Is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Gay?

At the United Nations on September 22, 2026, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke about Gaza and delivered his usual complaints about U.N. reform, but he also dedicated much of his time on the world stage to condemn growing LGBTQ rights. “Global gender-neutralization policies … have turned into a siege targeting innocent children, alongside the family institution,” he declared. His speech came nine days after his government directed middle-of-the-night raids on the offices of LGBTQ rights and HIV groups across the country.

Such targeted repression of Turkish LGBTQ individuals has become a hallmark of Erdoğan’s rule. After 100,000 people attended Istanbul’s annual Pride parade in 2014, Erdoğan banned the event in 2015, and every year since. Even as Turkish police allowed proponents of the Islamic State to gather openly in Turkey and use Istanbul’s airport as a transit hub, Turkish police fired rubber bullets on Turkey’s gay community and their supporters. In place of the Pride events, Erdoğan’s government began sponsoring the “Büyük Aile Buluşması” [“Big Family Gathering”] rallies explicitly as anti-gay events, urging state media to advertise and promote them for free. His government has even floated a constitutional amendment to close all LGBTQ organizations.

On March 20, 2021, Erdoğan by presidential decree withdrew Turkey from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence—ironically known as the Istanbul Convention—over objections to its notion of gender equality and its explicit normalization of homosexuality.

The Turkish parliament now considers laws that would explicitly outlaw gay sex and would even potentially criminalize reporting on Turkey’s LGBTQ community. Turkey’s Radio and Television Supreme Council fines companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney for streaming content the Erdoğan regime considers “contrary to social and cultural values and the Turkish family structure.” Ironically, while the Erdoğan government shutters hundreds of social media accounts belonging to LGBTQ activists or discussing their issues, Erdoğan’s troll armies seem obsessed with homosexuality and often threaten regime critics with homosexual acts.

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Erdoğan, meanwhile, increasingly appears obsessed with homosexuality. “LGBT—there is no such thing,” he declared at conference of his ruling party five years ago, paralleling then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s similar declaration at Columbia University. Erdoğan has repeatedly described homosexuality as a Western or globalist plot against Turkey. At the International Family Forum in Istanbul on May 23, 2025, he described the LGBTQ movement as a form of fascism.

Many countries crack down on homosexuality, but Erdoğan’s obsession is bizarre. The question analysts must ask is what motivates the Turkish leader’s hard line. No one can get into Erdoğan’s mind, nor does anyone want to get into his bedroom. The Turkish leader and his wife Esra have four children. Still, Erdoğan’s seeming obsession with homosexuality and his exaggerations and falsehoods about the impact of homosexuality on society fall into a broader pattern in which closeted homosexuals can be among the most repressive to the societies they seek to deny.

Consider the case of József Szájer, a principle drafter of Hungary’s 2011 Constitution that rolled back gay rights and defined marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, who later resigned from the European Parliament after police caught him fleeing an all-male party. In 2013, Keith O’Brien, the United Kingdom’s most senior Catholic priest and a campaigner against same-sex marriage, likewise resigned as archbishop after revelations that he sought, if not had, sexual contact with priests. Following Austrian far-right leader Jörg Haider’s death, his protégé Stefan Petzner admitted the two were a couple.

In the United States, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ruined lives of opponents, many of whom he accused of homosexuality, while allegedly being gay himself.

But as an Islamist, is Erdoğan different? Perhaps the greatest analogy, given the import of the Turkish leader’s Muslim Brotherhood-inspired ideology, would be the Islamic Republic of Iran. When Ahmadinejad denied the existence of homosexuality in Iran, he not only sought to paper over Iranian history, but also the open secret of many Shi‘i seminaries and, if Central Intelligence Agency profiles are to be believed, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei himself.

What is certain, however, is that homosexuality was not uncommon in pre-modern Iran, and is well-reflected in Persian poetry and painting. Ironically, Sirus Shamisa’s Shahedbazi dar Adabiyat-e Farsi suggests the origin of homosexuality in Iran came from Turkish military officers who invaded the country. Iranian bloggers discuss the practice as especially rife in Iranian religious cities. A former seminarian also described the homosexual experiences he had in a Qom seminary as rife. Nor was he alone. Indeed, Iranians quip, “In Iran, sodomy carries the death penalty. In the seminary, it carries a degree.”

Iraqi political analyst Bashir al-Hujaimi caused controversy when he stated on Iraqi television that Najaf has the highest rate of homosexuality in Iraq, implying the reason was its seminaries. Others were more explicit about the practice in the seminaries.

As Iranians tell jokes about the homosexuality among seminarians and whisper about the alleged homosexuality of Iran’s supreme leader himself, the question of overcompensation looms large.

So, too, should it inside Turkey. No one knows what is in Erdoğan’s mind, heart, or offshore bank accounts. But the combination of Erdoğan’s bizarre focus on homosexuality and Turkish commentators’ seeming obsession with gay slurs raises a question about whether the pattern of behavior Erdoğan has introduced makes him more Turkey’s József Szájer than a sincere social warrior.