By Nazlan Ertan
Lokma (noun): Literally translated as “morsel,” lokma is a fried sweet dough covered in syrup. Part of Turkey’s colossal street food culture, its shape, size, and sweetness change according to the region. Izmirians maintain that it has to have a hole in the middle, whereas Istanbuliots say it should be in the shape and size of a dove’s egg. People of Gaziantep, whose Unesco-registered cuisine is on festival mode until Sept. 22, call it pisik daşşaa (“cat’s balls” in the local accent) and sprinkle it with crushed pistachios. Greeks have loukoumades, which they serve with honey and heated arguments on its Greek origins. In Turkey, when a loved one dies, people distribute lokma in their sweet memory, when a small lokma-van pulls on the street in front of the family home and distributes little cartoon cups of half a dozen lokmas to neighbors and passers-by.
So what makes this dessert the word of the week?
Because of the lokma-van that made a mockery of the much-inflated Big Family Platform, an anti-LGBTI+ group. Like every year, the platform that claims to represent 400 civil society groups promises a huge mobilization against creeping perversity and homosexuality but managed to gather few supporters on the ground for its promised meeting on Sept. 15 at Saraçhane, Istanbul.
The lackluster gathering, which public broadcaster TRT trumpeted for days, united under the motto #StopThisShamelessAttack, a line from the ten-stanza poem by Mehmet Ali Ersoy, the first two stanzas of which are the lyrics of the Turkish national anthem. Those who arrived made strange bedfellows: the ultra-secularists from the Republican Women's Association rub elbows with members of TÜGVA, the youth foundation of president’s much-ridiculed son, Bilal Erdoğan, and raging Islamo-nationalist Yesevi Alperenler, known for their raid of an art exhibition opened by Istanbul Municipality because they thought some of the work was “blasphemous.” The meeting passed just as expected, with speakers’ references to international conspiracy theories to render the next generation gender-neutral and impassioned attacks against the gay plot at the opening of the Paris Olympics. The critics were quick to mock the anticlimax of the gathering. “You aimed at a big fat gathering but it seems only the nuclear family showed up,” mocked one X user.
However, the act that stole the show was that of the Social Policy, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation Studies Association (SPoD), an Istanbul-based LGBTI+ organization founded in 2011 by a group of academics, lawyers, and activists. The group arrived in the vicinity of the Big Family Gathering with a lokma-van, from which they distributed the delightful lokma in memory of Ahmet Yılmaz, who was killed for being gay by his father in 2008. The father has fled justice and has not been found.
