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Turkey Is Brutally Oppressing Queer People. Here’s What You Need to Know.

The government’s sweeping crackdown on the LGBTQ community is an escalation of a decades-long pattern.

Turkish police detain dozens of LGBTQ rights protesters in Ankara, on September 15, 2026.

Between September 12 and 14, in coordinated overnight raids across five cities, Turkish police targeted seven LGBTQI rights organizations, two groups supporting people living with HIV, and 13 bars and clubs where queer people gather. Board members of some of the country’s oldest LGBTQI associations, including Kaos GL and Lambda Istanbul, were taken from their homes. Human Rights Watch reports that at least 112 people were arrested and that 82 remain in detention by court order. Courts also ordered the blocking of dozens of websites and social-media accounts belonging to LGBTQI groups and activists; when people gathered outside Istanbul’s main courthouse to protest, more than a hundred were detained as well. The alleged offenses were “obscenity,” “prostitution”, and crimes against “public morality.”

Justice Minister Akın Gürlek named the operation “My Family Is Safe” and placed it squarely within President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of Family and Population,” a 10-year programme launched this year to reverse Turkey’s falling birth rate and defend what the government calls “national and moral values.” That framing is the most important aspect of the raids. Homosexuality has never been a crime in Turkey. What this month showed is a state that has found other ways to criminalize queer life and now presents such measures as family policy.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Istanbul’s Pride march has been banned every year since 2015, on the grounds of public safety, and police have detained hundreds of people who tried to march anyway. But those detentions were fleeting. Marchers were picked up on the street and, for the most part, released within hours. This month’s operation was different in kind. It did not target a march; it targeted the infrastructure of a movement, including its offices, leadership, health services, websites, and social spaces, in five cities at once. It relied on criminal law rather than public-order powers, and courts have kept dozens of people in pretrial detention. And it was announced not as a policing matter but as the enforcement of a government program.

To understand how Turkey arrived here, it helps to know how the family became the organizing principle of the state’s politics, and how much of that politics follows a script written transnationally.

Same-sex relations have been legal in Turkey since 1858, earlier than in most of Europe. Yet LGBTQI people have never enjoyed equal citizenship in practice. As with other minority groups, including ethnic and religious minorities, the state’s approach to LGBTQI people was long defined primarily by denial, repression, and nonrecognition. This decades-old policy began to shift after the neoliberal-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, but not toward greater equality. Instead, LGBTQI people increasingly became targets of explicit political, administrative and legal action, driven by the party’s conservative gender politics. This is not to say that queer people had been free from state harassment or the “indirect” violence of the law before then. What distinguishes the AKP era is the increasingly overt use of law, administrative power and state institutions to act against LGBTQI visibility, organization and public life.

Earlier manifestations included, among others, the........

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