Creating a Queer Archive in the Public Eye: The Case of Reşad Ekrem Koçu

How might current theories of the queer archive, its ephemeral, idiosyncratic, and fetishized contents, and its affective relation to the past and present, need amending to accommodate non-Western contexts and their differing histories and cultural scripts of sexuality? This article addresses such questions by examining the İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, the never-completed, lifetime labor of love of the mid-twentieth-century Turkish historian Reşad Ekrem Koçu. The entries and illustrations in the eleven extant volumes turn out to be a veritable treasure trove of queer history, queer longing, and queer affect — one that nonetheless managed to pass itself off as acceptable reading material for any number of middle-class Turkish families. Facing the systematic erasure of Istanbul’s centuries-old tradition of male homoerotic culture from the official and state record, Koçu makes his encyclopedic enterprise the covert home for a queer archive that, in refusing to disappear, becomes a queer politics.