Queering Sexualities in Turkey

Gay Men, Male Prostitutes and the City

Cenk Özbay

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784533175
• eBook ISBN: 9781786721983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite its some of its more liberal and democratic characteristics - when compared to many other countries in the Middle East - the more conservative elements within Turkish politics and society have made gains over the past decades. As a result, like many others in the region, Turkish society has multiple standards when naming, evaluating and reacting to men who have sex with men. Cenk Ozbay argues that overall, self-identified gay men (as well as men who practice clandestine same-sex acts) are most of the time marginalised, ostracised and rendered 'immoral' in both everyday practices and social institutions. He offers in this book an analysis of the concept of masculinity as central to redefining boundaries of class, gender and sexuality, particularly looking at the dynamics between self-identified gay men and straight-acting male prostitutes, or 'rent boys'. A result of in-depth interviews with both self-identified gay men and rent boys, Ozbay explores the changing discourses and meaning of class, gender and queer sexualities, and how these three are embedded within urban and familial narratives.

CHAPTER 1

SEXUALITY, MASCULINITY AND MALE SEX WORK

They are called ‘faggot’ if they are poor; ‘gay’ if they are rich.¹

[M]any of the boys and young men who sold themselves for subsistence or perhaps just pocket money experienced disgust or at best indifference when satisfying their patrons. These ‘prostitutes’ differentiated sharply between the sexual services they provided and their personal preferences and love relationships. A large number – as many as a third, in fact – professed to be heterosexual.

Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York, 2015), p. 189

The emergent interdisciplinary analysis of male prostitution and queer sex work informs the framework of this book. My research particularly builds on a number of recent sociological and anthropological studies that discuss, in one way or another, the identities, practices and social situations that resemble to what I elucidate in this book. Here I will provide an overview of this literature, and then allude to four basic lines of contestation that determine and stabilise that who the rent boy is (not) and what he does (not) do with gay men.

The Burgeoning Literature on Male Sex Work

Feminist sociology of sex work has been concerned mostly with female prostitution and human (female and children) trafficking until recently.² Three arguments are the centrepiece of this well-founded literature: first, sex work must be considered a form of violence against women and should be restricted (if not abolished) by policymakers; second, sex workers provide a service and thus sex work is a form of embodied, aesthetic and affective labour, which should be analysed in labour terms; and third, sex work is a kind of sexual liberalisation which has the capacity to radicalise sexuality and to advance sexual possibilities. There is a rich ethnographic literature, as well as more political and activism-oriented accounts on various forms of (female) sex work, that demonstrates that the lived reality of sex workers around the world is far more complicated than the simplistic analytical positioning of sex work either as liberation, choice, empowerment, autonomy, resistance and legitimate income-generating activity or sex work as exploitation, survival strategy, an outcome of forced migration, human trafficking, slavery and violence.³

When we look more closely at men who sell sex to other men, these positions are indeed very hard to apply directly. In spite of the fact that male sex work is still in its incipiency as a field of academic curiosity and activity across established disciplines, research findings show that there are at least six types of male sex workers: The fake ones who steal and blackmail their customers, hustlers who take part in prostitution but are also involved in stealing, part-timers who have regular jobs in addition to their occasional involvement with forms of compensated sex, professionals who perceive this as a form of committed work, poverty-driven sex workers who do male prostitution as a survival strategy (‘survival sex’ in the literature on female prostitution) and the more affluent and enterprising gigolos who work for agencies in the Global North.⁴ Within this most recent and comprehensive framework of male prostitution, rent boys in Istanbul fall into the third group, the part-timers, who do not have to sell sex in order to survive; there is therefore agency, choice, autonomy and flexibility in negotiating the terms and conditions of the sexual interaction.⁵ Rent boys are male sex workers as long as they wish. There is not an outsider actor, or factor, that pushes, forces or persuades them into male prostitution.

Male sex work and other forms of queer intimate economy take place in different social settings around the world, across a wide diversity of class, ethnic, racial, cultural and organisational arrangements, representations, fantasies and discourses.⁶ Social studies on male (or queer) prostitution, though, are largely limited to the geographical focus of the North⁷ and South America.⁸ Queering Sexualities in Turkey is the first monograph ever published on male prostitution in the region that includes Eastern Europe and the Middle East.⁹ Although it is expanding, the existing literature on male sex work is still highly limited and scarce in contrast to research on female sex work, and there is a clear need for more ethnographic, historical and comparative studies to comprehend and theorise the social situation better.¹⁰ Taboos about homosexuality, the relatively late appearance of masculinity studies as an admissible field of scholarly inquiry, the lack of institutional sites for research practice, like brothels, and popular opinions (sometimes myths), such as those that depict male sex work as less exploitative and more egalitarian than conventional sex work arrangements (women sell, men buy, pimps mediate), have probably contributed to this comparative underrepresentation. However, as Dennis Altman notes, ‘across very different societies men grapple with demands of masculinity, sexual desire, economic survival, family responsibilities and status, and the exchange of money for sex plays a role in each of this.’¹¹ Particularly younger men, in many different geographies and cultural settings, negotiate with societal norms, the rules and boundaries of masculinity, religious dogmas, erotic desire, somatic expressions, kinship ties, codes of honour and public morality as they get involved with transactional queer sex as embodied entrepreneurial selves. Male sex work is but one field of analysis where the materiality of social inequalities, the secrecies of everyday realities and the informalities of power relations are articulated with bodily and discursive gender and sexual practices. By studying male prostitution, we gain crucial insight into the social dynamics behind how dissident sexualities are organised, experienced and interpreted in the heart and the margins of hegemonic masculinities.

This book in general aims to make a contribution to the literature on male sex work with a particular emphasis on non-Western sexual geographies and to add nuance and intricacy to the field of class, sexualities and masculinities in the Global South. In particular, I explicate compensated sex between men of different social classes and sexual cultures that generate, and are fortified by, distinct masculinities. A number of sexual cultures, such as those in Mediterranean, European, and Islamic countries, as well as the rapidly globalising sexual identities, categorisations and proclivities meet and interface in Turkey.¹² Hence, I am not talking about an essentially non-Western place, culture or form of sexuality here. Instead, I argue that Istanbul presents an amalgamation of the well-studied Western-style gay culture with its own history, typology, boundaries, marginalities and objects. In this sense, Istanbul is indeed a ‘sexual’ or ‘queer’ city located in the margin of the West. This sense of the queer city in the margins deviates in obvious but multifaceted ways from the conventional queer centres such as New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris or London.¹³ By Western-style gay culture, I basically mean the emergence of men who call themselves gay (as in English) or sometimes gey in Turkish¹⁴ because they engage in sexual, erotic and emotional relations with other men who are supposedly self-identified as gay and are not ashamed of their sexual identity. There are many components of the gay (sub-)culture, including the enclosed spaces of gay bars and clubs, access to foreign or local websites with gay content for various purposes, such as online dating, watching gay TV shows, following gay (or, gay-friendly) singers and groups, and a discrete ‘gay slang,’ that is shared by the members. Before the emergence of modern gay identity in Turkey there were various sorts of same-sex sexual relations occurring under different identifications and social organisations.¹⁵

In its secrecy and isolation through carefully planned discretionary practices, male sex work, like homosexual acts, is neither criminalised nor normalised in Turkey. Optimistically speaking, it is the result of a collusion by authorities and society. As I discuss throughout the pages of this book, there is a common silence, an absence of public discourse about the subject and a superficial incomprehension about it. In this sense, male sex work stands somewhere between the concept of ‘the will not to know’¹⁶ as a response to homosexual acts in Islamic societies and ‘the unspokenness of prostitution’¹⁷ as a way of representing sex work in India. What Carlos Decena conceptualises in his work on the Dominican Republic as ‘tacit subjects’¹⁸ fits well with rent boys and the context of male sex work in Istanbul: ‘A tacit subject might be an assumed and understood, but not spoken, aspect of someone's subjectivity as well as a particular theme or topic.’ While the bewildering aspects of transgender sex workers' lives and female sex workers' long-understood hardships are rarely, if ever, talked about in public, there is an absolute blindness about the actors in male sex work. This tacit knowledge, or state of social blindness, about male sex work hides at least three significant concepts that I contest throughout this book: power, choice, and labour. These are also deeply related to economies of desire, sexual subjectivity, strategies for upward mobility, neoliberal personhood, search for adventure and somatic aspects of fun in accordance with the conquering masculinity, globalisation and economic transformations, migration and the opportunities the internet provides. On an urban scale, spaces of homosocial, homoerotic, masculine and queer sociabilities are available in the city that are known, intuited, felt or imagined by subjects of male sex work.

Bodies, Acts and Identities

When we look at how multifarious same-sex, non-conformist, counter-normative or queer sexual acts are organised in time, place, culture and the diversity of local gender/sexual identifications in each and every corner the world, we may reach a superficial analytical distinction between two basic configurations: The egalitarian model (Western, modern, globalising, normalising) with identical gay bodies and personas, and the difference model (non-Western, non-modern, Middle Eastern, Latin, Mediterranean) with dissimilar men, who embody the conventional gender binary via explicitly masculine and feminine roles, the former hiding his same-sex erotic biography and stigma working upon the latter. In the second configuration, within which Istanbul's queer sexual economy is partially included, the features culturally associated with masculinity become a critical arena of constructing, staging, exhibiting, repeating, emphasising and exaggerating virility. Masculinity begins increasingly to be deemed a skill or a form of capital that some men may invest in and have more, better or deeper versions of. There is, therefore, a hierarchy of embodied masculinity – an erotic market or a ‘sexual field’¹⁹ – in which the young men with the most authentic, rough, thuggish and macho performances stand at the peak. As I explicate in the next chapter, this very constellation of masculine acts and demeanour is a carefully defined and meticulously calculated set of performative dispositions, affective intensities, bodily positionings and aesthetic labour of ‘looking good and sounding right.’²⁰

In his ethnographic analysis of Brazilian male prostitutes, garotos, who have transactional sex with foreign gay tourists, Gregory Mitchell argues that performative and affective labours are intertwined in male sex workers' bodily, behavioural and discursive enactments.²¹ Mitchell maintains that what garotos bring together as elements of their butch and macho attitude is attuned to tourists' fantasies of racialised male bodies:

[G]arotos' performances of racialised masculinity are actually shaped by gay clients' eroticisation of straight men and macho masculinity. This is an example of a commissioned performance of masculinity in which economic incentivisation structures and guides the repertoire of masculinity. The end result is that the garotos' masculinity consists of a lot of macho straight men trying to perform a version of straight masculinity constructed and desired by gay men. (Mitchell 2016: 38, emphasis original)

In the queer sexual economy of Turkey, racial categories and the racialisation of the male body do not necessarily work in the same way as in Brazil. Nevertheless, a certain number of rent boys implicitly underline their real or imagined association with Kurdishness – the largest ethnic minority in Turkey – with political, social and cultural demands that may or may not include separatism, self-government and spatial segregation.²² Kurdish rent boys often get racialised on the margins of Turkish social normativity as ‘Easterners,’ and everything they do or do not do is explained by their Eastern or Kurdish identity. As Mitchell puts it, ‘attractions to difference’ and ‘eroticizing an exotic Other’²³ are organised through the distinction between the refined, Western(ised), ‘decent citizens,’ Turkish gay men and the disenfranchised children of Kurdish minority – the lusted after outsider within. In many situations being an Easterner also signifies a sense of lack or failure, that is, not being modern enough or having appropriate social taboos, which denote the non-performance of whiteness, middle-classness, or Turkishness. In this sense, some (Turkish) gay men have a specific sexual fantasy of having sex with Kurdish boys, who are supposed to be wilder, more animalistic and unfettered, and unquestionably more masculine. As one of my interlocutors once said, ‘When you get used to fucking with the Kurds, you would not enjoy the Turks any more. They [Turks] are smaller [in penis size], more feminine and more [self-] controlled.’

Mazlum is a good example regarding the curiosity about Kurdish men. I heard stories about Mazlum from two of my gay respondents. He was the realised fantasy of the monstrous young Kurdish-Arabic man, who has sex with men for money and satisfied his clients with his extra-large penis, as well as demonstrations of his untamed masculinity. He was from Mardin, a very conservative town in south-eastern Turkey across the Syrian border, and his Turkish was weak, with a thick accent. One of my key informants, Umit, told me,

I went to this Turkish bath which had rent boys for a short term [later it was closed down as a result of the smothering police oppression] with a queer friend. When we entered the hammam, he shouted, ‘Who is the guy with the largest tool here?’ Everybody said, ‘There is Mazlum.’ He came, a heavily Kurdish boy. I could not believe what I saw [his penis]. [My friend] said, ‘Well, how much does it cost, it is worthy.’ They went into a private cabin [to have sex].

But beyond the exceptional examples, such as Mazlum, and gay men who are specifically (and sometimes exclusively) interested in having commercial sex with Kurdish boys, it should come as no surprise that most clients have distinct (and changing) ethnic-racial ‘types’ and particular tastes in bodily and sexual predilections, which largely translate into ethnic or hometown identities, such as blond boys of Bosnian or Bulgarian origin (that their families migrated to Turkey in 1980s and 1990s), or young men of Caucasian or Black Sea descent.

Even though the racialisation of male sex workers' bodies in Turkey does not operate in the same way as in Brazil's complex racial and sexual economy, there are sharp similarities between these two otherwise radically different contexts. The biggest resemblance in this framework is the performative characteristic of masculinity from the vantage point of male sex workers. Mitchell says that masculinity of garotos in Brazil ‘is embodied, commodified and consumed,’ and their ‘success or failure depends on constructing certain styles of gender,’²⁴ which is also the case for rent boys in Turkey. This strict dependence on not only the successful performance of a particular gender identity (i.e., straight masculinity) but also the performative, repetitive, superficially coherent yet convincing enough and almost natur...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Queering Sexualities in Turkey
• 1. Sexuality, Masculinity and Male Sex Work
• 2. Rent Boys and the Contours of Exaggerated Masculinity
• 3. Rent Boys’ Intimacies in Neoliberal Times
• 4. Queer in the Spatial, Temporal and Social Margins
• 5. Contemporary Male Sex Work
• Conclusion: Perverse Mobilities and Deviant Careers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover