Istanbul: A Transvestite Desire - Extra Extra Magazine

GEZI PARK

It was a question of two or three trees for the Municipality in the beginning to enlarge the new fully cement pedestrian square Taksim had been transformed into. The resistance to protect the Gezi Park in Taksim Square marked a generation’s political stance in Turkey. The park is founded on a large territory that was given to the Armenian community in the time of Sultan Suleyman to become their cemetery. During the time of Abdulhamid, part of this area was emptied out to become artillery barracks. The area was fully expropriated in 1939, and right now three big hotels, Istanbul City Radio and Gezi Park share this large territory. It is the first park of the Republic of Istanbul and it is claimed that those Armenian tombstones were used to make the steps of the park. Gezi is still the only green spot in the central part of Istanbul. It used to be a quite neglected, run-down park hosting the homeless, the cruisers and the transsexual sex workers at night. People came here to look for random sexual encounters. The unforgettable commune, consisting of many different social groups from anti-capitalist Muslims to football fan groups, LGBTI activists and young socialists, took place in Gezi Park in June 2013 when it was removed by a police ambush. Having been closed to the public for a while afterwards, it emerged in a new form. Though the commune is not there any more, its memory still remains and guides our understanding of the public. The state’s de facto scrutiny for possible gatherings changed on the night of the coup attempt on 15th July when people were called to be on the streets by the president to protect democracy.

WIG SHOPS

Kutlug Ataman’s Women Who Wear Wigs (1999) ties the stories of four wigged women, a political fugitive, a transvestite, a cancer patient and a conservative student who is not allowed to appear in her university class with her headscarf. All four embody their wigs in their idiosyncratic ways shaped by their personal histories. The piece is a powerful metaphor of Istanbul – nicknamed Byzantium in the rest of Turkey – made of role play, identity building, survival instincts, sex appeal and political engagement. The wig becomes an agent to make us question gender roles and the state’s authority intervening in identity. The beginning of the 2000s in Turkey was the time when many suppressed histories and identities revealed themselves twenty years after the last military coup d’état. Tarlabasi Boulevard, which starts from Taksim Square and divides the Beyoglu and Tarlabasi neighbourhoods, is marked by the facades of wig shops displaying affordable wigs of all types and colours. Why wigs are still popular and affordable says a lot about how people live their identities in Turkey. Though the boulevard is undergoing a heavy gentrification process, the white fluorescent lights of these facades are recognizable. They hint at a city that appears only by night, made up of tiny music halls, ‘muzikol’, and clubs, of blue neon lights, mirrored stages, personal lodges and cheap champagne.

The stories of the four women touch larger issues of political, religious and sexual control in Turkey; their experiences are gripping on a personal level. Anyone watching will be absorbed by these tales of disguise and self-transformation. Courtesy: The Economist

Kutlug Ataman’s famous work 'The Four Seasons of Veronica Read', 2002 chronicles a year in the life of an obsessive British bulb fancier, a woman so attached to her hippeastra that she takes photos of her favourite flowers with her whenever she must, regretfully, leave her West London home. Although some viewers may smirk, Mr Ataman sees her, as he sees all his subjects, as kindred spirits. ‘The women I record in my films are both true individuals and extensions of myself. I am particularly interested in divas and transvestites because they are extreme individuals who are constantly performing their personalities,’ he says of his distinctive filmic portraits. ‘I am not observing them in a voyeuristic way; my films are a form of self-expression.’ Courtesy: The Economist

Wig shop at Tarlabasi Boulevard.

ZEKI MUREN

In the 1950s Turkey went through a liberalization in terms of social life and entertainment. Live music casinos such as Maksim or Cakil where famous singers appeared on stage became major entertainment in Istanbul, including for middle-class families. Known as the ‘sun of art’, Zeki Muren was one of the most prominent singers in this period because of the way he sang and spoke. He sang, composed and acted in some popular movies, and in high heels and specially designed costumes, he created a revolution on stage, encouraging his audience in the 1960s and 1970s to love him and his gay identity. Muren paved the way for many more singers and entertainers, such as Bülent Ersoy, in later generations to perform on stage with this kind of openness. Zeki Muren is an icon of Turkish popular culture and the LGBTI movement. His name is one of the keywords associated with Istanbul; during the annual Pride Walks in Istanbul in recent years, anti-militarists carry banners saying, ‘We are the soldiers of Zeki Muren’ or ‘Resist and be kissed by Zeki’.

Compared by foreigners to David Bowie and Liberace, Zeki Muren was Turkey’s most famous singer for more than three decades. He was not only a powerful vocalist, but also a songwriter, composer, entertainer and master of Turkish classical music, which has its roots in the court music of the Ottoman Empire. As a prolific designer, Muren created his own stage costumes – shiny jackets, bejewelled capes and extra-skimpy miniskirts. He might appear on stage in ultra-high platform shoes, or wearing big-framed and glittery glasses like Elton John. Courtesy: BBC news, Selin Girit

Zeki Muren at Maksim casino.

MUJDE AR

Another key cultural icon that may not surface at first sight in Istanbul is the film actress Mujde Ar. She became famous in 1975 for playing the character Bihter in the first television version of a classic novel Ask-i Memnu (The Forbidden Love). The same year, in Kocek (The Dancer), she played a hermaphrodite figure who became a woman with the help of surgery. Mujde Ar was a woman of conscious choices and remains so. The bold roles she played as a film actress, especially during the 1980s – not dared by other actresses – embodied a critical representation of women in cinema as independent, conscious and sexually more confident. In the 1986 Turkish adaptation of Belle du Jour named Kupa Kizi (Ace Queen) she played the female figure who started prostituting herself for her own sexual liberation. As well as appearing on the covers of popular women’s magazines of the time, she became a fantasy figure for generations of men. Some of her subtle but strong sex scenes are still accessible and popular on online platforms such as YouTube. Mujde Ar had stopped appearing in films by 2004 yet is still an important public figure.

'Dul bir kadın' (1985) Directed by Atıf Yılmaz

THE IMMORTAL

When collaborating with Alain Resnais for The Last Year in Marienbad, Alain Robbe-Grillet was also working on his own film L’Immortelle which he finished two years later in 1963. Robbe-Grillet’s approach to cinema reflects his hyper-modernist taste in writing: questioning classical character formations, turning narrative into a perspective rather than a position, transgressing chronological narrative, focusing on obscene details of the moment. L’Immortelle is a story of obsession and unrequited love of a French researcher who falls for a mysterious woman in Istanbul. Appearing in different names and characters, this mysterious woman is more like an eternal image in the man’s mind. Through her figure the real and the imaginative overlap each other. It can be claimed that the mysterious woman and her changing memory are symbolizing the city of Istanbul for Robbe-Grillet. His first Istanbul encounter was through his wife who comes from one of the old Istanbul-based Armenian families. Therefore it is no surprise that the film abstracts the actual city to black-and-white cards of the Bosphorus, the Byzantine walls, ancient cisterns and old mansions. As the love story becomes more and more impossible, these iconic images are taken over by dark and small streets of a labyrinth city. The contemporary history of the 1960s is more embedded in untranslated Turkish dialogue that can never be understood by the main male character. Robbe-Grillet doesn’t hide the fact that he is more impressed with the image of Istanbul in his mind, which he had learned from orientalist travelogues. For him the city is timeless and universal like a mysterious woman one can never fully understand and thus remains obsessed about her.

MY SCRIBER

When Eartha Kitt was taking stage at some Istanbul clubs, she learned the famous Istanbul song ‘Katibim’ (My Scriber) and covered it in her unique sensuous style during her performances afterwards. ‘Katibim’ is one of those songs that everybody knows in Turkey: It has started to rain on the way to Üskudar/My scriber has a long coat and mud on his sleeves. It has also different versions around Balkan countries. The way Eartha Kitt sings it arouses the romantic orientalist picture of Istanbul as a song sung by an Istanbul lady courting for his young lover who works as a scriber. The song was even used as a base script for a popular film where Zeki Muren played the scriber. Despite its popularity, ‘Katibim’ was actually a song of mockery composed by a hoodlum in the late Ottoman period. The sultan of the time ordered all state officers to wear uniforms, which was ridiculed by the locals. The Scottish Army was also in Istanbul to support the Ottomans in the Crimean War at the time, using one of the big military bases in the Üskudar neighbourhood. An Üskudar hoodlum steals the melody of a Scottish military march and writes an amusing story of a young scriber on his way to work in his new awkward uniform, which became popular among the folk. ‘Oh those Turks’ in Eartha Kitt’s version of ‘Katibim’ was echoed later by Boney M in their song ‘Rasputin’ as ‘Oh those Russians’.

Üsküdar’a – Eartha Kitt (Live 1967)

The 1970s vocal group Boney M, album cover photo shoot. The phenomenally successful quartet was manufactured by the German record producer Frank Farian. Its male singer and dancer was Bobby Farrell, who is admired for his amazing and sexy dance moves.

BEND BUT DON'T BREAK: POPULAR SEX CINEMA

Bend but don’t Break is one of the famous titles of the sex films that began being shot during the 1970s in Yesilcam, Turkey’s Hollywood, to compete with television and video. There was a huge flood of production that followed between 1975 and 1980, with a particular combination of crude sexuality, erotica and slapstick comedy. They are never remembered as good films but their colloquial sex-evoking titles are still part of the popular culture for the 1980s generation such as Neriman the Bus, Shoot You One Second, Not With Money But With Order and Target Shooters. These films also show how repressively sexuality is treated in the general society. Turkish women appeared on the acting stage very late in the Ottoman period and when they did, their roles were never a portrayal of a woman as a sexual being. There were actresses coming from non-Muslim communities who portrayed more sexually aware roles. The most famous stereotype was the mischievous ‘French teacher’. The good woman played by Turkish actresses was mostly a decent lady, a family woman, sexually closed. And the only way to have sex with them is ‘rape’. That is one of the reasons why ‘rape’ became a popular sexual fantasy in the sexually repressed society. They would claim to their raper, ‘You can have my body but never my soul!’ In such a context, the women playing in the 1970s sex films such as Arzu Okay, Zerrin Egeliler, Dilber Ay and Emel Aydan were treated as sort of porn stars. They were completely banned after the 1980 military coup d’état.

NEVER MY SOUL!

‘Never my soul’ is a phrase taken from the clichéd sentence the good Turkish-girl character says to her rapist in many old Yesilcam films – ‘You can have my body but never my soul!’. Kutlug Ataman’s multi-channelled installation, which he shot in 2001, is inspired by these Turkish melodrama films, boldly mimicking their clichés. It was first shown internationally at the second Berlin Biennial in 2001. At its centre is Ceyhan Firat, a transsexual who pretends to be Türkan Soray, the real-life diva of the Turkish cinema. The transsexual’s true life is similar to the melodramatic plot of a Türkan Soray film. She was born a boy, beaten up by her military father throughout her childhood for exhibiting ‘effeminate’ behaviour, taken to psychiatrists at the age of thirteen to cure her of her sexual ‘deviance’, and later beaten and tortured by a notorious Istanbul police chief. Ceyhan had to make her living through prostitution. Never My Soul imitates both documentary and fiction, but it is neither of these. All roles and positions are shifted and paralleled on purpose to such a degree that the work itself becomes a transvestite.

TEK YON - ONE WAY

If there are different sexual drives belonging to different cities, the sexual drive of Istanbul is mainly a transsexual one, standing between genders and different sexual roles. After the 1990s the LGBTI movement found a small but consistent base in Istanbul. This has been reflected in the city’s nightlife, which has been circulating around the back streets connecting Istiklal Street, Siraselviler Street and Tarlabasi Boulevard to one another. If you ask the right people, you can single out the sometimes on-the-roam locations for gay bars and trans clubs. Tek Yon, located on Siraselviler Street, is a classic meeting spot that is exclusive to men. It started as a bear bar that was women and trans friendly. Then it transformed into a more popular normalized gay club. Their bouncers still hold on to the five-women quota. Tek Yon is a crucial experience to understand the ways in which Istanbul desires.

NURI ALCO

Nuri Alco is the mischievous cult male figure of the 1980s in popular cinema, the ultimate ‘son of a bitch’. Though he never intended to be a bad guy when he started acting in films, with his blonde coiffed hair, reddish moustache, pink shirts, white jackets and his medal colliers he created a special kind of a decadent bad guy. Nuri Alco would always arrive in a white classic Mercedes. Sometimes he was part of a mafia, he drank whisky in one gulp, sometimes dealt drugs and thus was the bad friend of the leading actor. Alco represented the dangerous side of the metropolis. The most clichéd of his scenes was the one in which he drugged an innocent woman via her soda and abused her sexually. His special target was women who ran away from home and came to Istanbul on their own to become singers or actresses. He was the ultimate smart innocence killer. Thanks to him, for many years soda wasn’t considered a safe drink between a guy and a girl in Turkey. Nuri Alco is rumoured to have turned into a pious man in his later life. Generations will remember and adore him as their local ‘Anthony Hopkins’.

DIVA (BÜLENT ERSOY)

Her name is DIVA because of her impressive voice with large intervals and glowing stage presence. Bülent Ersoy still represents the school of classic music in Turkey. She was the first public figure in Turkey to undergo a sex-change operation, in London in 1981. When he first started to sing as Bülent Ersoy, he was just eighteen years old. When he revealed his nipples after calls from audience, he was detained and imprisoned for a short time in 1980. After the operation, Turkey refused to acknowledge her as a woman until 1988. She starred in different films during this difficult period to keep her name alive while she was in exile abroad, but she became a big star once she was acknowledged as a woman in Turkey. Her albums became iconic bestsellers of the 1990s with songs like ‘Sefam Olsun’ (May it be my Feast) or ‘Ablan Kurban Olsun Sana’ (Your Sister Will Die For You). Ersoy made talk shows, and participated on the jury for TV talent competitions. Her outstanding and extravagant costumes always made her the talk of the day. She inspired Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong to create a character that he named as ‘Bulent Wongsoy’, imitating her performances. She is also one of the departure points for Gulsun Karamustafa’s ‘Gender Project’. Unfortunately Ersoy rarely voices a critical public opinion in favour of the individuals who have suffered from similar oppression in Turkish society. She recently positioned herself more closely with the government, which was a disappointment for many.

ANOTHER COUNTRY

After the assassination of Martin Luther King, the writer James Baldwin decided to flee the United States. He first came to Paris, then went to Israel. His original plan was to go to Africa but he went to Istanbul instead, three years after he promised his friend Engin Cezzar he would come to the city. They became friends many years before when Baldwin chose Cezzar to act in the stage version of his famous novel Giovanni’s Room with Actors Studio. During the time when Robbe-Grillet was working on his L’Immortelle he may have been in the city too. When Baldwin arrived, he was involved with an enormous script he was trying to finish. He felt free in Istanbul because nobody interviewed him or asked his opinion about what was going on. He knew few people and didn’t speak the language. The racial prejudice in Turkey was not based on black and white. It is said that Baldwin would often be found at a party, calmly writing at a kitchen counter covered with glasses and papers and hors d’oeuvres. This is how he finished one of his masterpieces Another Country, signed ‘Istanbul, Dec. 10, 1961’, a novel about race, sexual orientation, sex, poverty, cities, masculinity, violence and anger. Though Baldwin never wrote about Istanbul directly, his experience in the city also shaped some of his later writings. According to a report, Baldwin told Turkey’s preeminent man of letters, Yasar Kemal, ‘I feel free in Turkey’ and Kemal replied‚ Jimmy, that’s because you’re an American.’ Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s academic research James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics in Exile is a good source for those who are curious about James Baldwin’s time in Istanbul.

Feeling more than usually restless, James Baldwin flew from New York to Paris in the late summer of 1961, and from there to Israel. Then, rather than proceed as he had planned to Africa – a part of the world he was not ready to confront – he decided to visit a friend in Istanbul. Baldwin’s arrival at his Turkish friend’s door, in the midst of a party, was, as the friend recalled, a great surprise: two rings of the bell, and there stood a small and bedraggled black man with a battered suitcase and enormous eyes. Engin Cezzar was a Turkish actor who had worked with Baldwin in New York, and he excitedly introduced ‘Jimmy Baldwin, of literary fame, the famous black American novelist’ to the roomful of intellectuals and artists. Baldwin, in his element, eventually fell asleep in an actress’s lap. Courtesy: Claudia Roth Pierpont The New Yorker

'Another Country' turned out to be a best-seller in the most conventional sense. A sprawling book that brought together Baldwin’s concerns with race and sex, its daring themes – black rage, interracial sex, homosexuality, white guilt, urban malaise – make an imposing backdrop for characters who refuse to come to life.

A candid of Marlon Brando, James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte in Istanbul, 1967.

ERKEKCE - THE MANNISH

Erkekce was the first erotic magazine of Turkey, first published in the 1980s. The magazine was initiated by a group of journalists who were inspired by Playboy. Men growing up in the 1980s have fond memories of Erkekce magazine as VHS tapes were a luxury. Since magazines were more accessible, Erkekce was collected by many. The highly erotic covers featured famous actresses and singers of the time such as Ahu Tugba, Hulya Avsar, Mujde Ar and Aysegul Aldinc. Inside the magazine were erotic photographs of these stars accompanied by serious interviews, male culture, sex and erotica. In 1987, the law stipulated that the magazine be sold in plastic bags, which led to a drop in the sales of the magazine. The editors decreased the erotica in the magazine so that it could be taken from the bag. Eventually the magazine had to close in 1993. By then there were more VHS players around and tapes brought by relatives working in Germany. In 2005, there was another attempt to revive the magazine but the internet generation was not interested in such a discourse any more. Therefore the magazine remained an important memory of the 1980s, and also inspired the popular feminist magazine Kadinca.

AJDA PEKKAN

When she was seventeen, in 1963, she featured in the famous Ses magazine as the new cover girl, the magazine calling her the new sex idol of cinema. Ajda Pekkan never played the sex bomb; she was always the stubborn, unusual, sexually bold and confident bourgeois blond popstar. The blonde in Turkish popular culture has always been considered a dangerous woman. Pekkan was one of the few figures who continued her singing career without having to dye her hair. In one of the films she acted with a football player of the time; she was the one inviting him in with him resisting. Some of Ajda’s early famous songs were adaptations from the Italian popstar Mina. Her lyrics became a march for women and queers, saying, ‘I am born free, I live free. Who is to say anything?/ Am I born a slave to you? Who are you to care?’ She is capable of showing the door to her lover: ‘Turn your back and leave?/You are not wanted any more’ in her adaptation of ‘I Will Survive’. Another dance-floor hit she made was the cover for ‘I Need a Hero’. After one of her friends claimed ‘Ajda is not only a star, she is a superstar’, the singer came to be nicknamed as ‘Superstar’ among her friends and in public. Consequently, Pekkan made a trilogy of albums called Superstar (1977), Superstar II (1979), and Superstar III (1983). If you go to any dance clubs in Istanbul, an Ajda Pekkan song will always find its way to the decks. Even fifty years after she first appeared on stage, Pekkan still performs as that bold blonde, while campaigning against domestic violence in her public life. She will always be our ‘superstar’

Superstar (1977)

Superstar II (1979)

Superstar III (1983)

7 Istanbul: A Transvestite Desire

by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu