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, Ugur—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 bit 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 his 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 draft 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 unit 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 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, but, instead, 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).
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