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News & Reports 2000-03 Also see: Also see: Gay
Islam Reports 1998-2002
2 Turkish transvestites stone minister's home-police 4/01 3 Pushed to the edge: Trannies in Turkey 12/00 4 Gays Refused Entry to Famous Turkish Site 9/00 5 A Quick Guide to Turkey 6/00 6 Transsexuals and the Urban Landscape in Istanbul (Essay1998) 7 Gay Identities, Communities and Places in the 1990s in Istanbul (Academic study) 8 Press statement for the ninth meeting of gay and lesbians 10/02 9 Lesbian Film: Journey to Kafiristan (true story of Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach and ethnologist Ella Maillart)
"The
Shame of a Dignified Family: A Gay Son" I
thought it was something like a birthday celebration, but next day suddenly
my father, my physician cousin and other men I don’t know brought
me into the back room of I
must have fainted. That violence called "circumcision" is
so common in Turkey. Our nation is so used to this violence that
it has become a tradition. I will never forgive my family for this.
Everyday, too many children in Turkey have to face this tragedy, which
is an about religious nonsense. So
even if you have the freedom to choose your religion, you actually don’t
have the right to live the way you want to in these places. In Turkey,
even in Istanbul, we are not allowed to celebrate Christopher Street
Day. Celebrations are only held in some clubs, not on the streets.
(But gays and lesbians have marched publicly in the streets in other
parades. In foreground, photo above.) April 16, 2001 2 Ankara - Turkish police said on Monday they drove a gang of stone-throwing transvestites away from a minister's home after they tried to rob his son late on Saturday. The Hurriyet newspaper said a group of transvestites accosted the son of sports minister Fikret Unlu as he parked his car near the family's Ankara residence. They demanded he give them 50 million lira ($42) or face being shamed in front of his neighbours. The group of cross-dressers threw beer bottles and stones at the Unlu home as the minister's bodyguards intervened, an Ankara police spokesman told Reuters. The paper said the group used their mobile telephones to call in other transvestites to join the fray before police drove them away. Two people, one of them transsexual, have been detained in connection with the incident, the police spokesman said. Turkey's larger cities have active transvestite scenes, in which men visit bars filled with young cross-dressers -- many of them in various stages of sex-change therapy -- and hire them for sex. Confrontations between police and transvestites in Istanbul and Ankara are not uncommon, particularly as summer nears and nightlife spills over onto the streets.
December 19, 2000 3 Gays, transsexuals are on the fringe of the Muslim nation, working only as prostitutes By Tom
Hundley, Tribune Foreign Correspondent She still inhabits a part of that world, although she has been fortunate enough to escape its most demeaning aspects. "I am the luckiest transgender person in Turkey. I met a man. He wanted to marry. I moved away from the streets," she explained. Kilic is the rare transsexual who holds a regular job, working for a non-profit foundation that tries to aid workers in Istanbul's sex trade. "I'm the only one [with a regular job]. Maybe there are two or three others, but definitely not four," she said. About 3,000 transvestites and transsexuals are thought to live in Istanbul. Most are prostitutes who ply their trade on the back streets of Beyoglu, the city's honky-tonk nightclub district, or along one of the major highways leading out of the city. They have been in the headlines recently because of a controversial government proposal to let them work in licensed brothels. Turkey is the only Muslim country with legalized, state-supervised prostitution. Thriving red-light districts can be found in almost every Turkish city. Istanbul has several, and for years most of the business was controlled by two Armenian madams who were annually honored by the city for scrupulously paying their taxes. Homosexuality, deeply problematic in most Islamic cultures, also has enjoyed a special niche in Turkey. Celtikci, or "pretty young boys," were prized in the harems of the Ottoman sultans. Even today, a transvestite named Bulent Ersoy is the reigning diva of classical Turkish music. But an accepted, openly gay life is almost impossible in Turkey, which is part of the reason there is such a large population of transvestites and transsexuals. Kilic explained that because homosexuality remains a taboo in this macho, male-dominated culture, the only option for an openly gay person is to live on society's fringes in the most outlandish and outrageous manner possible. "If you are homosexual, society pushes you toward this feminine behavior. Society says if I feel a little bit womanish, I have to be a woman," she said. Kilic described herself as a gay man who 10 years ago discovered she was really a woman. "This is not a choice. It's something instinctive," she said. Six years ago she found a Turkish doctor to perform a sex change operation. For most of Turkey's transvestites and transsexuals, the only way to earn a living is through prostitution. Their clients are generally closet gays who find that the most convenient way to have a sexual encounter with another man is to pick up a transvestite. "If they are caught, they can say, 'I made a mistake, bye-bye.' Or, 'I was drunk, I didn't know, bye-bye,'" Kilic said. Since the mid-1990s, when conservative Islamic political parties first came to power in Istanbul, there has been a steady crackdown on the sex industry. The city's brothels remain open but the red-light districts have been closed to foreigners and seem to be in a state of decline. Transsexual prostitutes who have undergone sex change operations can get female identity cards that allow them to work legally in the brothels. But those who have not had the operation, which costs about $5,000, or who have no desire for such an operation are considered illegal and often find themselves the target of police harassment. Periodic drives to clean up the grubby Beyoglu district have forced them to work the highways outside the city, where they still find themselves targeted by police. "The police push you into traffic. Last year, we had about one girl a week killed on the highway," said Demet Demir, a 38-year-old transsexual and political activist. According to news reports, a number of prostitutes have been killed on the highway, apparently struck by cars when they tried to flee from police or abusive customers. Demir, a lanky woman who was chain-smoking at a Beyoglu political clubhouse, said that for years the gay community had been pushing for legalized brothels, but now that this was a possibility, some were having second thoughts. "The mentality [of the lawmakers] is that if we take them off the streets, we can hide them," she said. On the other hand, "in brothels, the working conditions are hard, but at least it would be safer." Demir comes from a religious family in Istanbul. Her parents, she said, have "finally accepted me as I am." When she was 21, she spent eight months in prison for her activities with a leftist party that ran afoul of the military regime. After her release from prison, she was expelled from the party because of her sexual orientation. Despite her intelligence and appealing personality, Demir has never been able to find a regular job. Prostitution is the only way she can support herself, and this she laments. "This shouldn't be our destiny," she said.
September 2000 Author
? Kusadasi was the fourth stop on our whirlwind tour of the Eastern Mediterranean, following our departure from Athens and visits to the Greek island of Santorini, Egypt, and Israel. Day-long excursions to sights, nightly gay-themed entertainment, and admittedly a fair share of early-morning carousing, had left us tired, but still excited by the wonders we were seeing and the opportunity to be in an environment where same-sex relationships were the overwhelming majority. Kusadasi is one of Turkey's major resorts on the beautiful Aegean coast. It's a modern beach town; think South Beach or Venice, California, but more Islamic. More to the point, it lies just a few miles from Ephessos, a classical Greek port dating from the reign of Alexander the Great, in surprisingly fabulous shape given the region's frequent earthquakes. Ephessos was our primary destination that day. Secondarily, we hoped to do some shopping in Kusadasi's tourist-trap district, which looked nicely Rodeo Drive-ish as we passed it on the way to the ruins. But some of us never made it to the ruins, and none of us got to go shopping. Sometime that morning, before the last two tour buses could leave port, some Turkish official powerful enough to have his (or maybe her) way decided to declare a homosexual panic. Our final buses were prevented from getting under way. Passengers who had skipped the tour in favor of wandering the city were refused entry. Rumor has it that even the ship's crew was turned back. And when our buses returned a few hours later, roadblocks and security checkpoints marked our passing. Hurried conversations took place between our bus driver, policemen, and our Turkish tour guide (who did a marvelous job of not spooking us with what was really going on). Silly me: I thought it must be the usual security consciousness of Middle Eastern countries, little dreaming it was meant for us. In retrospect, the incident really did seem the work of a few isolated individuals abusing power while others were occupied elsewhere. Because as we passed back through Kusadasi's shopping district, still expecting to see it in person and not knowing I'd be back on ship fifteen minutes later, I saw a large rainbow flag hanging on the open door of a medium-sized shop. Ordinary Turkish citizens had waved at us as we left for the ruins; they waved as we came back. They knew we were coming, and who we were; they didn't seem to be bothered in the least. There were camera crews filming us as we walked down the gangway at the start of our day, but the tone was interested and welcoming, not hostile. And according to the ship's crew (mostly Greek, and therefore not predisposed to love Turks unconditionally), the general populace was flabbergasted and even upset at our dismissal, starting with the businesspeople who lost thousands of queer American dollars. Of course, some of that we only realized after we'd had time to calm down and reflect. That calming process didn't suffer from the fact that the president of the tour company was along with us, and called his friend David Mixner, Bill Clinton's friend and former gay adviser, to tell him what was happening. As it turned out, our Bubba was already talking to the Turks about something else that day. It was apparently an easy segue to take his pal's call and ask them why they were harassing 850 American tourists, gay or otherwise. The Turks, apparently, were surprised at their own behavior too. We were told there are no laws against homosexuality in Turkey, and the country is trying to join the European Union, meaning they must convince the very liberal Western Europeans they have a good human rights track record. Perhaps this explains the speed with which the Mayor of Kusadasi came aboard our boat and apologized to the entire tour and crew, saying he was ashamed of what had happened, promising to investigate and take action to see it didn't happen again, and inviting us to return someday. How often do queers get public apologies for how we're treated? That all made it easier to feel good on our next day's tour, again in Turkey, in the great city of Istanbul. But as many amazing sights as we saw-the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia--half the day was really about how famous we had suddenly become. We were front-page news in every morning paper, and the inevitable TV crews filmed hundreds of queens (and dykes) gleefully reading the news about ourselves. Media feeding on media: a very 21st Century experience amid the millennia-old relics. And oddly comforting, because we could see for ourselves that scandalous as we might seem, we were also a welcome entertainment. According to the Istanbul guide for my bus, the ruling parties in the current parliamentary coalition were looking for an excuse to break with each other anyway, and assigning blame to each other for what had happened to us. Meanwhile ordinary Turks scratched their heads and wondered why gay Americans with money to spend should be turned away. To some degree, it wasn't really about us at all, and the part that was about us eventually worked out to our benefit. The only thing that bothered me was the persistent rumors among us Americans that the Turks were fine until four men in drag descended half down the gangway. I know cross-dressers and trans people are a hot button topic for many in our communities, but personally speaking, I feel safest when gender outlaws are protected. The differences some of us see between being gay and being transgendered aren't terribly apparent to homophobes: to them, wearing a dress and kissing another man or woman both fall under the category of "things your gender shouldn't do." I'm unwilling to throw trannies to the wolves just to protect myself with some kind of "but I'm a NORMAL queer" gambit. So I felt we could have done better standing by our own. Besides, as I've said, the Turks knew a gay cruise was due in town. If they wanted to react badly they had plenty of better excuses and lots of lead time, so I don't think the rumor was even true. Imagine if they'd known yours truly is not just a gay man, but also an openly non-monogamous bisexual activist traveling with a long-term gay lover who isn't one of my two primary male partners. The horror, the horror! As an activist, I was most concerned about what the incident means for Turkish queers at home. Despite no legal sanctions against homosexuality, life is apparently still pretty rough for non-straights there. Things for the Americans on board the cruise were briefly confusing and almost scary, but quickly became a great "war story." Meanwhile the Turkish gay men and lesbians compelled into heterosexual marriage, the drag kings/queens and trannies who get abused for being too shocking, the bisexuals who probably get no more respect there than we do back home in the good ol' USA: they have to stay and work life out. We floated merrily away. In the long run, we can hope incidents like these, and the allegedly positive response from the Turkish public, help queer communities grow stronger. They also indicate how easily people in power can make our lives hard. That happens here too, of course. A week later, I look back on the Kusadasi incident almost fondly. Turkey was beautiful, and I hope to return someday. I may take 850 queer friends. Just to be safe. But I'd go again. I still haven't finished shopping!
Reprinted in The Washington Blade ,September 29, 2000. 5 June 2000 (?) by Kole
Hicks Turkey is itself as diverse as the countries surrounding it. Greece in the northwest, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria all share boarders with the exquisite country. The country is comprised of arid desert, deep forests, mountains, and Mediterranean costs, and a trip from one side to the next could have you rock camping in the Black Forest, cave dwelling in Cappadocia, or lounging on the beach of the Mediterranean sea. As can be guessed from its unique position, Turkey has had a long and turbulent history. Today the evidence of this history are scattered throughout the country but can be most clearly seen in the capitol city of Istanbul. The city itself spans more than 3,000 years. Aya Sofya, the Church of Devine Wisdom, was built in 548. Once the largest church in the world it is now a mosque, however the evidence of Christianity still remain intact on the interior, which houses a mosaic of emperor Constantine, his wife Zoe, and Jesus Christ. The region of Cappadocia is home to some of the largest underground cities in the world. These cities were used for hiding during times of war and many have caverns connecting them to each other. Arriving in any country is an experience unique unto its own. This is definitely true of Turkey. UK, Japanese, and US citizens among the many others, need to obtain visas before entering the country. If you arrive in by plane to Istanbul you will be happy to find that they do accept many forms of currency at the customs counter. For myself this was of great relief because I could not get my hands on any currency outside of the country. It seems that Turkey is currently experiencing inflation rates of nearly 100% a year so, as one can imagine, it is nearly impossible to buy currency before hand because banks simply don't keep it. Spring and autumn are among the best times to visit. The sun is nearly unbearable in the dead of summer, and in winter many of the hotels and sites are shut down. Budget travelers will be pleased to know that in Turkey you can live like a king on very little money. A good meal will cost you less than $6. A moderate hotel is around $8 a night, and travel in the country is also very cheap. But where do you go in Turkey? The following list is a brief highlight of the country: The prime attraction for travelers is the lively capitol city of Istanbul. The only city in the world set on two continents, Istanbul is the literal and figurative bridge between eastern and western culture. For the queer traveler it is the most exciting place to be in Turkey because of its bustling nightlife, and somewhat open scene (that is in terms of a Muslim country, so take this with a grain of salt). This city's sites are a cultural myriad of Christian art, the west, eastern art, muslim religion, and Turkish heritage going back thousand of years: The Imperial Treasury stuffed with gold, silver, jewels and other priceless treasures; Topkapi palace, the home of the sultans with hundreds of rooms, courtyards, and of course, the harem; Aya Sofya, mentioned earlier; and the Blue Mosque with it's exquisite interior, and captivating beauty. Istanbul also offers a good variety of gay venues accommodations and saunas, like Club 14, Bar Bahce (Siraseviler Cad, Soganci Sok.7), Hotel Eris (Istasion Arkasi Sokagi No.9), and the Cukurcuma Hamami (57 Cukurcuma Caddesi). Traveling outside of Istanbul is an experience all its own, where you are literally transported into a different world. Ankara, Turkey's capitol is mainly a place for government buildings and not too much for outstanding sites. However, it is the site of the Ataturk Mausoleum (a monument to the founder of modern day Turkey). If you happen to be in town on a layover to other parts (as many people are) you will also be pleased to find that there is at least one gay bar: Z Bar (Sakarya Cad., No.29). And a hamam: Merkez Hamami (Anafartalar caddesi). For lovers of ancient cities and classical ruins, Ephesus is one of the most exciting places. Among the many sites in this city on the Mediterranean is the temple of Diana, once counted among the Seven Wonders of the World. Cappadocia and the Valley of the Fairy Chimneys is one of the most interesting parts of the country. Huge cones of volcanic ash protrude from the ground. Many have been carved out to form houses. Aktepe in the north is where the most densely clustered formations exist. Bodrum is for the resort traveler. Palm lined streets, villas, yachts, snorkeling and scuba diving. There is only one gay bar that I know of in the area, the Oasis Bar (Halkarnas Caddesi), and not much else. Antalya is the place to be for phenomenal pebble beaches. Dotted with roman ruins, its 20 km of coastline are great for wasting away days in the sun. Although, once again, not much of a gay scene, allot of cruising seems to happen on the beach (Konyaalti beach) and in the local Hamams. Turkey is a wonderfully enchanting place offering a wide range of activities for travelers of all types. From the nightlife of Istanbul to fairy chimneys of Cappadocia it is packed full of eye opening experiences waiting to be discovered. Explore every aspect of the country from its culture and history, to its cities and beaches. Like no other place in the world Turkey is truly an astounding place to visit Kole Hicks currently lives in between San Francisco, London, Barcelona, and wherever else he decides to call home. He loves being on the road, sleeping in cheap hotels, and going on strange adventures. He can often be spotted digging through his carry-on looking for his frequent flyer card, which he will forget to use when he gets to the ticket counter. He is available for freelance work anytime: kolehicks@hotmail.com
Spring 1998 6 At one point, hardly a month went by without some feature in a popular magazine or a television interview. The cartoonist Latif Demirci captured this frenzied interest with his depiction of an apartment block in a notorious back street of Istanbul. Through each window, a transsexual could be seen being interviewed, filmed or recorded, while building janitors implored a queue of journalists waiting in the street outside to be patient. A recent book offering vignettes on modern Turkey devoted an entire chapter to an interview with Sisi, a famous transsexual.1 The popular magazine 'Kim' featured an intriguing article that voiced a complaint by the male gay community concerning these flashy upstarts.2 They contended that an estimated five to six million gay men--the true heirs of Ottoman tradition forced into retreat after post-Tanzimat westernization--had to lead secret lives, while a handful of transsexuals were making quick money from prostitution. Whatever the scale of this urban phenomenon, it appears to have caught the public imagination and evoked an almost voyeuristic curiosity. Part of the fascination surrounding transsexuals in Turkey is undoubtedly related to the sense of unease they generate in the morally and existentially loaded realms of sexuality and gender identity. In a society that prizes masculinity and places severe taboos on the expression of female sexuality, they parade an aggressively overblown feminine style and generally inhabit a shadowy underworld of entertainers and prostitutes. They inevitably raise questions about the sexual inclinations of their clientele since they tend to command considerably higher prices than their genetically female counterparts. They are also the unsettling harbingers of a new urban scene; the mega-metropolis where everything is on display and for sale, a new arena where the landscapes and, especially, the nightscapes of Istanbul, Rio, New York and Bangkok may become indistinct and shade into one another. Indeed, transsexuals appear to inhabit a social space where the influences of the local and the global meet and merge in varied and unpredictable ways. They are,
on the one hand, subject to the legal regulations of the Turkish state
and are monitored and often harassed by the forces of order. They are
members of a self-conscious local subculture that has evolved its own
coded vocabulary.3 On the other hand, they participate in a broader
circulation of people, fashions and ideas--in an international market
for sex-change surgery, for jobs in European clubs and in the international
gay movement's networks of political solidarity. This outcome
ended a lengthy legal battle dating from 1981 when the military regime
adopted a particularly uncompromising stance on any form of what it
regarded as social deviance.5 There is now an established medical-legal
procedure that culminates in the award of a pink identity card (to replace
the blue identity card held by men) which confers on its holder the
full legal status of a woman. Despite these changes, the fact that medical
and legal preconditions for sex-change surgery have not been fully worked
out creates areas of uncertainty and the potential for medical malpractice.
Sahika Yuksel, a psychiatrist with extensive experience in psychotherapy
with transsexuals, has made a strong plea for the full legalization
of sex-change surgery, because illegality encourages unscrupulous forms
of medical intervention for profit, compounding the difficulties of
an already stigmatized group.6 Few are
politicized and prepared to fight for their rights. Militants like Demet
Demir, a member of the Human Rights Association, have been struggling
to find a voice through the Association of Sexual Rights and Liberties,
a fragile coalition of gay and feminist activists. Many male gays accuse
the transsexuals of riding the sexual liberties bandwagon only as a
means of gaining more freedom as prostitutes. Some transsexual activists,
on the other hand, consider themselves to be feminists and progressives.
There is
a sense in which the dreams and materialistic aspirations of some for
a fast-track to fame and fortune capture the cultural mood of post-1980s
Turkey to an uncanny degree, while others include themselves in a broader
search for identity and legitimacy that reaches beyond Turkey. The fact
that Demet Demir was recently offered an award by the International
Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission confirms this latter tendency.
There will undoubtedly be many more troubled chapters in the history
of Turkish transsexuals and these will be narrated by the members of
this increasingly articulate community themselves. From: http://members.tripod.com/~warlight/YIGITHAN.html 7 Gay identities, communities and places in the 1990s in Istanbul Yigithan Yenicioglu Istanbul University, Department of Theatre Criticism -Methodology -Social characteristics and sexual behaviour of male homosexuals in Turkey -Towards Gay Identification and new sexual behaviour -Gay Identity in the 1990s -Gay Places in Istanbul in the 1990s -Diversity between gay communities -Conclusion -References This study is concerned with gay identity and the meaning and the use of gay places in Istanbul where one of the most obvious 'out' gay community holds across Turkey. I will argue in this essay that the gay population in Turkey (and especially in Istanbul) has produced a particular construction of a gay identity and community which has been influenced by Western gay rights movements since the mid-1980s. The 1980s were significant with regard to practising liberal economy policies of the new government and also emergence of the new feminist movement. This new political context of the 1980s has made a significant change in the traditional characteristics of Turkish male homosexuals in the largest cities. They began by creating their own places, such as bars, clubs and cafes through which the gay identity has gradually became a public phenomenon. In this study, I will be looking at whether it is possible to talk about a gay identity and/or gay identities, and visible gay communities in the 1990s in Istanbul; if it is so what the characteristics of these communities are. To deal with these questions first, I will focus on the meaning of male homosexuality perceived in the mainstream and its formation as an identity; second, I will examine the gay identity as defined in contemporary Turkey in Istanbul where the Occident meets the Orient. The word gay is used for male homosexuality in this essay. METHODOLOGY In Turkey, there are several studies on male homosexuality that are mainly undertaken from a perspective of heterosexual academics. They consider them as a group of people who have a specific medico-socio-legal problem. The results of these studies were often obtained through "natural science" methods, and were rarely based on the actual life experience of male homosexuals. However, my research includes in-depth interviews and questionnaires with a group of gays and also a point of a gay researcher myself as opposed to earlier researchers. For the
purpose of this essay, I interviewed 30 male homosexuals in certain
gay places in Istanbul (see appendix for the places) I have chosen to
work with male homosexuals between 18 to 40 years old who identified
themselves as gays. In these interviews, 26 open, closed and multiple
questions were asked considering their definition of their sexuality,
their sense of community and their places. I have used this data derived
from face to face interviews with them to examine formation of gay identities
and communities in Istanbul. However
beside this main model, Tapine (1992, p.41) offers four alternative
models of male homosexual relations: (1.) the masculine homosexual;
(2) the masculine "heterosexual" and feminine homosexual;
(3) the masculine homosexual and feminine homosexual; and (4) the final
alternative type of homosexuality: These publications started a debate between gay circles as well as in other sections of society. These debates led to a publication of a magazine called Ye<thorn>il Bary´s which started to discuss issues of sexual gender identity. Some of them expressed their gay political identity through the non-official Radical Democratic Green Party in the mid-1980s. These radical movements, especially the women's movement helped to introduce western experiments - particularly the concept of personal identity - into Turkish society. However this formation of sexual/gender identity among a group of people in the urban area was neither significant enough to change the common understanding of homosexual men in society, nor powerful enough to challenge established patriarchal values. They were still seen as marginalised. So Turkish young urban male homosexuals attempted to link their experiences to the western gay movement in their private life style, and borrowed the term "gay" from their counterparts and identified themselves as gays. However, they have never become an organised movement as in the West. The main
reason for this might be the lack of group consciousness to act together
as well as strong patriarchal values. Consequently an urban gay subculture
emerged who appeared to accept their marginal position in society. This
has led gays in the early 1990s to form their own small circles and
establish their own places where they could feel at home. But in the
1980s, as the interviewees explain, it was harder for gays to talk about
their identity and the word gay was not familiar between them. They began
a publication, a radical gay magazine called Lambda Istanbul and run
a weekly gay and lesbian radio program. All these facilities have given
them a chance to have a voice in public and to act as a group. These
kinds of cultural activities would help gay communities to establish
a more recognised gay culture in Turkey. They created
their gay places, socialised together and started to form consciousness
groups. Although they are marginal, a group of urban young gays have
succeeded to introduce a Western gay life style to Turkish society which
gives them freedom to exist and to have a voice in the public sphere.
October 31, 2002 8 We, as
gays and lesbians of Turkey, made our ninth meeting in Istanbul on
Oct. 26-29. Turkey’s lesbians and gays hold biannual meetings
for producing solutions to the problems they have with the society.
Under the head title “What Do Gays and Lesbians Want”, the
participators discussed our needs and demands, methods of struggle and
endeavors of organizing by Turkey’s gays and lesbians. Also our
families were ready in this meeting for the first time. Individuals,
The true-life story of Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (a cohort of Thomas Mann’s children Erika and Klaus), played by Jeanette Hain of THE TRIO, and ethnologist Ella Maillart (played by Nina Petri of RUN LOLA RUN) unfolds along an arduous route from Geneva, Switzerland through the Balkans and into the sultry bosom of Persia. Festivals/Awards Picture This films: http://www.picturethisent.com/dvdvideo/detail_journey.html
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My
biggest disappointment in life was the violence called circumcision.It
was the complete destruction of a child’s innerworld. When
I was 5 and my brother 11 we were both circumsized without knowing what
was going on. We were happily living in our flat; the day before we
had big celebrations, even our neighbours and our relatives were there.
our flat and I started crying. They held my hands and legs while they
started to undress my pants and the violence began. I had absolutely
no idea what was going on, I was only screaming and crying. I was
circumcised wildly without anesthesia at home. (photo left, circumcision;
photo right, recovery)
For
my colleagues from university, things are totally different. They
accept my way of living so easily and they have no problems with
gay people. Most of the university students appear to think that way;
that’s what I have experienced.
or any other Islamic state". I’m also a Kemalist (Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk’s fan) and I’ll always fight for our rights
to be free like the way he did. In Turkey; everybody must have the same
right to chose a religion. I, for one, don’t have a religion and
this is commonly acceptable. This freedom is protected by law, but in
some cities of Turkey there are big Islamic influences because of ignorance
of the people. 
Even
if you find a job by chance, being "too gay" means that you’re
fired soon. Therefore, you always have to be the "boss" and
act your role.