Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour

Gay men are exempt from the compulsory military service as long as they can evidence their sexuality. This work aims to confront the institutional identity of 'the gay man' in contemporary Turkey.

Every man in Turkey over the age of 20 is required by law to participate in the military service, a rite of passage into a sovereign masculinity rife with nationalism. Despite homosexuality being decriminalised during the Ottoman rule, the expression of queerness within the military is seen as incompatible with its values and threatens its core strength. On the contrary, the homosocial bonding between heteronormative men serving their conscription sustains and strengthens it.

Gay men wishing to be exempt from the service must declare and evidence their sexuality for the military to deploy a set of investigations, which intend to ascertain the applicant’s true sexuality. Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is an internationally recognised psychological screening test comprising single sentences that are answered with a Yes or a No. The applicant’s responses must coincide with the identity of the gay man as dictated by the military: a dangerous man possessing the means to provoke, seduce and hence disrupt the military order.

In Evidence of My Sexual Misdemeanour, as a gay man of Turkish origin, I photographically respond to the individual statements from the MMPI test. Through staging these photographs in a performative manner, I express and construct an identity on the gallery wall. This persona residing somewhere between fact and fiction aims to confront the imposed institutional identity of the gay man in contemporary Turkey and offer one of a multitude of queer identities as an alternative.