Out Portuguese Man Held in Turkey for 20 Days for Being Gay

An out Portuguese man recommends not traveling to Turkey after he was picked up on the street for looking "gay" and imprisoned for 30 days.

"What really happened in Turkey – human rights don't exist and this needs to get out!" Miguel Alvaro wrote on a video IG post in which he described the event.

The 34-year-old was on vacation alone in Istanbul last month. On June 25 he went to meet a friend for lunch and asked police for directions. What Alvaro did not know was that there was an illegal LGBTQ+ parade happening nearby. (Pride parades have been outlawed in Istanbul since 2015.)

Then, according to the British website LBC, Alvaro was arrested after being injured when he was thrown against a wall.

"After five hours in the police van, in which I was only told to shut up and be quiet, one of them explained to me that I had been detained because of my appearance," he told Portuguese outlet P3.

"They thought I would participate in an unauthorized LGBTI+ march that was going to take place nearby because I looked gay. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The police, he was told, needed a quota of arrests from the event, and he was the unlucky victim.

But it didn't end there. He was kept in a police van for 13 hours, before being taken to a police station the next morning. "He was then moved onto a foul immigration detention center, where he claimed that there were maggots crawling on the sheets amid other horrors," reports LBC.

Alvaro thought he was going to released. Instead, he and several other inmates were driven 17 hours to a remote prison by the Syrian border. There, he was threatened by some inmates for being gay, but was also protected by others.

He added that he and his fellow inmates were barely given water and feared sleeping for personal safety reasons. Nor was he able to use his phone to let friends and family know he was being detained. Not until early July was he allowed to call his father. The older Alvaro contacted the Portuguese embassy to ensure his son's release, but he wasn't let go until July 12 – 20 days after capture – when he was flown back to Portugal.

Speaking on Instagram, he said he would not recommend anyone visiting Turkey, but especially not gay people.

"Right now, I'm in a horrible psychological state, I'm very afraid of the consequences in the future," he told the Portuguese outlet P3. "I can't believe this happened to me. I pray for justice to be done."

"It is not illegal to be gay in Turkey, but LGBT people often face discrimination nevertheless. The Istanbul Pride march has been banned since 2015, with authorities claiming security and public order concerns," adds LBC.