Today the LGBTQ community looks increasingly vulnerable.Įrdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) originally supported gay rights when it was formed 19 years ago, and as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s Erdoğan was popular with the city’s marginalised populations for purging the police force of elements that terrorised and raped trans people and sex workers. Official data is patchy, but a monitoring project by Transgender Europe consistently ranks Turkey as one of the countries with the highest rates of discrimination and murders of trans people in Europe. While homosexuality has been legal since modern Turkey was founded in 1923, life for LGBTQ people has never been easy in a Muslim-majority country notorious for hate crimes against the queer community. Now just existing as a queer or trans person is inherently political in a country like this.” “I feel like I was just living my life, and society’s attitudes started becoming more hostile. “Drag was all glamour and cheekiness for Huysuz’s generation but it’s now become a political act in Turkey,” said the drag artist Deniz Aşırı as she watched her friend Florence Konstantina Delight perform zenne, a traditional form of male belly dancing, at Istanbul’s first drag show since coronavirus restrictions were lifted.
It is hard to imagine any entertainer making President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the butt of a dirty joke today, which is perhaps why Huysuz Virjin’s death last month aged 87 was widely mourned. “Will all presidents be short and stocky? Are there any thinner and leaner ones?” she asked with a coy smile, drawing howls of laughter from both the politician and the audience.