In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman attends Istanbul's fifth annual trans-pride march along İstiklal Street, held even as ISIS advances beneath its black banners in Turkey's southeast, and reflects on what draws so many disparate Istanbullus to a march for transgender rights.
A March Under Police Watch
Ackerman describes joining the march with two American friends beneath an enormous rainbow flag, as riot police with water cannons and plastic shields mass along İstiklal Street, and finds a crowd far broader than the transgender community it was organized to support.
Echoes of Gezi Park
Ackerman situates the march within a summer of overlapping Istanbul protests, from a Morsi solidarity rally to a May Day tear-gassing, and recalls a British journalist's observation that "the toughest men at Gezi were transgender women."
A Black Banner in the Crowd
As police water cannons train on the march's transgender leaders, Ackerman closes on an unsettling detail glimpsed at the edge of the crowd: a black flag flying alongside the sea of rainbow ones.
Read the Original Article
This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.