Our age is "the post-truth" age. Subjective perceptions are more important than objective facts, and these perceptions go beyond the truth and block the truth.
Metin Akdemir claims that three Turkish films were censored and that they were actually "queer films". That is a subjective perception.
Looking at the objective fact, the films "Iki Kadin-Two Women (1992)" directed by Yavuz Ozkan, "Kadinin Adi Yok-Woman Has No Name" (1988) and "Dul Bir Kadin-A Widow" (1985) both directed by Atif Yilmaz, do not talk about lesbian relationships and the filmmakers never pursued such a goal. When the scenes in question are seen, it is really impossible to evoke a lesbian relationship between the characters. As Deniz Turkali said, two women can sleep together naked, this does not mean sexual intercourse. When you see two naked women in bed, linking it directly to the sex is nothing but lesbian lovemaking fantasies of the male-dominated point of view. Another fact is that the average age of Turkey's 85 million population is just 29. This means that one out of every two people in Turkey was born after 1993. The films that Metin Akdemir refers to were made before 1993, and they are films that this young generation did not witness their production process, did not experience the conditions of that period, and do not know anything about those conditions. Therefore, they are very suitable films about which "urban legends" can be derived.
Metin Akdemir has made a production that tries to satisfy the LGBTIQ community, which is really under heavy pressure, by taking two academics and a film-critic as "forced witnesses" without any basis. The fact that "scenes Metin Akdemir imagines" do not contain any dialogue and are made up of just sex, reflects the shallowness of the production very well. A production where nothing is lost if not watched.
The scene most likely to be read as a lesbian affair is the scene from the movie "Iki Kadin-Two Women". That's because the male character says "You would do that to me?!", "Your woman lover"... However, these are the sentences that the male character says casually without thinking, because of his huge anger towards his wife, reflecting his subconscious and reflecting the lesbian fantasies of the male-dominated point of view I wrote above. It's also a subjective perception. The movie "Two Women" depicts the solidarity between two women, one from upper class, other from lower class, and solidarity does not have to result in sex. Unfortunately, such perceptions have arisen because of today's Netflix movies.
Metin Akdemir claims that "due to the intense censorship, lesbian scenes could not be shot at that time even if desired", but he does not take another Atif Yilmaz's film "Dus Gezginleri-Walking After Midnight" (1992) into account. Wasn't there the same censorship in 1992? That movie also includes a lesbian sex scene, the first of its kind in Turkish mainstream cinema. So, if a movie was going to tell about a lesbian relationship, it would. It is pointless to infer that the three films mentioned "were going to tell lesbianism, but the censorship blocked them". Another fact is that, Turkish people never met with feminist ideas and LGBTIQ movement before 1980s. So it was very normal not to see any feminist or a lesbian movie in Turkey before 1980s.
