Out on the Town

I try to explore the gay nightlife pretty much everywhere I go, including such unpromising places as Cracow and Panama City. But Turkey filled me with a bit of trepidation, since I had heard that the language was impenetrable and that many of the clubs and bars would be hidden behind unmarked doors.

A friend who had been to Budapest, where the language is if anything even more difficult than Turkish, had had a good experience hiring a gay guide, though, and we were able to do the same thing in Istanbul through http://www.turkey-gay-travel.com/.

And we were glad we did, though not for the reason we originally thought. All of the bars are marked with signs on the outside, though some are on the upper floors of tenement houses. It's the streets that are unmarked; maps are of little help unless they show landmarks, and the locals' competence in English is not great.

Our guide, Selcuk, took us to the following places, all in one six-hour Saturday night. We revisited most of them on our own the following weekend. All are in the Beyoglu neighborhood, the commercial heart of the new city, very close to Taksim Square where the bombing was on Oct. 31 (two hours after we left town).

Cafe Frappe -- This cubbyhole of a bar/cafe bills itself as Turkey's only openly gay restaurant, and certainly it is open, with a rainbow flag flying outside. We didn't try the food (except for the ubiquitous Turkish bar-snack mix of peanuts, sesame sticks, hazelnuts, chickpeas and pistachios), but the drinks were good, both the Turkish beer and raki and the Western-style mixed drinks. It was pretty quiet on our first visit on a Saturday, but packed the following Friday when a pair of elderly Turkish musicians gave a performance of traditional folk music. We wondered if they knew they were in a gay bar. But if they either could read English, or noticed the group of seven boisterous short-haired women sitting next to us, they probably figured it out.

Cafe Morkedi -- A more traditional Turkish-style cafe, which serves coffee and tea (tea is way more popular among the Turks than coffee, oddly enough) and a limited selection of hot dishes but no alcohol. Most of these places are full of old men playing backgammon and smoking hookahs (known as "narghile" here) but this one's clientele was mainly cute college-age boys chatting and fooling with their computers.

Aquarius -- A stop at the gay bathhouse was part of the tour, but this was not a Turkish hammam, but rather a Western-style bathhouse, and not a particularly nice-looking one. We didn't stay.

Chianti -- Like Morkedi, and like many of the establishments on Beyoglu side streets, this space is basically a New York railroad flat on the upper floor of a walk-up tenement building. But unlike Morkedi, it's a Western-style dance bar, with a DJ spinning a mix of American-style hard house and Turkish dance pop, which mixes the Middle Eastern equivalent of diva vocals with Latin-style horns and beats. It's odd but compelling, and we noticed that the hard house frequently cleared the dance floor, while the Turkish pop reliably filled it up again. Great energy and even one guy with his shirt off (the only time all week we saw this). This was on a Saturday; we returned the following Friday to a much emptier space in which a slim, beautiful young man with a professional-quality voice sang the Turkish pop live; when he went on break, one of the guys in the audience treated us to an amateur but competent belly-dancing performance.

Cafe Sugar -- Another bar/cafe, a bit bigger than Frappe and with a large outdoor terrace at the end of a back alley. Nothing remarkable about it (we went here mainly to kill time before the clubs) except that it seemed to be a good source of information on club happenings, if you could read the posters, which were all in Turkish.

X Large -- The first of two dance clubs we attended, and the only place we went to that had a cover charge ($20). It's a nice space, a former theater, about the size and shape of Philly's Trocadero but much, much more well maintained. Disappointing though because well over half the crowd was clearly straight (despite the male go-go dancers on stage), and it was one of those straight crowds that doesn't seem inclined to dance hard. Not worth the money. We read later in Time Out that, indeed, this formerly gay club now typically draws a mainly straight crowd.

Tek Yon -- Fortunately, we saved the best for last. This may have been the most fun club I've ever been to on the European mainland. The physical space isn't as nice as the club I raved about in Paris but the crowd was super hot, young and much more friendly than the French. If they didn't speak English, they tried to make up for it with body language. It's basically one large room for dancing, and a terrace out back for smoking and lounging, with a view of the Bosphorus. No cover. We went on Saturday night and again the following Friday and, except for a slightly thinner crowd on Friday, had consistent fun, including meeting some locals each time. I'd go back anytime.

By the way, "Tek Yon" means "one way" in Turkish. So signs like this are not directing you toward the bar:

Some general notes:

When to go: Gay nightlife starts in Turkey at about the same time it does in New York. Don't think of going to a bar much before 11, or a club before about 12:30 to 1. Saturdays are better than Fridays; weeknights are a waste of time. Closing time seems to be between 4 and 5 in the morning.

What to drink: Turkey is one of the few places outside North America where American-style sweetened mixed drinks, like Long Island Iced Tea and Sex on the Beach, seem to be popular. I generally stuck to the local beer, Efes, which is pretty good. You will see people drinking raki in the clubs but I recommend drinking that only with meals. Drink prices are similar to those in New York -- beer is $5 to $8 and mixed drinks a couple dollars more -- due, apparently, to a mildly Islamist government that is trying to discourage alcohol consumption through high taxation. (Meals and non-alcoholic drinks in Turkey are generally quite cheap.)

The crowd: Turkish men are often stunningly attractive, and also come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and hair and eye colors. (I speculated that Istanbul, as the capital of an empire that stretched from Hungary to Yemen, and an earlier one that once reached from Italy to parts of Iran, attracted many types of migrants over the centuries.) Whether your thing is twinkie boys or chiseled butch types or daddies or mustachioed Middle Eastern bears, you can find them in Turkey. The one thing you can't find is musclemen; there is no trace of a gym culture.

General attitudes: The Turks we met told us that Istanbul was an island of liberalism in what is otherwise a very conservative country. Certainly the gay businesses aren't very covert; rainbow flags fly at many of them. Our group did get some stares as we walked down the crowded main street of Beyoglu, but that may have been because one of us is East Asian (a very rare sight in Istanbul) and our guide was a bit flamboyant. But same-sex heterosexual pairs walk around all the time, often arm in arm, and people think nothing of it. The nightlife did have a bit of the frenzy you would expect from the following fact: From Istanbul east 4,600 miles to Bangkok, and south 4,600 miles to Johannesburg, there is only one other place with any sort of gay culture: Tel Aviv. A lot of people seem to end up there as refugees of a sort, eager to take advantage of their freedoms.

If you go: You can really trim this down to two stops. Go on a Saturday night. Go to Chianti around 11p. Head to Tek Yon between 12:30 and 1a. Enjoy. Repeat the following weekend if you're still in town.

And enjoy.