I'm a bit of a socio-political junkie and like to know where LBGT folks stand in the countries I visit. Here's an exerpt from an article I found on the web.
Another interesting bit: Turkey has had something like 17 annual Pride parades in Instabul - last one was end of June in '09.
Click here for the full article:
http://merip.org/mero/interventions/oktem_interv.html
There is wide consensus that Turkey is a “hinge state,” a hybrid of the political and also sexual regimes and ideologies of Europe and the Middle East.[1] Turkey’s neighbors to the east have considered homosexuality a punishable offense for the better part of a century, due to British or French mandate-era civil codes or conservative interpretations of Islamic law; its neighbors to the west have followed restrictive Communist legislation or conservative Orthodox Christian legal mores to the same conclusion. But homosexuality has not been an issue of criminal justice in Turkey since the modern nation-state emerged in the 1920s. The only territory under Turkish control where homosexuality is banned is northern Cyprus, where British anti-sodomy laws were incorporated into the Cypriot and, later, the Turkish Republic of Cyprus penal code.
Yet as liberal and cosmopolitan as Istanbul and other cities in western Turkey look in comparison to cities in nearby countries, Turkey remains a deeply conservative -- if highly heterogeneous and regionally differentiated -- society gripped by a patriarchal and militarist state ideology rooted in the foundational myths of Kemalism. If many gays and lesbians prosper as professionals or within the arts and media sectors, and some gay rights activists carve out spaces of interaction protected to a degree from state intrusion, transgender people are exposed by both the visible manifestations of their sexual orientation and their engagement in sex work. As Elif Shafak argues, the Kemalist modernization project “required the mapping of gender roles and public-private zones, as well as the redrawing of the boundaries in between.”[2] Kemalist and Islamist responses to transgender individuals are equally negative, but the former is probably more hateful: The transsexual condition is particularly threatening to the ideological constructs of modern Turkey’s very essence, the clearly, albeit differently, circumscribed roles for men and women in the public sphere. But the loud and public advocacy of all gender non-conforming people, gays and lesbians included, for equal rights throws into question key tenets of the republic: militarism, male hegemony and de-feminized femininity, a concept exemplified by the female doctors, nurses and teachers, who were expected to subordinate their sexuality to the ideal of selfless service of the nation.