious Affairs, which has attributed the pandemic to HIV and lubunyas during the pandemic period, is also a member of this commission. On the other side he reproductive and sexual health program began to be implemented as part of the harmonization with the EU. However, we could not fit into that framework because there was so much emphasis on reproductive health. The program was added to our agenda with the behavioral research on HIV/AIDS. Similarly, in order to apply to the Global AIDS Fund under the auspices of the Turkish Ministry of Health, an “AIDS Coordination” was set up, separate from the AIDS Commission. Kaos GL was invited to be part of this coordination. I participated on behalf of Kaos GL as the “most colorful” and the only person who was not a healthcare professional and suspected of being HIV+ in the coordination, which included representatives of the Ministry of Health and its related units, medical faculties of universities and NGOs established by healthcare professionals working in the field of HIV.
And we went into overdrive to write a project all together. Finally, our project was accepted and the Turkey HIV/AIDS Program was launched in 2005. We sat at the table with the public for the first time and started working as a part of this program. The project was completed in a more liberal process because it was the first period of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government. The beginning of a period of direct organization of people living with HIV and the transformation of HIV activism into a human rights struggle was one of the most important results of this project.
But here is my point of emphasis: Activists who were HIV-positive started to do their activism as if they did not have a sexual orientation at all. This entailed a process that made them invisible, or at least assumed that they are ‘hetero’, even if it did not make them invisible. For a while, the issue of HIV circulated as a whispered rumor within LGBTI+ activism. Today, however, it has become more comfortable to talk about HIV, with the presence of openly HIV-positive queers.
*The articles at KaosGL.org Gökkuşağı Forumu (Rainbow Forum) are under the responsibility of their authors. The fact that the articles are published at KaosGL.org does not mean that the opinions at the articles necessarily reflect the opinions of KaosGL.org.
Translation: Selma Koçak
Tags: human rights, hiv
