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In those days in Istanbul, in the European Urninge colony (Urninge was an earlier term for gay people) of Constantinople, as Magnus Hirschfeld referred to it, there existed “historical sites of homosexual pleasures” characterized by voluntary participation.
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It was also home to gays who had fled other countries, mainly Germany, France and England, where, at the beginning of the 1900s, homosexual relations were a punishable offense. Before this process got under way, Istanbul was a city of “sexual freedom,” a magnet for many homosexuals and trans people in the Ottoman Empire. Turkish queer groups have been fighting for visibility and legal equality within all aspects of society at least since Turkey began from its founding in 1923 to go through a Europeanization process and to take on “Western” values and norms. But how has it been possible for the queer community to improve its visibility, to put forward political demands and to intervene, both nationally and locally, at the parliamentary level? A look at the history of the queer movement in Turkey will shed some light on these matters. Queers have nonetheless become increasingly visible in Turkey since the neoconservative AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power. In June of this year the police used water cannons to break up the pride parade in Istanbul. Although homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, repression is the order of the day. The struggle for the rights of people with non-conforming sexual orientation and gender identity has gained new momentum in Turkey since the Gezi protests, which saw lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and intersex people (queers) fighting side by side on the barricades with other protesters. The history of the movement, however, the begins at the latest in the beginning of the last century. The Gezi protests have given new, sustainable boost the LGBTIQ movement in Turkey 1.