ABSTRACT
For the young men, many of whom quietly believe themselves to be gay, sexuality has come to be understood as something a person just has. Among men who pursue sex with other men in Istanbul, however, men regularly respond that the opposite of gay is gizli; a commonplace adjective in Turkish that can mean anything from confidential to hidden, agglutinated out of the everyday noun— giz—for a mystery or secret or riddle. For men who experience their same-sex sexual desires in Istanbul as a giz—a mystery that may be challenging given values that animate their most treasured relationships in the city—words in place are a way of confronting this puzzle head on, face-to-face, riddling through the enigma these desires pose to them and those they love that seem to transcend the limits of any prosaic classificatory scheme available to them.
