Ancient Strings, New Healing: How Turkish Queer Communities Are Finding Wholeness Through Sound

There's a moment, Defne says, when the bağlama stops being an instrument and starts being something else entirely. "It becomes a conversation," she explains, her hands moving instinctively as she describes it, like they already know the shape of the strings. "And for the first time in years, my body was the one doing the talking."

Defne, a 34-year-old Turkish trans woman living in Brooklyn, began studying the bağlama — a long-necked lute central to Anatolian folk tradition — three years ago, mostly out of nostalgia. She grew up hearing it at family gatherings, weddings, village celebrations broadcast through a cousin's crackly phone speaker. But what started as a cultural tether became something far more personal: a way of processing gender dysphoria, family estrangement, and the particular grief of displacement that so many queer Turkish Americans carry quietly.

"I didn't walk in thinking 'this is therapy,'" she laughs. "But that's exactly what it became."

The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Forget

Across the US, a quiet but meaningful movement is taking shape among Turkish LGBTQ+ communities — one that blends the country's extraordinarily rich musical heritage with contemporary frameworks around trauma healing, somatic therapy, and gender affirmation. It doesn't have a formal name. It doesn't need one. What it has is a growing number of practitioners, musicians, and everyday people who've stumbled onto the same truth: sound reaches places that words can't.

The science backs this up. Decades of research into music therapy confirm that sound can regulate the nervous system, lower cortisol levels, and even help process traumatic memory stored in the body. For trans people specifically — whose relationship with their own physical selves is often fraught, complicated by dysphoria, medical gatekeeping, or the weight of others' projections — somatic approaches to healing carry particular weight.

But what makes the Turkish queer experience distinct is the specific sonic vocabulary being drawn upon. Classical Ottoman makam theory, with its microtonal scales and modal complexity, has long been described by scholars as emotionally precise in ways that Western music theory simply isn't built for. There are makams associated with grief, with longing, with spiritual elevation. When queer Turks engage with this tradition, they're not just playing music. They're accessing an emotional architecture their ancestors built over centuries.

Ney, Neyzen, and the Space Between Genders

Ali, who uses they/them pronouns and teaches ney — the reed flute central to Sufi musical practice — out of a small studio in Astoria, Queens, describes their relationship with the instrument as "gendered in all the right ways and none of the wrong ones."

"The ney is traditionally associated with longing, with the soul's separation from its source," they explain. "There's something in that metaphor that resonates deeply with a lot of trans people. That sense of reaching toward something essential about yourself that the world keeps pulling you away from."

Ali started offering sliding-scale sessions specifically for LGBTQ+ students about two years ago, after noticing how many queer Turks in their community were searching for cultural connection but felt alienated from the conservative institutions — mosques, cultural centers, family networks — that typically gatekeep it. The response was immediate. "The first workshop filled up in 48 hours," they say. "That told me everything."

Participants describe the sessions as unlike anything else they've tried. One student, a non-binary person of Turkish-Kurdish heritage, told us that learning to produce the ney's signature breathy tone — which requires an almost meditative surrender of breath control — helped them reconnect with their body after a period of severe dissociation following surgery. "It sounds abstract," they said, "but you literally breathe yourself back into existence."

Sound Baths with a Turkish Twist

Meanwhile, a different strand of this movement is weaving Turkish sonic tradition into the increasingly popular American wellness format of the sound bath. Zeynep, a certified sound healing practitioner based in Los Angeles, grew up in Ankara before moving to the US in her early twenties. She incorporates traditional Turkish instruments — the darbuka drum, singing bowls tuned to Ottoman makam intervals, and recorded samples of classical kemençe — into immersive group sessions she hosts monthly in Silver Lake.

Her clientele is a mix of curious Angelenos and specifically Turkish and Middle Eastern LGBTQ+ folks who found her through community word-of-mouth. She's careful not to appropriate or oversimplify the traditions she draws from. "I'm not pretending the bağlama was always a queer instrument," she says plainly. "But I am saying that healing is queer, because healing is about becoming more fully yourself. And that's a radical act when the world has spent years telling you that who you are is wrong."

The response from participants has been striking. Several attendees describe crying unexpectedly — not from sadness, they clarify, but from something closer to recognition. The sound of a darbuka pattern their grandmother used to hum. A vocal drone that sounds like a lullaby half-remembered. Grief and comfort arriving at the same frequency.

Reclaiming a Tradition That Didn't Always Claim You

There's a complicated politics to all of this, and nobody in this community is pretending otherwise. Turkish musical tradition has been wielded by nationalist and conservative forces in ways that explicitly exclude queer people. State-sponsored cultural institutions, mainstream media representations of folk music, even the way classical Ottoman music is taught in formal settings — all of it tends to center a heteronormative, ethnically coded vision of what "Turkishness" sounds like.

For queer Turks in America, engaging with these traditions means navigating that history consciously. It means deciding what to reclaim, what to reimagine, and what to simply refuse.

"I'm not interested in the version of this music that erased me," Defne says. "I'm interested in the version that has room for me. And honestly? When I sit with the bağlama, I feel like that version exists. It always existed. We just have to find it."

That act of finding — of reaching back through cultural inheritance to pull forward something that actually fits — is itself a kind of healing. Not a cure. Not a resolution. But a frequency that says: you belong to this. This belongs to you.

And in a community that has been told otherwise for a very long time, that's more than enough to start.