The chant—‘The day isn’t over. We’ve only begun. We won’t give up’—rose first near Kadikoy, on Istanbul’s Asian shore, then echoed in side streets off Istiklal Avenue. It was Sunday, and for the tenth year running, authorities had banned Istanbul’s annual Pride parade. Police sealed Taksim Square with iron barriers, restricted metro access, and deployed officers in plain clothes to break up any assembly. Yet the protesters came anyway, blowing whistles and waving rainbow flags, before being swiftly corralled.

By evening, at least 50 people had been detained, among them a journalist, Muberra Unsal. The Turkish Journalists’ Union reported that Unsal displayed her valid press card repeatedly but was still taken into custody. ‘Journalists covering the Istanbul Pride March faced unlawful interference again this year,’ the union stated on social media platform X. ‘Despite repeatedly identifying herself as a journalist, Unsal was also taken into custody.’ The detention of reporters added a chilling punctuation to a day already tense with state authority.

Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, but Pride has been banned since 2015, and the crackdowns have intensified in tandem with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s growing rhetorical attacks on the LGBTQ community. He has frequently blamed what he calls deviant lifestyles for Turkey’s declining birth rate. The weekend also saw the forced closure of a gay bar in Istanbul—ordered by officials citing unspecified violations, but coming after Islamist groups mounted an online campaign against a planned LGBTQ cruise. The cruise operator subsequently cancelled its Istanbul stop.

Amid the clampdown, symbolic gestures broke through. The Istanbul Bar Association hung a large banner from its building on Istiklal Avenue reading: ‘LGBT is human rights.’ The gesture, alongside the persistence of protesters who switched from banned main squares to scattered neighbourhood gatherings, signalled that the city’s LGBTQ community and its allies were not retreating. As Pride celebrations in Berlin, Paris, and New York drew vast crowds, Istanbul’s participants faced not only police but a climate of steady hostility sanctioned from the highest levels. Still, the chant stuck: ‘We’ll keep coming out onto the streets.’

As darkness fell, the banner of the Istanbul Bar Association still hung from its Istiklal Avenue building, a statement in black and white: ‘LGBT is human rights.’ It was a message that, for one afternoon, the city’s authorities could barricade streets but not entirely silence.