My paper investigates the murder of a twenty-six year old gay man in Istanbul, Turkey, during July 2008. The murder of Ahmet Yildiz received instant international and national media attention (in that order) as "Turkey's first gay honor killing." The suspicion of an honor killing was caused and fueled by two facts: the official complaints Ahmet had filed with the office of the attorney general prior to his murder, which stated he was being threatened by his family, and the fact that his family initially refused to "claim" his body for it to be washed and buried according to Islamic requirements. Through content analysis of news pieces, internet discourse and ethnographic data, I lay out the discourse around Ahmet's murder in mass media and in LGBT circles; and I think through three issues: First, I argue that different queer subcultures produce different politics of visibility, while a simplistic out/closeted binary cannot capture the ways in which desire is organized. Outness however permeates the definition of being political (and vice versa) in the Turkish urban queer context. I use this story to think about the implications of this for who gets to have a political subjectivity and who gets pushed outside the limits of the political. Second, I show how the historical relationships between the institutions of the Nation-State and the Family in Turkey play out in this very incident. I pay special attention to the different ways in which family is discursively, institutionally and legally employed in the examples of the honor killing, the Lambdaistanbul family group's statement, and the international "Ahmet is my family" movement. Third, I think about the category "honor killing," the ways in which is it mobilized by the national and international press, and activist organizations, as well as the political outcomes of its employment.