Turkey Street, Jack and Liam move to Bodrum

Postscript - The Girl in the Red Dress

When Jack and Liam left Turkey, the nation was on an economic roll and the popularity of the ruling AK (Justice and Development) Party and its charismatic but dour leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, seemed unassailable. The nation was fêted (not least by Erdoğan himself) as a template for the popular revolutions sweeping through the old Ottoman lands, the so called 'Arab Spring'. Across the border, Syria had begun its tragic descent into murderous civil war and Erdoğan's attempts at mediation were casually rebuked. His newly acquired taste for international statesmanship appeared amateurish and the limit of his influence was humiliatingly transparent. On the home front, a lively demonstration in Istanbul against the destruction of a clearing in the urban jungle (to make way for yet another shopping mall) quickly spread into a wider national protest against creeping government authoritarianism. To the banging of pots and pans by disapproving housewives hanging out of kitchen windows, riot police dispersed the Gezi Park occupation with water cannons and rampaged through the surrounding streets, tear-gassing everything that moved. If there was a single image more eloquent than a thousand headlines or a million tweets, it was the picture of a young woman in a red dress, armed only with her handbag, being tear-gassed at close quarters by a policeman in full riot gear. The photograph circled the world faster than the Gulf Stream. The violent clampdown was nothing new for Turkey, of course. Turks at the top always got tough with those snapping at their heels. But this time, the target was different – the bourgeois, the educated, the secular and the children of the upper crust. Tables had turned. Erdoğan's predictable hard line played well to the party faithful but quickly unnerved the markets. As foreign investment took flight, the stock market crashed and the lira nosedived. Global capitalism has no morals and social instability is bad for business. Erdoğan's paranoid nonsense about foreign devils and domestic subversives conspiring to wreck the Turkish economy served only to stoke the fire.

In March 2014, the AKP consolidated power in municipal elections which were mired in accusations of vote rigging. Weeks later, Turkey suffered its worst ever industrial disaster when an electricity distribution unit exploded deep underground at the newly privatised Soma Coal Mine. Lifts and ventilation systems failed, tunnels filled with smoke and three hundred and one miners choked to death. Cost cutting, cronyism and profiteering were widely blamed for the catastrophe. All of a sudden, the Justice and Development Party's economic miracle appeared to deliver precious little justice and way too much development. Ironically, when the doughty old bruiser stood for election as Turkey's first executive-style president in August 2014, he won by a landslide. The outcome was never in doubt.

Erdoğan's time will pass. In the final analysis, Turkey is much more than his crude sound bites and so much more than lazy Western clichés. As an openly gay couple, Jack and Liam demonstrated that even the avant-garde can enjoy the Turkish good life without compromising too much. Thousands of yabancılar  who now call Turkey their home would agree and continue to add colour to the cultural kaleidoscope. Turkey is changing.

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Would you like to read more? Turkey Street, Jack and Liam move to Bodrum, the much-anticipated sequel to Perking the Pansies was published on Springtime Books in paperback and e-book on 18th May 2015. Turkey Street was runner up (LGBT Biographies and Memoirs) in the Rainbow Awards 2015. More information at www.jackscott.info.