Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (May 19, 1881 – November 10, 1938)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is revered as the Father of Modern Turkey. He had also numerous young male lovers, throughout his lifetime. As biographer Patrick Balfour put it, “Women, for Mustafa, were a means of satisfying masculine appetites, little more; nor, in his zest for experience, would he be inhibited from passing adventures with young boys, if the opportunity offered and the mood, in this bisexual fin de siècle Ottoman age, came upon him.”

Atatürk became famous during World War I when he defeated the British who were attempting to land at Gallipoli. He opposed the Turkish government’s decision to surrender to the Allies and organized an army of resistance based at Ankara. They defeated the Allied occupation forces, deposed the sultan, and formed the Turkish republic. Atatürk became its first president.

Source: Stern, Keith (2009-09-01). Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals (Kindle Locations 1689-1696). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

Further Readings:

Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 by Wilson Chacko Jacob
Paperback: 440 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books (January 14, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822346745
ISBN-13: 978-0822346746
Amazon: Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940

Working Out Egypt is both a rich cultural history of the formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth and a compelling critique of modern Middle Eastern historiography. Wilson Chacko Jacob describes how Egyptian men of a class akin to the cultural bourgeoisie (the effendiyya) struggled to escape from the long shadow cast by colonial depictions of the East as degenerate, feminine, and temporally behind an active and virile Europe. He argues that during British colonial rule (1882–1936), attempts to create a distinctively modern and Egyptian self free from the colonial gaze led to the formation of an ambivalent, performative subjectivity that he calls “effendi masculinity.” Jacob traces effendi masculinity as it took hold during the interwar years, in realms from scouting and competitive sports to sex talk and fashion, considering its gendered performativity in relation to a late-nineteenth-century British discourse on masculinity and empire and an explicitly nationalist discourse on Egyptian masculinity. He contends that as an assemblage of colonial modernity, effendi masculinity was simultaneously local and global, national and international, and particular and universal. Until recently, modern Egyptian history has not allowed for such paradoxes; instead, Egyptian modernity has been narrated in the temporal and spatial terms of a separate Western modernity.

Comments

[jufin.livejournal.com]

Ataturk? Really????

[elisa-rolle.livejournal.com]

well, according to his bio, bisexuals like many other at that time.