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There were early signs, in fact, that even this summer’s broadest calls for greater human rights and freedoms were neither mainstream nor prompted by a shift in the public’s mood. At the height of the protests, in response to the new political threat, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held a rally of his own, which drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to a neighborhood on Istanbul’s coast. Polls are sometimes unreliable in Turkey, but according to one often cited survey released in July, nearly 60 percent of Turks not only opposed the protests but viewed them as an attempted coup.

“It was clear from the get-go that the bigger society did not sympathize with the movement,” says Hossein Alizadeh, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. “The protesters’ demands generated a lot of sympathy in the West, but I don’t know how much that resonates with the average person in Anatolia.”

Murat Çekiç, the executive director of Amnesty International Turkey, even wonders whether the liberal groups that rallied around the LGBT flag during the protests had the interests of the gay community in mind. “It came from sharing the same front, being on the same side,” not a real sympathy for the LGBT cause, he says.

One of the first post-Gezi tests for gay rights groups came last month, when lawmakers debated an addition to the country’s draft Constitution that would protect LGBT people from discrimination. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) pushed back against the addition, spreading fear among activists that LGBT protections would never make it into the final draft. But these concerns received little attention beyond human rights circles.

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