“Was there no room for my child in this vast world?”
Melek Okan - Mother of Irem, a trans brutally murdered in 2010 in Bursa, Turkey
We, families of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals in Turkey, are being featured in a documentary film titled ‘MY CHILD’ which is about our personal stories and LISTAG (Families of LGBTs in Istanbul), an organization which we founded in 2008. For this film to be completed, we need your support.
To support our film you can visit our website www.listagfilm.com and just click on IndieGoGo, watch our trailer and help us realize our dream of sharing our stories by donating to our project. To inform more people about our project, you can also share this link via social media or your private contacts. The amount of your contribution does not matter that much, whatever you can afford counts, because it is important for us to include your name on our list of supporters of the project.
Since January 2008 we, as LISTAG, gather regularly and give interviews to the press to raise awareness about homophobia and transphobia, and to reach other families with similar experiences and to offer them support. But, that is not enough…
We felt the need to make this documentary, because it is very important to be heard by as many people as possible in this homophobic, transphobic society where our voices usually are not being heard. People do not know or understand what we have been going through and mostly ignore the situation. We thought that we should have a voice. People should know what we and our children go through in this part of the world and that a different world is possible! We think that if we talk as parents, it is easier for people to understand what would happen if one day their children were to come out to them as LGBTs.
Last year we spoke at a conference at Bogazici University and there, after listening to us, filmmaker and academician Can Candan proposed to make a documentary film about us. We decided that he was the right person to collaborate with to spread out our voice and we became part of this documentary film project. As you can imagine it is not easy for us to be in front of the camera as parents of LGBTs in such a homophobic and transphobic society where our children have to struggle even when expressing their sexual identities.
But now, WE ARE HERE!
We, as 5 mothers and 2 fathers of LISTAG, now, call out to you, to the whole world, with our own faces, voices, and our souls: ‘my child is homosexual’; ‘our children are transsexuals’. What have we gone through and are still going through? How did we happen to sit in front of this camera? How did we start our journey and what else do we want to do? All of this will be in this documentary when completed. But, as you can imagine it is really hard to make documentaries in this country, let alone a documentary about LGBT issues. Therefore we need your support to further our cause and have our voices be heard.
Please join us to make ‘MY CHILD’ via our website www.listagfilm.com
We hope to have your support! Let’s make a change!
LISTAG (Families of LGBTs in İstanbul)
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Pınar Anne (Eda)
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