Queering the Ottoman Homefront: Lutîs, Alüftes, and Sex Panic in Wartime Konya, 1914–18

On August 17, 1918, a two-page telegram from the Konya Municipality to the Ottoman Ministry of Interior relayed locals’ concerns about a brothel in the city center and its perceived impact on youth and public morality. According to the petition, young men were stealing from their parents, gambling, and engaging in “obscene intimacies” to finance their visits—threatening not only their familial relations and marital prospects but also the broader moral fabric of the city. More than a plea for regulation, this complaint reflected anxieties over shifting social dynamics on the Ottoman homefront during World War I. As a key logistical center for the redistribution of human and material resources in the Ottoman state’s wartime mobilization, Konya also became a site of containment and regulation for those deemed social and sexual outcasts, including alüftes (prostitutes) and lutîs (men who engaged in sex with other men). Ottoman officials designated the city as a hub for the gathering and so-called rehabilitation of these groups, reinforcing wartime moral anxieties about sexuality, urban space, and social order.

By analyzing state documents and newspaper reports, this paper explores how the social and sexual encounters of alüftes and lûtis illuminate the moral, political, and social transformations reshaping the empire during the war, offering a queer(ed) reading of the Ottoman homefront during World War I. The state’s attempts to control these sexually and socially stigmatized subjects—alongside local anxieties about their presence in everyday life—did not merely reflect concerns about prostitution and homoerotic sexuality but also broader fears of hetero-moral decline and disorder. Centering queer(ed) intimacies and subjectivities, this paper argues that the Ottoman homefront was not only a space of discipline and regulation but also one of contestation and subversion—where wartime heteronormative ideals were both enforced and undone.