New Articles and Reviews

Serkan Gorkemli, University of Connecticut

Enculturation: http://enculturation.net/gender-benders
(Published January 18, 2011)

In 2007, Kaos GL, a bimonthly publication of the Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association in Ankara, Turkey, devoted its November/December issue to “Turkiye’nin Gay Ikonlari” (Turkey’s Gay Icons). The magazine surveyed readers and published a list of the ten most popular gay icons in Turkey. Various well-known celebrities were mentioned, including singers of popular music and performers of classical Turkish music, as well as a writer and a poet.1 A similar effort to inventory gay icons and bring them to the attention of the gay community and the public was made in India in 2004. “Indian Gay Icons: Queers Like Us, A Tribute to Indian Gay Icons” was described by Bombay Dost, a local LGBT magazine, as “an exhibition of Indian gay icons featuring some of the true leaders of the queer struggle who also spell excellence in their profession” (The Bombay Dost Team). The exhibition was presented at the World Social Forum in Bombay and featured poets, artists, writers, scholars, filmmakers, and activists.

These projects in Turkey and India provide evidence for the emergence and increasing importance of visual representations, including gay icons, in the formation and bolstering of international gay communities in non-Western contexts. Such developments echo similar preceding and ongoing developments of gay icons in the West, especially in the United States and Britain in the twentieth century. However, much remains to be unearthed concerning the exact borrowing and adaptation of the concept of the gay icon, as well as the accompanying practices of visual rhetoric (i.e., the creation, reception, and interpretation) of gay representations, including those of gay icons, in non-Western contexts.

In this article’s discussion of the Turkish gay icons in popular culture and the contemporary lesbian and gay practices of visual rhetoric in Turkey, I analyze three sets of contemporary representations and the accompanying practices of visual rhetoric: 1) two Turkish celebrities who are widely visible gender transgressors in Turkey: the late Zeki Muren (1931-1996), a flamboyant queer male singer,2 and Bulent Ersoy, a male-to-female transsexual singer, both of whom Kaos GL readers voted “gay icons”; 2) the gay icons issue of Kaos GL, a Turkish LGBT community magazine in print, which adapted the Western concept of gay icons to the needs of the Turkish LGBT community through a critical engagement with the concept; and 3) the collegiate lesbian and gay fliers, website, and "fanzin" (Turkish transliteration for "fanzine," i.e., fan magazine) of Legato, the acronym for Lezbiyen Gay Toplulu?u (Lesbian and Gay Association), a collegiate student group organized through the Internet using mailing lists and a website.3