This is a typical scene on any street in Istanbul. If you are a woman, and without a "chaperone," male eyes will lock themselves on any number of your body parts. A few paces behind, the hirsute owner of these eyes will follow you, haphazardly hurling questions of every sort in your direction. Like the Pied Piper, you will invariably attract a following — all jostling, grinning and staring, competing for a response.

"It's like that here," explains Öykü Potuoglu, a twenty-six-year-old Turkish actress whom I just met on my visit to the former Constantinople. "The men never leave us alone." She tells me that my instinct was right: the customary way to deflect an unwanted male suitor in Turkey is to push him away with your hands — and hard. This kind of response to attention on a crowded street in London or Manhattan might elicit a push back, but in Istanbul, a man so handled will retreat, snubbed, into the background. Such an unlikely act of decorum is a reflection of the deference common among the less educated Turkish males to the "highly prized": educated members of the middle class, Westerners, and the Westernized. More traditional, obviously rural Turkish women may not be as successful in getting men to back off.

Even today, the legacy of the Sultans lives on in Istanbul. The magnificent Topkapi Palace still stands. Here, the Sultans of the Ottoman empire each kept a harem of some 900 concubines until the 1920s when, under Kemal Atatürk, Turkey became a republic. "Historically, there has been a sense that Turkish authorities own people's bodies," Yigithan Yenicioglu, a high-profile Lambda activist explains. "Certainly today some people are penalized for openly 'owning' their sexuality or gender. If you are a male-to-female transsexual, for example, it's very hard to get a job other than as a prostitute. If you are a young woman, you are generally treated like a third-class citizen with few rights. If you're a gay man, you are treated as though you have a mental illness. And if you are a lesbian, you don't really exist. Even the straight men are controlled because they have to behave in the 'correct' masculine way."

Turkey takes its patriarchy seriously. Freedom for women, particularly those with Muslim backgrounds, is limited. In rural parts of the country, virginity tests on girls are still common and female Orthodox Muslims are generally confined to a domestic existence. On my tour of the city, I noticed few women on their own; for the most part they were gathered in clusters or else accompanied by men. It is only in recent years that women have begun to play a greater role in public life.

I flew from a grim English town in West Yorkshire where the air hangs heavy like a dulled wine, to this bright, bustling Eastern metropolis of Istanbul in order to take part in Turkey's first ever "Man for a Day" workshop. New York performance artist Diane Torr (who is also my girlfriend) was invited by Turkish theater director, Gül Cürses, to give her drag king workshop as part of an initiative to form a union of sexual minorities and to kick-start a civil rights campaign here.
Diane has been "teaching drag" all over the world since she first discovered, in 1989, that she was able to pass as a man. At a Whitney Museum opening in New York, Diane had arrived in drag after a photo shoot with her friend, sex performer Annie Sprinkle. When acquaintances didn't recognize her, Diane decided to indulge her male identity for the evening. Standing alone and aloof, she was approached by a woman who introduced herself in a self-effacing manner, asked all the questions, deferred to Diane at every turn and basically pulled the plug on her own personality. Diane was horrified: "I felt awful. But I also identified with her. It made me realize that women need to be more conscious of the way they relate to men." It was this experience that inspired her to create "Man for a Day."

"Doing the workshop is more taboo for women in Turkey than it is in Europe or the States," says Diane. "In Europe, you have a history of female-to-male cross-dressers, such as Dr. James Miranda Barry, who cross-dressed in order to graduate from an Edinburgh medical school in 1812 and lived as a man until her death. In the late seventeenth century, Irish pirate Anne Bonny disguised herself as a man so she could sail and fight with the crew of the legendary British pirate ship, the Calico Jack Rackham. And then, of course, there's Joan of Arc. Here in the Middle East, however, there is no such history."

Most of the participating women — some straight, some gay — have Muslim backgrounds but are not practicing; they are "modern" women. To take part in the workshop is a real act of defiance, a flouting of the social order. Diane adds, "Ironically, it's probably the most visibility that the lesbians in the group have ever had. Lesbianism isn't part of the Turkish lexicon of sexual possibilities. There's this idea that women having sex with other women is impossible because it doesn't involve a penis."

Today's ten participants — all native Turks except for myself and Anna Dworak, a Norwegian actress — have gathered in the new gay bar, Kara-k, one of about fifteen gay clubs in the city. (In the four years since a UN human rights convention took place in Istanbul, a live-and-let-live vibe has slowly grown in the city's centrally located, unofficial "gay district," Beyolu, where many of these bars are located.) In a room overlooking the Bosphorous, Diane prepares to transform us into men with theatrical stubble, beards, natty 'staches, Ace bandage–bound breasts and homemade phallic prostheses (cotton-stuffed condoms). Later she will march the group into the frosty weekend hubbub where we will try out our new male personae.

Diane asks each of us to think for a few minutes about the kind of man we want to become and about the various nuances of male character traits. We sit in a circle, bodies square, jaws set tight, waiting in turn to introduce ourselves in both our female and male incarnations. First up is a lesbian activist hates the heterosexual elitism that abounds and longs to be accepted simply as a woman rather than a masculine woman. She's tired of the men at her office thinking of her as male and wants to see if she can actually "out-guy" them. In drag, she becomes "Farouk," a hyper-macho lawyer who "honors women with his cock."

Öykü hopes to feel more grounded on her feet as "Zeki," an unmarried carpet salesman. As a woman, she says she feels like a swan, buffeted by intemperate waters. She wants to feel comfortable walking around Istanbul after midnight alone and can't wait to spit on the sidewalk with abandon.

Günes Goker — the first and only lesbian to come out on Turkish TV — wants to see how men perceive women, how they befriend other men, and how big the difference in experience really is. Her male alter-ego, "Zart," is a laid-back student from southern Izmir who lives on money from his family. As a man, Günes wears brown leather trousers, a baseball cap and sweatshirt. Her dark woolen facial hair is styled à la George Michael — not at all, as it happens, a queeny signifier in Turkey. (News of Michael's cottaging escapade in Los Angeles has just reached Turkey and folks can't believe he's actually gay. "He is the perfect image of Western heterosexuality to most people here," I'm told later that day.)