LAST MONTH, Turkey’s state-run Radio and Television Supreme Council, which sanctions radio and television broadcasts in the country, made a startling announcement. They designated 2025 “the Year of Combating LGBTQ+ Content.” Turkey’s embattled queer communities weren’t surprised. Three months earlier, the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, officially branded 2025 “the Year of the Family.” During a pompous ceremony, the politician identified “neoliberal cultural trends” as the reason behind “LGBT and other movements gaining ground” and claimed that “criticism of LGBT is immediately silenced. . . . Anyone who defends nature and the family is subject to heavy oppression.”
The reality in Istanbul is quite different. It’s the queer activists who are silenced (or worse) in public squares and workplaces. The “Great Family Platform,” which organizes marches that counter LGBTQ+ rights, acts as it pleases without regulatory pushback. In 2023, the group collected 150,000 signatures demanding the closure of Turkey’s LGBTQ+ rights groups and associations. A draft bill to criminalize Turkey’s queer communities was introduced in February and risks writing “biological sex” into law, punishing gender nonconforming behavior with up to three years in prison. If passed, the bill will also punish “queer propaganda” and will undoubtedly boost instances of queercide. According to the organization Transgender Europe, Turkey already has the highest rate of murders of transgender people in Europe. In 2022, the country ranked forty-eighth out of forty-nine nations in the “Rainbow Index” of the European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association.
In the wake of such developments, Turkey’s art institutions have acted pusillanimously. Almost none of Istanbul’s shiny museums (with the exception of Pera Museum in Beyoğlu) have the guts to celebrate Pride Month in June. So queer artists must respond to the onslaught alone—unfunded, unprotected, and left to rely entirely on each other.
On a cold night in January, I joined an expectant queer crowd outside Koma Sahnesi, a small theater on Istanbul’s Asian side. We came to see a show with the intriguing title Above the Clouds: Underground, which had debuted at a bookstore on the city’s European side. The reading was the fruit of a collaboration between İrem Aydın and Seçil Epik, queer artists based in Berlin and Istanbul respectively.
Aydın, once a part of Istanbul’s blooming performance scene, immigrated to Berlin six years ago and grew interested in speculative fiction. During the pandemic, they pondered ways of portraying Turkey’s queer communities through the genre. Could the unseen, ignored status of the community be their superpower? Aydın also explored the intersections of lubunya—a term Turkey’s queer community has used to self-identify since Ottoman times—and another mythologized figure: the vampire, similarly marginalized, undead, and proud.
Aydın met Epik, a cofounder of the queer publishing house Umami, and sent her their speculative fiction in 2023. “We discovered how our activism and artistic practices had a similar intersectionality,” Epik told me. “We were both very keen on imagining and producing alternative queer futures through speculative fiction.”In October 2024, Epik received a grant from the Goethe Institute’s Istanbul branch, which funded their dream project. Over the next three months, the two workshopped drafts of Above the Clouds: Underground alongside four mainstays of Istanbul’s queer scene: Jilet Sebahat, an activist-DJ; Akış Ka, a multidisciplinary queer performance artist; Bulut Sezer, a casting director and trans actor who starred in Levan Akin’s heartbreaking queer drama The Crossing (2024); and Zeyno Erdost, an Istanbul-based actor and illustrator who produced a comic book of Above the Clouds: Underground based on photographs taken at rehearsals for the performance.
As the actors gathered onstage at Koma, a hush descended on the small venue. A view of the galaxy was projected on the background screen. Sebahat launched into the narrative with a deep, charismatic voice: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . . ” She yearned for a time when “underground, above the clouds,” queer people would be free, with their “cosmic laughter making space birds fly.” This led to roaring applause.
The play was inspired by the real-life story of Kenan Çinili. Assigned female at birth, Çinili cross-dressed in 1930s Istanbul. In recent decades, he became an inspirational figure for Istanbul’s trans community. Çinili lived in Kurtuluş, once a predominantly Greek Orthodox and Armenian neighborhood that is now home to a sizable queer population. When newspapers exposed his trans identity, Çinili could no longer safely walk the streets of his hometown. Sezer, who plays a time-travelling version of Çinili in the show, explains how he slowly transformed into a nocturnal creature. Sezer delivered his monologue in Çinili’s beautiful, Ottoman-flavored Turkish, declaring himself as one who “embraces the night and vanishes when the morning arrives.” A projected video then showed Çinili travelling to modern-day Istanbul, where he sees his beloved neighborhood transformed into a queer hub.
While detailing the economic crisis that befell Turkey, which began in 2018 and is characterized by the collapse of the Turkish lira and runaway inflation, Çinili notes how the country’s polycrisis is “making us vampires, who are not welcome. . . . As such, unrest, homelessness, and unemployment are rampant.” The economic crisis hits various sectors of the society in different degrees, and leads queer people to escape to the “shabby West. . . . Some say Germany, some say Great Britain, and every day, one more vampire nest disappears from Istanbul.” In one particularly memorable scene, Çinili describes encountering Orlando—a version of the titular character of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel from 1928. In Woolf’s book, King Charles II appoints Orlando to serve as ambassador to Constantinople and, after a week’s sleep, he mysteriously wakes up as a woman. Ottomans didn’t ban homosexuality and didn’t have a binary notion of sexuality. Orlando could accept her trans identity partly thanks to this alternative paradigm of sexuality and gender. “It allowed me to reacquaint myself and even make peace with myself. As you can see, Kenan, I am a vampire like you. Whatever the reason for your sadness, don’t worry.”
The audience’s reaction to the Orlando anecdote and Çinili’s tour of modern-day Kurtuluş was moving. People laughed out loud, cried, and cheered. It seemed as if everyone in the room had read Orlando: A Biography; everyone had taken nocturnal strolls at Kurtuluş and Feriköy; everyone had tasted, or craved, in various doses, the joys of queer love.
Rather than one continuous narrative, Above the Clouds: Underground was a collection of scenes. Istanbul served as the glue that bound these vignettes, with its melancholy views and intricate histories. “The Sea of Marmara is split in two,” mused Akış Ka when they stepped onstage in a tutu dress. Their flamboyant presence wedded the wit of Oscar Wilde with the garments of Lady Gaga. In this tale, Turkey’s queer communities morphed into reptiles to adapt to an inhospitable society. “We reptiles know the taste of stone and soil well. Our skin is either covered with scales or armor. It is resistant to all conditions regarding biodiversity in the ecosystem.” Akış Ka told how Istanbul’s queer reptiles crawled the squares surrounding the city. “We climb the statues; we defend the parks. We shout that this city is ours despite those who stole it.” This reference to the Gezi Park protests in 2013, where LGBTQ+ activists played a central role, didn’t go unnoticed. The Pride march of the following year, 2014, was the most prominent LGBT event in Turkey’s history, attracting more than a hundred thousand people.
But since 2015, the authorities have denied pride parades permission, something Akış Ka acknowledged. Because of the shift to an autocratic atmosphere, a single complaint about indecency to the Istanbul municipality could have easily stopped Above the Clouds: Underground, as well. “We insects know the taste of asphalt very well. If crushed, we mix with the soil, sprout, and become trees. . . . The day will come when we fall apart, and then we will come together again.”
The night ended with another tale of conflicting emotions. A queer couple—played by Epik and Erdost—meet at a solidarity party. When they look at each other, all sounds stop, and “the crowd disappears.” Standing side by side on stage, Epik and Erdost painted verbal pictures of their lives in Istanbul and Berlin: a walk on İstiklal Street, a view from Kottbusser Bridge, a kiss at Pürtelaş Street, a conversation on Weserstraße. There were postcards of house parties; a performance that lasts seven hours and bores them to death; picnics in Maçka Park and Körnerpark; walks in Gezi Park and Hasenheide; sunsets in Burgazada and Admiralsbrücke. Berlin, a hub for Turkish queer immigration, and Istanbul merged in their flowing narrative; Aydın said it formed a “queer migration route” over the past decade.
As Sebahat delivered the night’s closing monologue, I teared up. It was hard not to. What a strange thing for queer people in Turkey to see themselves represented this way, I thought—with such startling frankness, vivacity, and panache. The demonizing stereotypes and sugary clichés that pigeonholed our queer communities, it seemed, vanished with one fell swoop. In their place was the joy of solidarity, which Sebahat emphasized. “Shadows also walk the streets of this town. . . . There are cracks you forget about, and those are where our truth seeps.” She warned the heartless and the unimaginative: “Whatever you have buried under the ground will rise one day to the sky, above the clouds again.”
