In Turkey, corporeal threats to Kurdish and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transvestite or transsexual people target both groups through governing policies and silent practices. In response, LGBTT people in Diyarbakir have been pursuing activism since 2006. Yet those who are LGBTT and Kurdish do not experience violence in the same ways. A focus on the local context of Diyarbakir reveals the reproduction of patriarchy within LGBTT activism according to socioeconomic privilege. In my example, I read one LGBTT group as a contact zone, wherein the important issue of socioeconomic status and moral positions on the “wrong” practice of sexual relations by gay and trans sex workers under local norms of patriarchy and Islam emerge as a social paradox to LGBTT unity. Scripting gay and trans sex workers as those who “have no love or lovers,” and as those who can “legitimately be killed by their families,” some gay and lesbian activists take a moral stance against those who fall outside of their homocentric and socioeconomic norms. Based on research carried out with two local LGBTT organizations in Diyarbakir, Turkey from May to August 2012, using data generated from participant observation and structured interviews with members of Kurdish LGBTT organizations, my research investigates the following questions: why do gay and trans sex workers represent such a source of tension for gay and lesbian activists? What can the role of necropolitics tell us about scales of violence targeting LGBTT activists in very different ways in the Kurdish region of Turkey? Using Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, which explains how power functions in uneven ways, targeting some subjects for death while supporting the lives of others, I focus on interviews with gay and trans sex workers in Diyarbakir concerning their fears of violence. Considering the ways in which gay, lesbian and trans identity exist simultaneously and in tension with local practices of unspoken same-sex desires, I examine the way trans has been reconstructed by gays and lesbians in Diyarbakir in relation to the local context of patriarchy. Further, this study demonstrates that economic logics are central to the ways in which gay and trans woman sex workers in Diyarbakir pragmatically negotiate their positions vis-à-vis established hierarchies. Due to economic necessity, they inhabit a very different subject position from Kurdish gays and lesbians, who remain largely ambivalent to their place of privilege in the broader scope of social life in Diyarbakir.