Harun Baysan | Akif / 2018

required identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harun Baysan and Çetin Kurt (screenplay), Harun Baysan (director) Akif / 2018 [30 minutes]

 

It’s somewhat difficult to know how to feel about Turkish director Harun Baysan’s 30-minute film Akif since the film’s central character, Akif is a slightly homophobic draft dodger who wants to use the possibility of being gay as a way to escape the military.

     Akif (Bekir Behrem) certainly has good reason. His father (Yusuf Eksi) is seriously ill and has no one else to care for him, being unable to even eat without the careful ministrations of his only child. In fact, Akif has previously saved up to join the military—soldiers in the Turkish military, at least at the time of this film, must serve six months without pay.

     The culture, moreover, which does allow gay men to serve in the military (just as was long true of the US and numerous other countries’ militia), encourages men who will not or cannot serve to seek the escape of being gay. But what that entails, the creation of a stereotypical view of LGBTQ people, is even more terrifying. As the true hero of this work, Ugur (Uzay Gökhan Irmak) explains to Akif, in order to prove one’s own sexual orientation one has to create a notion of homosexuality that has little to do with the reality. And once he has been declared gay, many job opportunities are lost and the people at large are likely to despise him, as we have already heard a grocer speaking to a customer of Ugar. Ugur was a school teacher without a job.

      It is to Ugur that Akif turns to help him in what is basically a “gay makeover.” But, in this case, Ugu—who identifies as a gay man, but might be described in his manner of dress and behavior as a transsexual—demands that Akif first learn everything he can about gay culture, assigning him basic gay texts such as the works of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster’s Maurice and requiring him to watch a number of openly gay movies.

     But in Akif’s world even being seen publicly with Ugur is dangerous, and in his attempts to buy the underground tapes, he is discouraged by the seller, forcing him to explain that he is buying them for a brother attending the university, yet another ironic level of this hostile cultural milieu in which men like Ugur must live.

     After reading and watching to assimilate some basics, Ugar insists that Akif apply lipstick and makeup and put on heels (that look a lot like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz) to help him learn to walk more effeminately, a requirement if he is to behave as authorities expect him to as a gay man. One scene of the straight Akif putting on lipstick and eyeliner is so sad that it almost brings tears to one’s eyes. Even if he were a macho S&M gay man, it is a requirement to prove one’s homosexuality.

     We see the faithful son alternating between becoming someone else, a man that even he soon won’t be able to identify. The final catch is that there must be a picture, with his face fully visible, of him engaged in homosexual sex. It’s no longer legally required, but the military boards still demands it as proof nonetheless.

      It is at this point that the mild and passive Akif finally balks, demonstrating his own heteronormative cultural assimilation, insisting that Ugar’s entire efforts have been aimed at getting him to have sex, and, in the very worst of assaults, insisting that Ugar is after all still just a faggot!

     Ugar spits in is face, orders him out of the house, and demands that Akif never return.

     The very next day, Akif is fired from his job, his boss having been contacted reporting that Akif is a drat dodger, which no business is allowed to keep on their payroll.

    With no way out, Akif returns to Ugar and goes through the “ordeal,” spitting out the semen and almost vomiting much in the manner of Fergus in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) upon discovering that his lover is actually a transgender male.

      Ugar himself sits waiting for the ordeal to end, also in tears.

     Yet Ugar’s lessons and, evidently, the photo succeed. Akif is declared unfit for military duty, which probably will also make him now even more unhireable and a general outcast in his society.

He and Ugar hug.

    The young now suddenly “approved” gay man returns home to attend to his father, only to discover him dead. On the television, the reporter describes how a military until has saved a portion of the country from terrorists without violence, those saved singing out their ululations for their heroes.

 

     The mixed feelings I have about this film must certainly emanate in part from my own experience of being called up for military service for the Vietnam War in 1970. Howard and I were already a couple, and even as a gay man I was terrified that I might not be able to convince them that I was gay, an “out” provided by the misconceptions of US culture that LGBTQ men and women were undesirable because they were simply less capable and were subject to blackmail—the deep irony of which was that only in a closed, unaccepting culture which their attitude helped shape, might one have to worry about being blackmailed for being gay. I must have fit the all the psychologist’s preconceptions of what a gay might be, for upon reporting that I was gay, he handed a 4F rating, declaring me unfit for military duty. I was relieved, but angry at the same time that those gay men and women who might have wanted to serve might also be declared unfit just because of their sexuality. I felt my sexuality had saved my life, but at the same time it had declared me unable to fully participate in the culture.

     Akif, knowing now that he is a marked man, begins to laugh before falling into tears. I might have begun to cry before, realizing the irony of the situation, I began to laugh. I felt freed; whereas Akif knows that he is now imprisoned in an identity that has nothing to do with him. Of course, so was I.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).