Examining the divergent histories of the mainstream LGBTI movement and Kurdish queer/trans activism in Turkey, this paper critically scrutinizes the concept of (Turkey’s) “queer times,” used by Turkish scholars and activists to historicize “queerness” within the context of sexual politics under Justice and Development Party. In recent years, queer and trans Kurds have been under an increasingly intensive, extensive, and sophisticated regime of surveillance for their involvement in Kurdish and LGBTI movements, for attending and organizing public events and protests, and for explicitly voicing a trans and queer Kurdish cause by deploying radical narratives of Kurdish national struggle. These narratives have long been criminalized in a context of state-sponsored stoking of fears of national disintegration and moral degeneration while recently being strategically used by TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and Turkish cisgender women further to demonize trans and Kurdish causes in the public discourse. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish queer and trans activists in Istanbul and Diyarbakir, participant observation at the LGBTI Assembly of People’s Democratic Congress (HDK – Halkların Demokratik Kongresi), virtual meetings with a city-wide Pride Week Committee as well as following their disputes on social media with trans-exclusionary radical feminists, it examines how queer and transgender Kurds have developed a sense of Kurdish queer cause filled with affective dis/attachments, negotiations (of value), and insurgent ethos whose meanings have been shifted and refashioned in response to their national struggle and the economic depravity they were born into. The paper shows how queer and trans activists become the political subjects of the longstanding warfare between the Turkish state and the PKK as their lives and activism destabilize asymmetrical power relations, individual freedom, and liberal non-violence dominant in the mainstream political discourse of the LGBTI movement in Turkey. This work contributes to and expands queer studies of “homonationalism” (Puar, 2007) and anthropological literature on activism (Abu Lughod, 1990; Howe, 2014) by showing how their lives cannot be adequately described through dyadic frameworks of domination and resistance in a securitized landscape working on the register of intimacy and security, all of which have historically been shaped and shifted by the longstanding warfare between the PKK and the Turkish state.