State of the Global Queer Nation, Post-Trump, Year 1

By Kelly Cogswell

It's hard to do more than gape at the destructive ripples we're sending worldwide, the terrible knowledge of how fragile our already imperfect American democracy is, how dependent on custom and those "gentlemen's" agreements, and not the beleaguered U.S. Constitution. Who knew it only took one mad, racist narcissist to inexorably open the floodgates to the blatant white supremacists, and rapacious thieves dreaming of a toilet paper little ‘c’ constitution except for the ironclad detail about bearing arms?

For U.S. queers, this means what? That those of us that were already poor and marginal will be even poorer, even more consigned to the ninth circle of political and economic hell. Especially trans people of color. Already at the bottom of our community's economic heap, they were just beginning to make a little progress under Obama, but were targeted immediately under Trump, and are now invoked as monsters at Republican fundraisers. Give us money and we'll keep you safe from them in bathrooms.

And lesbians --and their children-- who already suffered from the customary salary penalties assessed to all those obviously female humans will have even less help from the federal government. The tax bill passed by the Senate last week and awaiting confirmation from the House, essentially takes from the poor to give to the rich, creating unimaginable deficits, and knowingly setting the stage for the destruction of programs like Medicare and Medicaid which were saving our lives, though in some states were already tough to access. Those of us who sidestepped the discrimination of the market by hustling our own jobs, now face the elimination of all our usual deductions, while private jet owners are allowed to exempt their maintenance.

Bad as all of this is, the worst thing is the frontal attack on democracy and the constitutional rule of law. As queers, we've relied on them for progress and protection. We've pushed for social change on the streets and in the courts, while persuading legislators to enshrine our gains into law. It was already hard enough to gain access, with so much Congressional horse-trading going on behind closed doors. But in the era of Trump, horse-trading is being replaced by one sneaky self-coup after the other. The latest was when Senators were forced to vote on a tax bill literally written by lobbyists that few Senators had time to read, much less was comment on, and debate. All taxation, no representation. Congrats to us as we take another baby step towards ‘illiberal (aka fake) democracy‘, a la Erdogan or Putin.

Apparently the guy tapped to head the Republican National Convention three years from now is a gerrymandering/voter suppression whiz. At this rate, the only votes we will be left with are our voices in the street. And there, we must be prepared to be prosecuted not as citizens engaged in protest or civil disobedience, but under the Homeland Security laws meant to apply to terrorists. Because what could be more terrifying these days than citizens saying, "No." "We resist."

The courts, too, are being revamped top to bottom. Every empty seat open to a lifetime appointment has been filled by radical conservatives prepared to ignore existing law to attack LGBTQ people, people of color, the poor, women. We can only hope there is some way to challenge them, maybe if they are too blatant as they disregard laws. We have to find out. We have to educate ourselves. Encourage young and old queers to go to law school, support organizations like the ACLU. The Innocence Project.

Things may not have been perfect but they were moving, even if two steps forward, one back. Now reversals are happening so fast no one can keep track, much less digest. And we'll have to do what we've forgotten how to. Build community. Look after each other. Order medication from abroad. Get our scripts from tame doctors that we can't afford to visit. And also, keep an eye on queers abroad.

The impact of Trump's America doesn't stop at our borders. LGBT refugees, like Chechen queers facing a brutal purge, aren't enthusiastically welcomed here. Funding for global health programs including those fighting AIDS have been or will be slashed. The destruction of the U.S. State Department is not only irreparably damaging ordinary relations abroad, but gutting the Obama policy of declaring LGBT rights human rights. Thanks to that policy, the U.S. offered financial and moral support to embattled LGBT groups worldwide, and saw their work as intrinsic to larger projects of broadening democracy.

In practical terms, this means that queers in Turkey who've already seen their Pride Parade banned in Istanbul, have even fewer allies as they fight back against new anti-gay measures like the ban on their queer film festival, PinkFest, which has been declared "an incitement to terrorism."

If we are going to survive this, we have to stop exhausting ourselves with every Trump tweet, or the latest indignities visited on us by the Republicans. We need to think bigger, much bigger, and begin to plan. For the long run.

Embedded in Queer Turkey

By Kelly Jean Cogswell

I was in Turkey almost two weeks for an LGBT film festival, and at first it seemed like Paris or New York or San Francisco, where out queers hold popular events, discuss how to push things forward in a resistant, but mostly democratic society.

In fact, everybody smiled so much, was so fucking cheerful and effective I thought I'd landed in activist Nirvana. After a day running screenings and troubleshooting tech issues and moderating discussions, they even had enough energy to show up at the parties where they'd let their hair down and dance like joyful fiends while I crept away in exhausted shame.

Then, one day, I talked to a guy who stopped smiling long enough to admit he really despised his day job, but didn't dare leave because he could be out at work, a rare occurrence in Turkey. "It took so long to find it. I wasn't going to lie, like everybody else." All the gay guys he'd known in his twenties had caved in to the demands of their families and gotten married, to women of course. Then he counted out for me exactly how many more years and months he had to put in before his sentence was up and he could retire.

Next I heard that a trans woman had killed herself in Istanbul a week earlier. And that just last night someone's trans friend had died during sexual reassignment surgery, and nobody knew if the family would allow them to attend the service.

I also learned that the film festival that seemed to be going along so swimmingly actually had a film stuck in customs, delaying a screening. Not surprising in this increasingly Islamist country, where censorship is gaining ground and journalists are regularly arrested.

As we took the show on the road from Ankara, the capital, to Istanbul, an organizer got a phone call from some government type saying that Kuirfest didn't have all the correct permits to show a certain film, which meant a new tangle of complications. She spent the rest of the trip on the phone to the festival's lawyers.

Other pressures were less obvious. As we neared Istanbul on the bus, the woman next to me said that when she was in the city, she always made time to walk along the Bosphorus, the strait separating Asia from Europe, and dividing the city. She lamented that most of the women of Istanbul rarely visited the mythical water because the men in their lives all but confined them to their homes.

In Turkey, the society's so macho it makes Spain or Greece look positively matriarchal. Something like forty percent of women face violence at home, with hundreds slaughtered every year. And in the public sphere there's always some minister or other informing the country how obscene it is to see pregnant women on the streets, or, God forbid, see any woman at all with her mouth open, laughing.

At least Turkish women don't take it in silence. When Bülent Arinç, the deputy prime minister, came up with a choice bit last July, railing against immodesty, and the horror of a woman's laughing open mouth, Turkish women responded with snapshots and videos of themselves laughing as loud as they could. Their masculine allies tweeted, too, denouncing men who were so cowardly that laughing women terrified them.

Trans women and gay men frighten them, too. What could be more horrifying than effeminacy in a body with a dick? A man giving up his privilege? They are murdered like dogs, especially trans sex workers, and their deaths are dished up on the evening news. If the violence doesn't come from tricks or random bigots, or competition on the street, it's fathers and brothers trying to erase the family shame.

Many faced with a brutal life, decide to kill themselves. Crossing a bridge into Istanbul, one trans woman told me that so many in her community had jumped from it, they'd held a vigil there, unfurling a rainbow flag.

Lesbians, too, are strangled by gender, and the double whammy of lesbophobia and misogyny. I didn't understand just how invisible and marginal we were until I started tallying up the girls I'd met in different queer projects, and realized that almost all them called themselves "bi women", not dykes. Though as one explained, "Politically I'm a lesbian."

My love affair with queer Turkey lost some of its gloss on the bus when a trans woman declared that lesbians, all of us, were "as bad as white supremacists." Later, a rare out lesbian reinforced the familiar divide justifying the exclusion of trans women from a feminist group, if I understood correctly. What a joke. As if most straight women or men considered either trans women or dykes "real women". As if there was a whole strait between us, and no bridge in sight.

Still, I'm not quite ready to call it quits.

Kelly Cogswell is the author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (U Minn Press, 2014)

Queer Turkey: A Snapshot

By Kelly Cogswell

I don't know what I expected to find at a kuir film festival in Turkey. Cops writing down the names of besieged queers, maybe. Or mobs of angry fundamentalists outside the degenerate theaters. But while I can see the tall white minarets of the local mosque from my hotel window, and hear the call to prayer a couple times a day, religion, at least in Ankara, the capital, still has a much smaller impact than in a place like, say, Egypt. In fact, I've seen more headscarves in certain Parisian neighborhoods than around here, where men on the street seem largely indifferent to women passing with their liberated hair.

As for LGBT folks, they're here, they're queer, and they've been organizing in earnest since the early Nineties. The human rights organization Lambda Istanbul was founded in '93. The largest national organization, Kaos GL, was formed the year afterwards, in Ankara, and became the first LGBT organization with legal status in 2005. Despite periodic efforts by the increasingly authoritarian Islamist government to get rid of them, the judiciary of this secular republic has repeatedly upheld their right to exist.

Civil society offers some support. Some newspapers cover LGBT issues and events. A request in 2012 to include some protections for LGBT people in the new constitution was supported by the main opposition party. Nevertheless, acceptance is not widespread, and while student groups and other efforts are growing every year, it's hard to imagine how most of these LGBT projects would survive without major foreign support.

When I went to lunch with Ömer Akpinar and Aylime Aslı Demir of Kaos GL, they unapologetically explained most of their funding came from a range of foreign embassies as well as human rights funds. There is a lot to do, and the money has to come from somewhere. The 13-member staff of Kaos GL is spread thin with a variety of projects from Pride marches that get bigger every year to queer publications and projects helping LGBT people survive. They also try to offer assistance to smaller groups.

One of their biggest efforts right now is directed to supporting LGBT refugees fleeing Iraq, Iran, and now Syria. Turkey is a transit point, and many will end up in Canada or the UK. In the meantime, the government places them in small cities and towns where they not only have to grapple with the difficulties of having fled their homes, and being foreign, but with the homophobia of conservative regions.

Kaos GL also has a campaign directed towards teachers and school counselors, in co-ordination with the teacher's union. Up until recently, if a struggling queer kid looked for help at school, they'd get ratted out to their parents, and the kids would often get yanked from the school. Nobody ever knew if they were living or dead. Kaos GL provides information, and encourages school staff to help the children without putting them in danger.

They also hold cultural events. Last year, for instance, they teamed up with a human rights center at Ankara University to show Lars Von Trier's "Nymphomaniac," banned by Turkish authorities for its extensive nude and sex scenes. The screening was denounced in the religious press, but they didn't mind much because afterwards five hundred people turned up to watch the movie and support them, instead of the expected one hundred.

According to Ömer and Aylime, the religious press is the main opponent of the LGBT movement. They aren't very good at it. Not yet, anyway. Most of their anti-gay articles are just cribbed verbatim from queer Turkish publications with the word "pervert" added on every time an L, G, B, or T is mentioned. As a consequence, the content and language are actually quite progressive if you ignore all the "perverts" sprinkled throughout.

While there aren't any specifically anti-gay groups, violence is a big problem for LGBT people, especially trans women who are murdered in epidemic proportions. One of the films in the festival, "Trans X Istanbul," showed two middle-aged trans women thumbing through a photo album in which they were among the only survivors.

In recent years, some of the violence in Istanbul has been inspired by more than transphobia. Property speculators have been using anti-trans campaigns to force them from desirable redevelopment areas. These hate campaigns are often followed by attacks and murders.

They're not suffering in silence. Trans women are some of the most visible, and radical, organizers in Turkey. In Ankara, they were the founders of The Pink Life Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Solidarity Association, which supports trans people, especially sex workers, and organizes the Kuirfest film festival, among other things.

Queer activists of all kinds got a boost from the huge antigovernment demos of 2013 that were sparked when cops squashed peaceful demonstrators trying to prevent Istanbul's Gezi Park from being replaced with a shopping mall and luxury housing. The resulting protests became a kind of referendum on Turkey's democracy, raising issues of freedom of speech and assembly, and protesting attacks on secularism. For most of the population, it was the first time they'd dared to take to the streets.

Mobilized and empowered, LGBT people started to create small groups all over the country, even in conservative towns. Which is essential. Faced with an eroding secularism, and a creaky democracy, queers need every hand on deck. And after the Gezi protests where they were often in the forefront, they may even have more allies. As Sedef Çakmak told one newspaper, "Gezi did in three weeks what would have otherwise taken us three years."

Check out Kaos GL (English) and Pink Life's Kuir Fest.