In this paper, I will interrogate traditional/modern and East(ern)/West(ern) as central categories that have been employed in scholarship on Turkey. Unlike most of this scholarship, however, I will center sexuality as a vector through which such categories are animated. From the Republic’s management of uncivilized savage sexualities, such as polygamy and arranged marriages, to the recent and explicit uptake of LGBTI+ politics as one of the key sites through which the AKP government seeks to mobilize a voter base, sexuality clearly sits at the heart of the Turkish nation-state, as it does for most nation-states. What sites are opened up for interrogation and how are our categories of thought reworked when we place the regulation of sexuality at the center of violent nation-making, civilization-making, and contemporary governance? I suggest that understanding sexuality not (just) as a matter of recognition but also redistribution reveals its work as a mode of nation-making, land-settling, labor-power producing but also as a way to racialize and minoritize. The paper will conclude with a discussion of recent “anti-LGBTI+” marches organized around the country that work to push sexuality into a narrow matter of “perversity” that would trigger responses of rights and recognition. I will suggest that continuing to tell a materialist story of the work of sexuality despite these political moves is vital for true social transformation towards a different co-existence in the second century of the Republic. In order to make these points I will be bringing various materials on the two seemingly divergent points of analysis together: polygamy and LGBTI+ politics. Through an analysis of news media coverage of two sexual sites, "traditional" polygamy and "modern" LGBTI+, as well as of interviews with women in polygamous marriages and LGBTI+ activists I will show that sex is a central concern for the Republic as much for its ideological as it is for its distributive challenges.