Gay muslims shed their veil of secrecy for the night

Published on Saturday 5 January 2008 16:54

SIX men whirled faster and faster in the centre of the nightclub, arms slung over one another's shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual, given the German capital's large Muslim population.

But most of the people filling the dance floor at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background.

They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.

"When you're here, it's as if you're putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun," said a 22-year-old Turkish man who would not give his name for fear that he would be ostracised or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.

Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble in two very different ways.

"Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I'm a foreigner and in the other because I'm a queen," said Fatma Souad, the event's organiser and master of ceremonies. Souad, 43, a transgender performer born in Ankara as a boy named Ali, has put on the party for more than a decade.

Souad came to Berlin in 1983 after leaving home as a teenager. She studied to be a dressmaker and played in a punk band, but discovered Middle Eastern music through a friend and taught herself belly dancing.

Souad started Salon Oriental, her first belly dancing theatre, in 1988 and threw the first Gayhane party – hane means home in Turkish – in January 1997.

The club was packed by midnight and still had a queue outside. On stage, Souad mixed a white turban and white net gloves with a black tuxedo with tails and a silver cummerbund, her face made up with perfectly drawn eyeliner and mascara. Dancing, she was all fluid motion, light on her feet, expressively twisting her hands and swivelling her hips.

Under flashing coloured lights, guests, some with dreadlocks and others with carefully gelled coiffures, moved to songs by the likes of the Egyptian Amr Diab and the Algerian Cheb Mami. Beats from traditional drums crossed with electronic ones, as melodies from flutes and ouds intertwined. When several circle dances – halay in Turkish – broke out at once, the floor began to shake from the stomping.

One of the regular DJs, Ipek Ipekcioglu, 35, said she got her start rather suddenly, when one of the founders of SO36 walked up to her and asked: "You're Turkish, right? You're lesbian, right? Bring your cassettes and DJ."

Ipekcioglu spins everything from Turkish and Arabic music to Greek, Balkan and Indian, a style she calls Eklektik BerlinIstan. She has been a full-time professional DJ for six years and now performs all over the world.

The space is decorated with bright yellow wall hangings depicting elephants, camels and even a flying carpet, with an intentional degree of kitsch, Souad said, and an intentional distance from anything Islamic. "We take care that religion is not mixed in here, not in the music either."

Hasan, a 21-year-old Arab man sitting at a table in the club's quieter adjoining cafe, declined to give his last name, saying: "They would kill me. My brothers would kill me." Asked if he meant this figuratively, he responded: "No, I mean they would kill me."

"I'm living one life here and the other one the way they wish me to be," Hasan said, referring to his parents. He said that he still planned to marry, but when he turned 30 rather than right away as his parents wished.

"I have to have children, to do what Islam wants me to do," he said. "I would stop with everything in the homosexual life. I would stop it."