This article analyzes how the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) 2023 election propaganda utilized political homophobia as a populist tool to construct and reinforce political antagonisms and carry out a crisis-driven politics in search of continued hegemony. Relying on critical discourse analysis of qualitative data, it demonstrates that during the 2023 election period the AKP’s antagonistic operationalization of anti-LGBTI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex) discourse unfolded in three modalities: as a culturalist rhetoric and a nativist technology of othering at the intersection of Islam and anti-genderism; as a tool of defining and vilifying political opponents as “inner enemies”; and as a policy perspective and path towards legal action and institutionalization of political homophobia. Within this frame, the article demonstrates that the gendered performance of crisis-driven politics is a core mechanism of the current democratic erosion in Turkey. It argues that homophobic propaganda is a key tool for the AKP not only to enact the processes of othering through fearmongering and scapegoating, but also to restructure politics through crisis-driven imaginaries, post-truth epistemologies, and emergency legislation that lacks political responsiveness.

Despite campaign promises to be the most “gay-friendly” Republican president, since assuming office, Donald Trump has been proactive in what many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocates call a “rollback” of gains made during the Barack Obama administration, shocking many observers and bringing sexual and gender politics to the fore. How can we make sense of the contradictions and consequences of Trump's sexual and gender politics? I argue that examining the transnational processes of democratization, political homophobia, and homonationalism illuminates the significance of the administration's actions. A democratization approach reveals how Trump's reversal of Obama-era policies and appointment of conservative judges signifies a greater effort at de-democratization through the contraction of citizenship rights and weakening of the judiciary; political homophobia clarifies how the administration legitimizes its governance through opposition to LGBT people and issues with the appointment of openly homophobic and transphobic individuals to prominent positions; and homonationalism, or the entry of certain queer subjects into the nation at the expense of racialized “others,” aptly characterizes forms of queer inclusion still taking place under Trump. For these reasons, putting Trump's sexual and gender politics in transnational perspective can help us better understand this moment in U.S. politics.