Nicholas:
“The primary thing I focused on in preparing for the interview was my position as the interviewer. It has become increasingly apparent to me, through this class as well as previous experiences, that as an American, or more specifically as a gay white male from San Francisco, I represent things that have very strong meanings for many people.”
“I feel like I did a pretty good job of pursuing aspects that it seemed like he was interested in talking about and leaving behind those that seemed relatively fruitless. I feel like sometimes I could have asked more about one specific thing, but once he was silent I couldn’t think of a related question fast enough, so I defaulted to a change in subject. Still, I feel like I got a pretty wide overview of Emre’s life and ideas."
"It is interesting to experience how different the recorded audio is from the live conversation – the lack of visual information was particularly striking in places where Emre acted out situations or had sort of internal monologues.”
From the interview:
“Let me say, it’s not a cliché let’s say, but first, I’m a human. I don’t believe in the, let’s say, sub-IDs or sub-IDs. […] I’m a child of "Meryem", which is my mother, and "Faruk", which is my father. And also I’m a brother of "Esra", which is my sister. But I’m not a Turkish, I’m not a Circassian, or I’m not a Greek or something like this. I’m a human. […] I don’t want to call myself as a Turkish or Circassian, because of my, uh, just because of my father is Circassian. […] I don’t believe in this stuff.”
“[U]h how can I say, really hard process to find myself as a gay living in Turkey. I think when I was a, uh, when I was a freshman in university I told myself, ‘yeah, Emre, you are gay.’ Because in high school I didn’t, I wasn’t uh thinking of these issues actually. I would like to go a specific university, this was my actually only, let’s say, purpose to achieve. Nothing else actually in high school I don’t, I didn’t have any crush.”
“People think that, I believe in that by the way, people think that I’m gay. Because there is a stereotype, if you are talking like me or you have gestures like me, you are gay. Yeah. People think that I’m gay. But actually I hate this, let’s say stereotypes, because I don’t believe in stereotypes.”