Futballer Erkut Ergiligür via Blu
Erkut Ergiligür, 21, a Turkish footballer who plays with Berlin’s traditional Türkiyemspor soccer club, said he’s faced continuing discrimination and ridicule for appearing on a poster for Berlin’s Respect Gaymes (Respekt Gaymes), an event that kicked off the city’s three-week-long gay pride events on Saturday.
The Gaymes, which opened its fourth edition Saturday at Berlin’s Jahn Park, is an annual athletic competition and cultural event organized by the 'Lesben- und Schwulenverband LSVD' ('Germany’s Lesbian and Gay Association'), Berlin-Brandenburg.
Ergiligür posed shirtless and holding a leather ball for a poster used last year to advertise the Gaymes. The poster includes the event’s motto, “Show Respect for Gays and Lesbians”. A slightly modified version of the poster is “plastered all over the city” again this year, according to reports.
But Ergiligür, a Turkish citizen, told a Berlin daily that he didn’t want to be the poster boy for the Respect Gaymes a second time because of the harassment and slurs he has experienced since last year when his image was widely distributed in the city on the event’s posters.
He claimed that Gaymes organizers had used the same image again this year without asking him for permission.
Sports: Berlin ‘Respect Gaymes’ opens with controversy about soccer hunk’s image on ads [contd.]
“I’m really pissed off. The organizers should be happy that I’m not suing them,” Ergiligür told Berlin daily Die Tageszeitung, according to The Local, a Berlin English language news site.
A press spokeswoman for Ergiligür’s team confirmed that he has “not been treated normally by his friends ever since he appeared on the poster and was constantly asked if he was gay”, according to The Local. Susam Dündar-Isik said that she and others associated with the Türkiyemspor have also experienced ridicule because the team has lent its name to the event as one of its sponsors.
But Dündar-Isik said the experience reinforces for her the need for the Gaymes. “That’s a sign for me that we have to work harder to fight the very widespread homophobia among youth,” she said
Despite the simmering controversy about the poster, however, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened annual sports and cultural event at Jahn Park stadium on Saturday. Fifty-eight youth teams are participating in the Gayme’s soccer tournament, according to The Local.
The athletic event brings together teenagers from schools, youth centers, migrant communities, and the LGBT community to compete against each other in football games, streetball, and martial arts, according to an unedited Wikipedia entry on the event. The main focus of the Respect Gaymes is to create an opportunity for personal encounters within the framework of respect and equality.
The event also includes performances by a number of artists including (according to a Google auto-translation of a Blu post) Squeeze Box Band, SheMoveZ, Biggy van Blond, Gloria Viagra, and many more.
Twittertip: @queerjohn