Back to its Owners: Queering of Istiklal Avenue

A version of this article was originally published at spex.de

İstanbul is a true metropole in all senses of the term. It was the capital of three mega empires: Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman; it’s no doubt a city for which a lot of blood was spilt. It’s the the ultimate destination for all internal migration, and a major hub for external immigrants too. Twentieth-century Anatolian folklore even claims that  “the earth and rocks are golden.’’ It’s the symbol of the Turkish Dream, the place “to make it”. From students who come to study at universities to labourers who come to earn a living, or people simply looking for a better future. Built upon culture over culture, İstanbul is a Pandora’s box with many stories to spill. And like every megacity, it has been sculpted, altered and transformed by the people inheriting it and their ideologies; ideologies which are as effective as chisels in giving shape to not only thoughts and behaviour but to buildings, districts, parks and streets.

 One of the most frequently altered districts of the city is Beyoğlu and its befittingly named İstiklal Avenue. İstiklal means “liberation” in Turkish, a direct reference to the İstiklal War (War of Independence) which marked the end of Allied occupation and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  The previous names of the avenue were Cadde-i Kebir and Rue de Pera, the latter reflecting the increasing European domination over the city in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Like I said before, this is how streets are sculpted. 

In this modern Turkey, İstiklal was planned as a tourist centre and a locus for social life with cafes, bars, movie theatres and concert venues. It has been largely successful at being home to a very mixed crowd: students, artists, lovers and of course tourists who hope snap an orientalist miniature of the country in one convenient stroll. Today, İstiklal Avenue is still very popular but with a twist. AKPs quarter of a century long tenure over the city asserted that it will reclaim public spaces for conservative inhabitants of İstanbul who were excluded by the secular elite. In many cases this reclamation was done by police brutality, the intensification of neoliberal policies and a never-ending cycle of gentrification. İstiklal Street has long been among the flagship projects of AKP in the cultural war between two ideologies. It also became the ground zero of AKP’s strict security measures taken after the Gezi Protests of 2013 and the reaction against the failed coup attempt of 2016. There are still special police forces walking around with guns, extra security checks scattered along and military vehicles parked at certain points or just driving at large. The street is now closed to any march or protest including Pride, March 8 Women’s Night Walk, Mayday and the Saturday Mothers sit-in. These repressive measures, combined with the ongoing gentrification and the renewed tax regulations for businesses, encouraged certain residents to relocate to the “still secular’’ Kadıköy district on the Asian side.   

 It’s important to examine the secular part of the country’s cultural, psychological and emotional investment in Istiklal. Losing it to AKP also means losing it to “invaders”, this belief is often vocalised through racist statements against resident Syrians and Arab tourists. Since modernism is pro-West and anti-Middle-East, in secular Turkey, the changing demographics of the street is alarming for that group. Granted, certain AKP policies made it difficult for small businesses to survive here, not to mention the permanent presence of the police after the 2014-2017 bombings. But the expression “Istiklal is over’’ İstiklal bitti is now so commonly used that it has effectively become a proverb. These complaints function as dog-whistle terms to conceal anti-Arab/anti-Afghan/anti-refugee sentiments. The racialised Islamophobia which is deeply attached to this narrative is one of the principal reasons for the white Turk exodus to Kadıköy. The visibility of the Syrian community aroused the indignation of the Turkish “progressive” left during the new year celebrations. Most of these leftist communities were so ill-informed that they referred to Syria’s independence flag as the “FSA flag”. The recent outburst of racism following the election of opposition CHP mayor İmamoğlu has also rung alarm bells about a culture of racism among Turkey’s secular elites.

But you see, there are many layers to a city. Most of the time it is communities who get the least credit that carry most of the burden in giving life to a neighbourhood. Secular middle-class consumers scooped the cream and the crust of the avenue while subaltern communities laboured daily to infuse it with a unique spirit. In the case of Istiklal, this is the queer population, the workers at the bars, immigrants from other cities or countries who moved here for survival in the truest sense of the word. It is these vulnerable groups who paid the heaviest price for gentrification, the increased police presence and the neoliberal reconstruction of the district. In fact, these people live through all the consequences of the ideological ping pong while the privileged found other places to gentrify and transform according to their taste.

Beyoğlu has always been a key district for the LGBTQI+ community since the late ’80s. In contrast with the conservatism of rural areas, for many queer immigrants, these spaces offered the chance of being invisible from the judging gaze of small towns. Though never fully safe, Beyoğlu has been a survival space for these communities. It’s functioned as a home for them, and the many “firsts’’ of the community happened here. First clubs, first protests, first organizations and the very first pride march took place here. There was always an undercurrent of a counter-movement which though invisible, actually prepared İstiklal Caddesi for what it is today; a street famous for its ‘’diverse/colourful’’ voices. If you can walk in a swimsuit on the streets today without much of a shock from the people, you owe it to this community.

So it’s only predictable, once the middle-class consumers of Beyoğlu moved to Kadıköy to continue having fun and gentrifying the hell out of the place, we see the real transformers in action. The recent blooming of various queer parties and other events organized in venues previously considered “heterosexual’’, the increase in the number of gender non-conforming DJs playing at straight places as well as the new queer venues and bars opening in the “mainstream’’ parts of the district, reveal how much this city owes to them. Without the efforts and the stubborn existence of this community, Beyoğlu might have been buried as the centre of diversity and would have long transformed into a tourist-only, shopping centre.

The censorship, bans and all that pressure, is of course hard on these communities who have to constantly find ways of surviving in the city. But as one of the most politically aware and active communities of Istanbul, the LGBTQI+ community is all about creativity when it comes to surviving. Pride March has been officially banned here since 2015 and it’s unclear if it will ever be legal again. But even this decision was countered with an act of political creativity when the Pride committee released a press statement in 2016, declaring that they are “now spreading/disbanding’’ to every little corner of the city. Nowadays they are percolating into once all-straight places, through music and parties.

Of course, queer spaces have existed in Beyoğlu since the beginning but their entrance into the mainstream without having to blend in or keeping a low profile, is relatively new. Once, the queer community had to hang out in zones they had carved out for themselves to keep safe. Now we have openly queer bars, right in the centre of the city where every gender is welcome as long as there is respect and no discrimination. Şahika Teras, for instance, is run by a trans woman named Üzüm Derin Solak and is located at Nevizade, the hotspot of Beyoğlu’s nightlife, hosting two of the oldest and most loved bars of Beyoğlu for the indie/electronic music lovers, punks and dance-heads: Peyote and Gizli Bahçe. Then there’s Ziba, a bar which is known for its queer heavy audience. Located at the same street with Ziba, Anahit Sahne a live venue that hosts regular queer parties led by DJ collective Queerwaves and a very popular drag lip-sync show called Dudakların Cengi.

A trans woman DJ, Şevval Kılıç who has been DJing for a long time in various events and bars around İstanbul, tells me that behind this increasing visibility of queer people and places in İstiklal Street is the fact that “the privileged have left for Kadıköy and so the district is once again left to its original inhabitants: Queers’’. Along with Kurdish bars and street musicians, all these people came here to seek refuge from their native towns, to make like-minded friends and create communities.

Beyoğlu is characterized with entertainment and tourism by every administration, but there has always been a backdrop to this “stage’’. Back streets of Beyoğlu as its famously represented in Turkish movies, mainstream media and the common narrative of the mainstream politics, is an underground that hosts underdogs. A “ degenerate’’ world, full of “freaks” such as transvestites, prostitutes, beggars, refugees. A stereotyping of “the dark side of the city’’: a dark side for sure, for the ones who can’t see.

“Cities are unpredictable’’ says writer Teju Cole in his book Open City; “Once you give up insisting on stereotypes, you can really start to see’’. Seeing beyond one’s sight is often difficult especially in project-streets like İstiklal which are designed to hide the unwanted with either a secular Western facade or  AKP’s money-drawing-shopping-star-project-district. In both cases, the real makers of the city are sacrificed in the name of formal, structural change. Like sweeping “waste’’ under the rug, both regulations only tend to polish the surface of the city, and those who are uncomfortable by these changes but are privileged enough to relocate are able to leave it without giving up much of a fight. Similar to Julia Kristeva’s abject concept, the unwanted, the disgusting, the primitive, all those who don’t fit in the perfectly designed, functioning body of the dominant culture; here in the form of İstiklal Street, are repressed. But they always come back, because they are the real transformers of the city. They resist regulations and push comfort zones until they have to transform and extend beyond stereotyping. And what is resistance, if not this?