Ok, there really isn't much I don't like about being queer. Sure, occasionally there's some fucked up homophobe I have to deal with, particularly when I have a job that takes me to many different lands where I get engulfed in many different cultures. But the cool thing about being gay with this job is that its kind of like belonging to a secret club and you can meet members of this club no matter where you go in the world.
Case in point is this last weekend in Istanbul, which is a pretty typical example of how a gay person can land in a place and get connected pretty quickly to local folks who can give you a very different understanding of what the local life/customs/culture is really like.
So here's how it works (And will my straight readers PLEASE not use this as a guide to infilitrate the gay community wherever you are travelling!). First step is to book into a local gay hotel. This is probably the most critical and trickiest part, since it can often be hard to get info on gay-owned establishments in places where there's a lot of hostility towards gays. I found a gay travelers website guide on Istanbul that hadn't been updated in a year or so but mentioned a newly opened gay-owned hotel called the Eklektik. Now, staying at a hotel can be a mixed bag. I recently stayed at a place in London called the Philbeach hotel where they gave me a "fetish" map on arrival and there were men hanging around the hall way hoping for an invite into a room. Not the most comfortable of settings.
The Eklektik turned out to be a nice charming hotel in a good location close to Taksim. I arrived in the evening on a Saturday and asked the slightly hip young hotel clerk to recommend some clubs for the evening. He gave me a run down of four clubs. I asked him which he would go to and he said "Barbohce". Later on, after showering in my ultra-glamourous room (complete with revolving disco-ball in the toilet, I kid you not), I returned to the lobby to deposit my key and was engaged by a different hotel clerk who was a little older than the first and obvioudly not as hip. He asked me where I was going and I said I wasn't sure, what would he recommend. He told me about a "great" club that had a really good "show" (drag queens). I decided to go with the first clerks recommendation and I wasn't sorry.
I got to Barbohce around midnight. As I entered the place the DJ was playing "Karmastition" an Alicia Keyes-Stevie Wonder Mash-up that is one of my all time favorite tracks. I knew I'd made the right choice. However the place was empty. I asked the bartender if I was late or just early (in NYC several bars will empty at around 12 or 1 as people move on to dance clubs - I was afraid I had missed the crowd). The bartender could not understand my flat american english, so I decided to wait and see if more people would show up. I wasnt dissapointed, within an hour the place was packed and people were dancing to an incredible blend of elektro and turkish dance hits.
On the dance floor, I found myself dancing with a couple of handsome guys who really had some great moves. They soon started asking me who I was and what I was doing in Istanbul (guess I don't look very turkish!). I soon learned that they were a couple (three years) and one was a teacher and the other was an engineer. So they invited me to join them to the next club and we continued dancing til the wee hours of the morning.
The next day I joined them for a late brunch and I found myself on the asian side of the city, where I would have never been if I had spent the day on my own. The asian side is residential. The nice thing about this was that it was Sunday and I got to experience a quiet Istanbul. My turkish couple decided to show me what typical istanbul people do on a Sunday (ok - obviously, this is a typical middle-class day - but typical). So first stop was brunch at a lovely outdoor cafe on Baghdad St. At first Baghdad street was described to me as the Istanbul version of Champs de Eleyse. As we got closer I got the clarification that it was a "smaller version". But it was charming none the less.
Over brunch, we talked about Bush (they hate him of course) and how turks think because they have a lot of natural and energy resources (petroleum, etc) that it won't be long until the US makes up a reason for aggression and will invade turkey. Unfortunately, thanks to the Iraq war, there's really not a hell of a lot of reasons to dissuade people that this won't happen.
Following brunch we took a walk by the seaside where a speed boat race was taking place. You could also get a view of four islands just off the coast that people could go to that aparrently have only foot traffic and are very pleasant. During our walk on the seaside, I found the two of them touching me in ways that were rather intimate. At first I was alarmed, but then remembered where I was and that in this part of the world its not uncommon to see men with their arms around each other and looking rather, well, close. I know this is the part where I am going to sound like a dirty old man, but I can't tell you how hot it was to walk through town with the arm of a charming turkish man over my shoulder, pulling me close to his side. (sigh!)
After the seaside we headed back for baghdad street to do a little shopping. After learning that my boyfriend is greek and Paul and I had attended an Anna Vissi (greek pop singer) concert in Kos Island two weeks earlier, they gave me a strong recommendation for a CD to buy for Paul (I had first bought Paul an Anna Vissi cd in Turkey). Also they recommended two turkish movies to buy on DVD (the engineer's ex-boyfriend is a film-maker).
Then we headed back to their apartment to take a break and get their car to continue shopping (I was warned that the next shopping trip might get boring and I should feel free to hop out anytime). At the apartment I was treated to a bit of Karaoke (this was actually more charming then it sounds, especially since the teacher had a really good voice and sang some turkish love songs to his boyfriend).
The shopping would have been boring if they hadn't been so fun about it. We laughed about the fashions, gross consumerism, etc. And of course, arms were over my shoulder the whole time, which really meant it wasn't boring for me. We headed to some outlets and then to some shopping malls. One of the shopping malls was actually gourgeous, and it's one a prize for the best shopping mall in Europe. We then had dinner at one of their favorite restaurants, the UK asian food chain, Wagamama.
When I finally got back to my hotel at 9pm, I was exhausted and realized I was in for the night, there would be no Istanbul sight seeing for me this trip, since my flight was in the morning. Though it wasn't the way I thought I would spend my time in Istanbul, I don't think I could have spent it better. I went to bed that night remembering all the times I had felt a friendly hand on my shoulder.