Topkapi: A jewel-encrusted daggar, gay subtexts, and technicolor Turkey

In the early 1960s, before Google Maps, if you wanted to see southern Europe, you got on a plane for an expensive, once-in-a-lifetime trip, or you went to the movies.  Dozens of films had plots about glamorous, attractive people (except for an occasional comic relief lout) doing something or other that required them to drive mopeds through quaint hillside villages in Sicily or rush at breakneck speed through the Parthenon, giving viewers a bright technicolor Cook's Tour.  Usually you saw France, Italy, or Greece, but in Topkapi (1964) you got to see Istanbul.

Glamorous jewel thief Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) invites us to tour the  Topkapi, the palace complex of the Ottomans during the height of their empire, now open to the public.  Many tourists are drawn to the Treasury, with its displays of Turkish opulence, especially the emerald encrusted daggar of Sultan Mahmud (1730-54).  It was actually crafted as a gift for Nadir Shah of Iran, but never delivered, but she tells us that it was a gift from his lover. And she plans to steal it.

The caper requires her to assemble a band of experts:

1. The dashing, cosmopolitan Walter (Maximilian Schell, right)

2. Mechanics expert Cedric (Robert Morley)

3. Acrobat Giulio (Gilles Segal, left)

4. Muscle Hans (Jesse Hahn)

5. Stooge Arthur (Peter Ustinov), who will take the fall for them.

Beefcake: Hundreds of shirtless hunks engaging in Turkish oil wrestling.

Hans, Giulio, and Walter all have their shirts off (Giulio is ripped!).

Buddy bonding: Walter and Giulio (they definitely look like they are going to kiss), Arthur and a burly Greek cook (Akim Tamiroff) who becomes his confidant:

Cook;  You foreign, no?
Arthur:  No, I'm English.
Cook: (Puts his arm around him).  Everybody out there -- Russian spies.  I kill.  I get medal.
Arthur: (Suspecting that he is a spy.) Are you here officially?
Cook: Fishily?  No, I give  English friend good meat.
Arthur:  Good meat, I understand.  (Cook kisses him.)  Well, I thought I understood.

There are complications, some humorous, some suspenseful, and of course they don't get away with it.  But not to worry, they are soon out of prison and on their way to a new caper: stealing  the crown jewels in the Kremlin!

No sex, no romance, no violence,some buddy-bonding, lots of oiled-up Turkish guys, and location shots in Greece and Istanbul.

Not a bad way to spend two hours.

"The Prince": The actor claims that his flashy-femme prince is "just sensitive." See for yourself. With gay-subtext homies and Turkish d*cks

 

Link to the N*de Dudes

The Prince is unfortunately the title of about a dozen tv shows and movies, but the Turkish one (2023-25) stars Giray Altinok as the Prince of Bogonia, a fictional micro-kingdom somewhere in the Balkans during the Middle Ages.  The Prince (no other name because his father hates him) is so flashy-femme, and exhibits such a strong interest in men, that viewers began buzzing.  Altinok went on social media to clear up the "misunderstanding": The Prince isn't gay, he's just sensitive.  Funny, that's what my parents used to say about me.

Of course Altinok would claim that his character is straight: Turkey is the most homophobic country in Europe. It gets 4% on the Rainbow Map of LGBT legal status, while Russia gets 8%, and Poland 15%.  Let's take a look at Episode 1, and see how "not gay" the Prince is.

Scene 1: Establishing shot of Bogonia. Several n*de women, one chained up, snooze with semi-n*de guys (one bare backside shot).  Can you show n*de ladies on Turkish tv?   

A chained up man who has been cuddling with a man and a woman both awakens to a rap on the door, and yells at the Slave Köle (Canberk Gültekin, left).  Surprise -- he's the Prince!  Identified as bi in the first scene. Maybe Altinok meant "not gay, bi/pan."

 The King has summoned him.  "So what?"   "So what?" He returns to his orgy.

Scene 2: As everyone waits impatiently, the Prince bursts in.  He touches the cheek of one of the courtiers: "Come here, my black lamb."  He lectures against Turkish masculinity: to compete in the modern world, we need to be hugging and touching.  

The problem: The Hungarian army is at the border, and Bogonia doesn't have a big enough army to defeat them.  

"So, get help from our neighbors, like Bosnia?" "No, they all hate us."

Uncle Kalish (Serdar Orçin) suggests just surrendering and paying the tribute.  "No, we'd lose our proud history." "But this country is only twenty years old!"  This enrages the Prince's Older Brother Tenyo (Çagdas Onur Öztürk),  who threatens to kill Uncle Kalish for treason.

King to Older Brother: "I'm lucky to have you as a son.  Without you, my name would die with me."  So the Prince isn't going to have any kids.  Maybe he is gay, not bi. 

They decide to fight the Hungarians.  Older Brother gets the horses ready for their 50 soldiers.

Scene 3: The King meets with the Prince in private: "Everyone has some regrets in life.  Mine is you.  I can't find the words to describe my hatred of you." You're just homophobic, Dad.

The King orders Slave Kole to bring his Very Important Sword  to the Blacksmith to get the handle fixed. "The Blacksmith is my oldest and dearest friend, and only he can fix my sword."  The Prince asks him to also fetch the "big ruby necklace" that the jeweler has for him.  Dude is into drag.

Whoops, the King decides to humiliate the Prince by making him take the sword in instead of the slave.

Scene 4: Older Brother Tenyo's Wife has just taken a home pregnancy test (the Medieval version).  Still not pregnant! He is not upset: "Don't obsess over it, it will happen in due time."  But the Queen has been putting pressure on her; she sent a gigantic crib, hint, hint.   Older Brother suggests trying again now.

Scene 5: The Prince and Slave Kole in the market.  He stops to look at some fabric.  Dude is gay.  A commoner complains that the people are starving while the royals live in luxury, "especially that Prince."  "Which one?" "The ugly one."  

Upset, the prince orders him executed.  Slave Kole suggest  they could give him a chance to apologize.  Nope, he's hanged.

Next stop: the Blacksmith, the only person who can fix the King's Very Important Sword.  Except he's the guy they just executed!

Scene 6: The Prince's Sister is practicing swordsmanship when her stepmother, the Queen, bursts in and throws her sword out the window.  "Act like a Princess!"  "No -- I don't want to be a princess!"

"Too bad -- I've arranged for you to marry the Duke of Saxony!"   

"What?  No!  This is the modern world.  I want to be more than just a wife!"

Ok, the main conflicts are established: Older Brother can't get his wife pregnant, Sister wants to be a liberated woman, and the Prince is gay.

More after the break

John Wahlberg: Adult video star from Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Vienna, Bursa, Las Vegas, and Wise

 

Link to the n*de photos

John Wahlberg appeared on one of my n*de celebrity websites, listed as "an actor." I figured he must be Mark Wahlberg's son, so I began the research.

Surprise: He only appeared in one movie, an adult video from the BelAmi Studios.

He's so incredibly hot, and I'm still wondering if he's Mark Wahlberg's son, so I continued the research.

There are two bios, on Facebook and BelAmi.  They have the same photos, they both say he's an actor/model, but the timelines are completely different. 

The Facebook timeline doesn't make sense:

1995: Left job as a Private Secretary at the Bistro Cafe at the Palms Casino Resort, Las Vegas.  There's no such job.  The Bistro Cafe hires cooks and waiters.

1995: Left job as a front desk hotel clerk at a hotel in Bursa, Turkey.

Wait, were you working in Las Vegas and Bursa at the same time?  Or was it a summer-school thing?

2003: Graduated from high school in the U.S.  

So, were you ten years old when you left the Las Vegas/Bursa jobs, or did you graduate from high school at age 30?

2008: Graduated from the University of Virginia College at Wise, population 3,000, in the far western part of the state.  It's a small, isolated school, unlikely to draw anyone who doesn't live nearby.

He studied acting, modeling, and penyanyi (the Indonesian word for "singing"). 

That university has a music department, but does not teach specifically penyanyi.  Or is this guy Indonesian, and just means voice?

Left: A voice major at the 2020 Honors Recital.

Now he lives in Las Vegas, where he is a content creator for the Bree Gaming Channel.

The BelAmi timeline is more logical:

1993: Born in Hungary.  Real name Benjamin Ders (try researching that on German-language websites).

2009: At age 16, photographed in front of a bong.

2011: At age 18, he answered an ad for BelAmi, and did a photo shoot before moving to the U.S.  His measurements: 6'0", 2 pounds (must be a mistake), 8.5 inches.

More details: He's gay, a top, hooks up with guys 7-8 times a week, and prefers the classic positions.   

More after the break.

The Protector: Turkish Superhero TV

The new Netflix series The Protector (2018-) is set in Istanbul, which is sort of interesting, but not very.  This is an Istanbul with no sign of Islam anywhere, which is almost as annoying as the standard gay-free San Francisco of American tv.

It's filmed in Turkish but dubbed in English, specifically an annoying colloquial "hey, dude, whazzup?" American.  Netflix uses subtitles for Basque, Catalan, and Hebrew.  Why Turkish?

I like Cagatay Ulusoy, but I do not like his character, Hasan, at all.  He's an annoyingly chipper post-teen operator with Big Dreams.

He and his buddy Memo (Cankat Aydos) hope to get the contract for renovating Hagia Sofia, the former Greek Orthodox Cathedral that is the most famous landmark in Turkey. 

Fat chance.   Turns out that rival contractor Faysal Erdem (Okan Yalabik) is killing off the competiton. 

Hasan keeps butting heads with his traditional father, who owns an antique shop: "We've got to be modern!"  I've only seen this a thousand times before.

And he's a stereotyped 1970s horndog, double-taking and jaw-dropping at ladies every five seconds, and getting cruised constantly with the absurd intensity of a shaving cream commercial, where the guy has to fight off armies of women driven to a sexual frenzy by the sight of his clean-shaven face.

But on to the plot:Hassan finds an ancient talismanic t-shirt which names him the Protector, a superhero destined to protect the world from the evil Immortal.  En route he has to find several more emblems of power.  He is assisted by a pharmacist named Kemal (Yurdaer Okur), the standard hero's mentor (think Mr. Miyagi and Yoda) and his daughter Zaynib.

Meanwhile the mysterious Leyla, who works for Erdem, joins the team, and...well, I don't need to finish that sentence, do I?

I don't expect any gay characters in a tv series filmed in the Middle East, but there isn't really much buddy-bonding, either.  Other than Memo, who is killed early on, Hasan's associates are all women or elderly men. 

Beefcake is also rather limited.  Hasan takes his shirt off a lot, to show the talisman burned into his chest, but the characters are usually shown in business suits.

I suggest skipping the stream and going for a pin-up of  Cagatay Ulusoy and a Google Earth tour of Hagia Sofia.

The Penis Valley of Turkey

This post has been moved to Boomer's Small Town Beefcake

Turkish for Beginners: Gay Subtexts and Nudity

Turkisch fur Anfanger (Turkish for Beginners, 2006-2009) was sitcom airing on German PBS, about a blended family.

1. Psychotherapist Doris
2. Her children, Lena (who narrates), and gay-coded Nils (Emil Reinke).
2. Metin (Adnan Maral), a Turkish immigrant police officer

4. His children, devout Muslim Yagmur and wannabe gangster Cem (Elyas M'Barek, left).

Lots of "girls! girls! girls!" proclamations occur, as every one of the cast has to choose between two prospective hetero-romances: Lena is dating Axel, and Cem, who is dating both Lena and Ulla.

However, from the episodes I've seen, there are gay subtexts everywhere.  Nils crushes on Axel. Lena flirts with Yagmur.  Cem and his buddy Costa (Arnel Taci) are in love, and know it (kind of):

Cem: Have you ever said 'I love you'?
Costa: What are you implying, dude? We're just friends, aren't we?

There is also ample male nudity, including this frontal.

You can see episodes on youtube and Hulu.

The 2012 feature film Turkische fur Anfanger has the gang all meet when their plane crashes on a desert island.  Cem hooks up with Lena, and Costa with Yagmur, but I assume the gay subtexts are intact.

Too bad it's not playing in Turkey.