Our story began in the early ’90s when we came together in parks and houses. As a matter of fact, someone used to tell our story a long time ago. But the ’90s became a cornerstone on our journey of telling our own story. On our journey that we started to reclaim our own lives, to say “We exist”, the first issue of our magazine met with readers on September 20, 1994. “We live in a society that is not only sexist but also heterosexist” was written on the cover of our first issue.
We kept coming together, arguing, inventing new ways. Violence in a park was also our topic, and so was the media; academia was one of our discussions and so was human rights. We’ve talked about HIV, we’ve created strategies against hate. Our readers were not just readers, they took their place in our magazine with their letters. We kept going forward while not giving up the dream of organizing, getting together and changing an entire world.
In 2001, we were on the streets with our banners and flags during the May 1st demonstrations in Ankara. Two years later, in 2003, The Problems of Gays and Lesbians and the Search for Social Peace was sort of our opening to the general public. We laid the foundations of the Kaos GL’s current workspaces. We started our work without delay by establishing our commissions. In 2005, we completed our application to become an official association and became the first official LGBTI+ association in Turkey.
For over a quarter of a hundred years, we’ve been trying to organize by fits and starts, trial and error. By trying not to resemble the social structures we criticize, we are trying to create spaces where we can be liberated at least in our own field of struggle. The more we struggle, the more we change, the more we transform. We are, we will continue to be empowered by the social movements while changing and transforming them by making them question their heterosexualisms.
