Gürsoy Doğtaş - F-17

For the exhibition Urning & Urningin. Language and Desire since 1864 guest curator Philipp Gufler invited three writers to reflect on the legacy of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: Simon(e) van Saarloos, Hendrik Folkerts and Gürsoy Doğtaş. You can read them here, or in our exhibition zine Nesting Habbits.

F-17

…in the narrow booth of the cruising area of an erotic shop, Mystery Hall in St Pauli. There’s hardly any space between the screen and my chair. It feels as if I could step right into the scene on the monitor. Every channel plays a different porn film. To the left, in the wall, a glory hole — large enough that even from the corner of my eye I can see what’s happening next door. On one screen, Men of Istanbul is playing.

Scene: Orhan is showering after masturbating on the hotel bed. Warm water runs over his face. He looks thoughtful. The camera moves in. He turns away. The next sequence begins. After Orhan comes Ahmet, then Erol — then Murat, Mustafa, Deniz, Erdal and Uğur. Unlike other porn films, Men of Istanbul doesn’t excite me; it makes me silent. I think the young men barely knew what they were agreeing to. It feels as if I am part of their exploitation.

‘At last, on lawful ground!’ General B. Stein shouts as he crosses the border into the Ottoman Empire. In Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s Urnische Liebe in Constantinopel (1865) he appears as a ‘great admirer of male beauty’. In Austria, the general lived under constant threat; one denunciation could mean imprisonment. He joins the Turkish army. General B. Stein becomes Ferhat Pasha. For a gay man (even though they did not yet use that word), this transformation meant freedom. Within Ulrichs’s twelve-part series Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (The Riddle of Man-Manly Love) (1864–1880), Urnische Liebe in Constantinopelserves as a key case study underpinning his central aim: to present male–male love as a natural variation of human sexuality and to free it from notions of pathology and criminalisation. Ulrichs frequently supported his arguments with historical, literary, and cross-cultural examples. The text takes the form of a short ethnographic essay, combining travel report, correspondence, and moral reflection. In that, Urnische Liebe in Constantinopelfunctions as a pragmatic, real-world illustration of his ideas.

Next to Ferhat Pasha, Urnische Liebe in Constantinopel also features Ahmet Bey — a Turkish general who was once Gustav von Fritsch, a lieutenant colonel in Hungary. For Ulrichs he is a trusted source in Constantinople. In a letter from November 1864, Ahmet Bey writes about male–male love in the Ottoman capital. As a dioning, Ulrichs says, he speaks without hostility towards such love. In Ulrichs, “Dioning” refers to heterosexual love — the counterpart to “Urning,” which denotes homosexual love. With this distinction, Ulrichs defines two forms of love and, through this terminology, establishes an equal, non-moralising system: “Dioning” and “Urning” represent two equally natural variants of human love. Ahmet Bey describes a society where wealthy effendis keep handsome young men as companions, sometimes several at once.¹ These young favourites are cared for, privileged, and influential in their patrons’ households. Many of them later enter state service, some marry their benefactors’ daughters. The form of same-sex love described in Ahmet Bey‘s letters is not one between equals; it depends on inequality.

…on the dance floor at Gay Oriental Nights.

Biz iki çılgın sevgiliyiz
Delicisine sevdalıyız
Öyle büyük ki bu sevgimiz
Biz ayrılamayız…

(We are two crazy lovers,
madly in love.
Our love is so immense—
we can never part…)

(Zeki Müren, Biz ayrılamayız (We can never part))

I ask Tufan whether he, too, has come out to his parents — at least to his mother. I tell him that, unlike me, he can choose whether people see him as gay or not. Because I cannot, my Turkish friends — and not only them — made life difficult. Too difficult for an insecure teenager. But that was no reason not to fall unhappily in love with one of them.

I remember sitting next to him in Year Five and complimenting his hands.
In Year Eight I sat on the luggage rack of his bike and held his sides — as if I needed to in order not to fall off.
…I remember how good Fahrenheit smelt on him — and how, every time the advert came on TV, I thought of him. When Dior launched the men’s fragrance Fahrenheit in 1988, it used strong imagery and sharp slogans: ‘L’homme infiniment’ (‘the infinite man’) and ‘What never ends, begins here’. Ridley Scott directed the 30-second spot: a man walks along a pier that seems to lead into the sea. But when he reaches the end, he looks out over an endless desert — as if he’s reached the edge of the world.

Urnische Liebe in Constantinopel opens the final chapter, Ara spei, of Ulrichs’s fifth pamphlet in the series Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe. Ulrichs published his early writings under the pseudonym “Numa Numantius,” which served both as protection and as a declaration of intent. The name combines the wise lawgiver Numa Pompilius with the defiant city of Numantia—symbols of Ulrichs’s aim to found a new ethics of love and to resist the prevailing moral order. From this moral vision, Ulrichs’s gaze shifts toward the East, where he imagines another ground for love and freedom. Ara spei translates as Altar of Hope. Ulrichs finds hope in the idea that male–male love — condemned as ‘unnatural’ in Europe by Church and law — is, a normal and accepted part of social life in Constantinople: widespread, socially integrated, and not shunned. Not only the ancient world, but also the gaze toward the Ottoman Empire opens up, in Ulrichs’s time, a space in which utopias of same-sex love become conceivable and livable. Constantinople becomes a site of longing. The “Turkish man” becomes a projection for gay desire — a weave of othering, exoticisation, and fetishisation.

Graffiti I. On his seventeenth birthday, I sprayed F-17 on the wall in the Falkenstraße, right next to the workshop where he was training as a car mechanic. It was meant for him to see it every day — to know he was admired. The letters were for him, but also for everyone else passing by. At the same time, I was trying to hide a lot. I couldn’t say to him that I was gay — even though I’d been called Schwuli (poof) since primary school. I knew that if I ever said it aloud, everything would suddenly end.

Son bir defa göreyim
Uğruna can vereyim
Kollarında öleyim
Başka bir şey istemem

(Let me see you once more,
let me give my life for you.
Let me die in your arms—
I ask for nothing more.)

(Zeki Müren – Kollarında Öleyim (Let me die in your arms))

Ulrichs left Germany in 1880 and settled in Italy, where he lived until his death in 1895. For other prominent figures, the Ottoman Empire became an important destination. Again and again, men travelled there in search of male–male love — and, in their longing, became “Turks” themselves.² Among them was Pierre Loti, a French naval officer and ardent Turkophile who served in the empire from 1876 to 1877. In Aziyadé (1879), his epistolary novel, Loti tells an autofictional love story set against the decline of the Ottoman world. The writers André Gide and Jean Cocteau read the forbidden love with the young harem woman Aziyadé as a coded same-sex narrative.

The protagonist transforms into an Ottoman gentleman, who takes the Turkish name Arif-Effendi, and adopts Ottoman dress, manners, and language. Later, Loti returns to his family home in Rochefort, creating a “Turkish Room”. In a black-and-white photograph, he sits in the centre, in Ottoman costume, calmly on a sofa, gazing into the distance. To his right, another man, also in costume, prepares a water pipe; his face blurred by motion. In those sumptuous costumes of yesterday, Loti becomes a living figure of an Orientalist painting. Before his death, he destroys any clear trace of his homosexual inclinations; his son further purges the archive.

Graffiti II. As a teenager I cruised in the Ihme-Zentrum in Hannover, just round the corner from the Falkenstraße. I knew my love would not grow out of a circle of friends, as it did for my mates. I sought encounters in places where people stayed only as long as necessary. There I hoped to meet someone like F. I wandered through the department-store toilets of the Ihme-Zentrum, peered through small holes in the thin cubicle walls, and waited for a miracle. The walls were covered in graffiti, some like personal ads: “I’ll be here on …, at …, looking for …” Sometimes there were phone numbers. Some were specifically looking for a Turk to take them. I too looked for a Turk, yet I couldn’t be their Turk. On some toilet walls you could also read: “Turks out.”