Viral tweet claims gay men can serve in the Turkish military – if they're a top

Sorry, Turkish tops, being a giver will provide no special treatment in Turkiye’s armed forces – in fact, it will hurt your chances of recruitment.

Online rumours that the Middle Eastern country, run by rampantly anti-LGBTQ+ president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, prefers its military personnel to be on the offence seem to have spawned from some false information in a viral social media post.

Posted to X/Twitter on Thursday (17 July), user @karmavoodo shared his shock at a screenshot that claimed “passive (bottom) gay men are not allowed to serve in the Turkish military” while “active (top) gay men are permitted to serve in the armed forces.”

The terms top and bottom refer to positions in penetrative, often anal, sex. A “top” refers to an individual penetrating a person or people, while a “bottom” refers to a person being penetrated. Other roles include the “switch”; one who enjoys both top and bottom positions, and a “side”; one who doesn’t enjoy or engage in penetrative sex.

Wait is this real 😭😭😭 pic.twitter.com/29GP2tRlX1

— Karma (@karmavoodo) July 17, 2025

Expressive his shock at the apparent fact that Turkiye’s armed forces recruits exclusively from the top bunk, @karmavoodo exclaimed in the post, which has gained over 7.5 million views at the time of reporting: “Wait, is this real?”

No, it’s not real, PinkNews can confirm.

The screenshot appears to have been taken from the collaborative equality index site Equaldex. The site, launched in 2014, relies on users to update and verify the status of LGBTQ+ laws in countries across the globe, ranking them in a global equality index.

The entry featured in the viral post was submitted on 16 September 2013 during the site’s closed-alpha testing phase, using a 2009 Turkish progress report from the Commission of the European Communities as its source.

The report references the Turkish armed forces’ homophobic policy which deems homosexuality a “psychosexual illness” and forbids out LGBTQ+ individuals from serving, adding that conscripts who do not want to serve in the army and instead declare their homosexuality in a bid to excuse themselves “have to provide photographic proof” and, in some cases, must “undergo humiliating medical examinations.”

It does not, however, say that Turkiye military personnel must be exclusively tops to be eligible to serve in the armed forces.

The entry remained available to read on Equaldex for nearly a decade before it was changed in July 2021 to reference a 2020 report which highlighted the “psychosexual disorder” policy.

It was, however, changed yet again in 2022 to falsely claim personnel must provide “photographic evidence of them being on the receiving end of anal intercourse.”

One user notes in a post following the correction: “Being homosexual in [the] military is indeed illegal, but there seems to be no necessity to show any evidence about anal intercourse.”

The entry has been changed on several occasions over the past few years to remove and subsequently reintroduce a line about whether or not Turkiye troops need to be tops.

The current up-to-date entry reads: “Until 2015, in order to be exempt, gay men had to prove that they were homosexual by providing photographic evidence of them being on the receiving end of anal intercourse.”

This, again, is not the case. While Turkiye citizens must provide photographic proof of their homosexuality to be exempt from military service, it is not required that the photograph involve anal intercourse in any way.

The BBC reported in 2012 that a young man was banned from serving in the armed forces after showing a photograph of himself kissing another man.