From The Pervert, Back To The Beloved: Homosexuality and Ottoman Literary History, 1453-1923

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From the Pervert, Back to the Beloved:

Homosexuality and Ottoman Literary
History, 1453–1923
A bdul ham it A rva s
Early modern Ottoman poetry is predominantly about love; and for the most
part, both the subject and the object of this love are men. Same-sex male erotic
desire from the ifteenth to the eighteenth century is central to various genres
from gazel (lyric poetry) to mesnevi (narrative poem) and shadow theatre, from
sçehrengiz (catalogue of beautiful men) to tezkire (biography) and bahname
(medico-erotic treatise). While the image of the boy as the beloved pervades
the early modern literary imagination, a wide array of other male objects of
love calls attention to how same-sex desire is a complex phenomenon in early
modern representations. Yet, in the nineteenth century, Westernization and
the change in social dynamics at home transformed the “queer” paradigm of
this literary lineage, and heteronormativity has since then colored the literary
imagination, transforming the beloved into the pervert.
The Ottoman Empire includes Turks, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Jews,
Kurds, and many other ethnicities from various regions; it would, however,
be beyond the scope of this chapter to attend here to the distinct qualities of
all regions. In this chapter, I speciically focus on the literary production and
social context in Istanbul, which is the political heart of the empire as well
as the center of literary production from the late ifteenth century onward.
Although it is predominantly inl uenced by Persian and Arabic traditions,
Ottoman literature develops in relation to a unique sexual culture with distinct
categories and dynamics in Ottoman language and society. We have to think
critically about our assumptions in reading this literature. Indeed, a literary
history of Ottoman representations of same-sex desire, as well as sexuality in
general, needs to account for a history of reconigured and revalued readings
of these texts. So to begin this chapter, I examine recent critical approaches to
same-sex eroticism in Ottoman literature and discuss the theoretical problems
regarding the history of sexuality and its terminology. I subsequently turn to
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homoerotic examples in early modern poetry to uncover commonly used

homoerotic patterns and to trace their evolution from the ifteenth through
the eighteenth century. While same-sex male eroticism is at the center of
male-dominant poetry, women poets are also writing in this period, and they
raise the question of same-sex female desire, which becomes my focus in
the third section. The question of whether a same-sex object of love is supe-
rior is also a popular topic of literary disputes. Prose works in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries particularly profer such arguments, in the process
laying out the nuances of sexual categories in early modernity. After tracing
these intricate categories through historical inquiry, I present the nineteenth-
century paradigm shift in the inal section so as to “denaturalize heterosexu-
ality” as the norm, to use David Halperin’s terms (10) – that is, to undo het-
erosexuality as the unquestioned standard not only in societal discourses in
Turkey, but also in scholarship that analyzes representations of same-sex love
through naturalized, heteronormative lenses.
The Ottomans, Ottomanists, and Homosexuality

The understanding of homosexuality as an innate perversion and an immoral
practice in the nineteenth century, together with the reverberations of
Western descriptions of the Ottomans as sodomites, transformed the societal
norms and literary representations in late Ottoman culture and continued to
develop as the society strove to modernize and Westernize. This transfor-
mation also afected literary criticism in the ield of Ottoman studies. The
great Orientalist E. J. W. Gibb analyzed Ottoman poetry on the grounds of
Western morality in his multivolume A History of Ottoman Poetry (1900–09).
Subsequently, early twentieth-century Turkish scholars followed Gibb, whose
work is based on assumptions not unlike those undergirding travel accounts
written about the “pervert” Ottomans in Western travelogues from the six-
teenth century onward.1 Gibb and his Turkish adherents generated moraliz-
ing interpretations that imposed heteronormative readings on the poems and
relied on an ahistorical understanding of homosexuality. Some scholars read
the exclusive same-sex expressions and representations in the early modern
Ottoman poetry as perversion, while others read it rather in metaphorical or
transcendental terms – accepting the convention of same-sex love only with-
out the bodies involved.2 While some connect it to the availability of boys,
others, who try not to be judgmental of these desires, attribute it to gender
segregation, implying that same-sex desire was actually a frustrated heterosex-
uality. On the other hand, some use the gender-neutral nature of the Turkish
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From the Pervert, Back to the Beloved
language as an excuse to claim the beloved is actually a woman while all the
indicators evince the opposite.
The irst Turkish study fully focused on sexuality in Ottoman literature
is Divan SÇiirinde Sapik Sevgi (Perverted Love in Divan Poetry), a non-scholarly
work published in 1968 by a journalist, Ismet Zeki Eyuboglu. With an agenda
to disparage early modern Ottoman poetry, Eyuboglu discusses the (homo)
sexual aspect of Ottoman poetry to justify why it should not be canonized
or studied in schools, and why it must be banned, lest it corrupt the Turkish
youth (33). Interestingly, his essentialist approach and thesis, which claims gen-
der segregation as the cause of “pervert love,” have been accepted as given
by some scholars. Echoing Eyuboglu, Kemal Sılay, for example, claims the
Islamic practice of gender segregation and women’s exclusion from the public
sphere as the main reason for the homoerotic and homosexual relations: “In
a social environment where pre- and extramarital ‘heterosexual interactions’
were strictly prohibited, the absence of a real woman as beloved in poetry is not
surprising” (82).3 Love for young men emerges when the women are absent;
it is simply a substitutive, temporary, and situational desire. Sılay anachro-
nistically follows a homo/hetero matrix, and conines same-sex desires and
poetic expressions to the marginal sphere of a minority, a group of frustrated
heterosexuals.
In contrast to the early criticism, sex and sexuality in Ottoman represen-
tation have become a salient scholarly subject only in recent years thanks
to literary scholars and historians like Nuran Tezcan, Selim Kuru, Walter
Andrews, Mehmet Kalpaklı, and Dror Ze’evi, who have explored the subject
with meticulous attention to the social and historical contexts. Kuru’s disser-
tation (2000) was a signiicant attempt to present a transcription and English
translation of Deli Birader Gazali’s erotic text. Most important, Andrews and
Kalpaklı’s groundbreaking book, The Age of Beloveds, introduced a wide array
of translated literary materials and vigorous analyses, asserting that “for the
Ottomans, artistic literature was irst and foremost poetry and that nearly
all the poetry was love poetry” about the igure of the beloved youth; hence
the title, “the age of beloveds” (10). El-Rouayheb’s Before Homosexuality, and
Ze’evi’s Producing Desire inl uentially uncovered the history of sexual prac-
tices and categories in the early modern Arab-Islamic world and the Ottoman
Middle East respectively.
Such work was made possible by Michel Foucault and other social construc-
tivists who investigated the birth of modern homosexuality, and inl uentially
suggested that “the homosexual” as an identity is a modern, bourgeois con-
cept; indeed, Foucault famously declared “the homosexual [became] a species”
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only in the nineteenth century (43; see also McIntosh; Weeks; and Halperin).
Thus, nowhere in the early modern Ottoman texts do we ind conceptualiza-
tions of homosexual identity, psychosexual orientation, or stable subjectivi-
ties. There is not a term equivalent to modern “sexuality” and “homosexual”
in Ottoman-Turkish. The word cinsellik (sexuality) itself is a twentieth-century
innovation in the Turkish language. The Ottomans have categories like gulam-
pare (male-lover), zenpare (woman-lover), köçek (male dancer), mukhannes (pas-
sive), guzeshte (young man with beard), emred (beardless youth); yet none of
them can be seen as analogous to “the homosexual.”
Nor do we ind a normative heterosexuality in premodern Ottoman lit-
erature. As Valerie Traub attests in her essay on Islamicate sexuality studies,
while many scholars eschew the labels gay/lesbian to describe premodern
sexualities, “there is a tendency to use the term heteronormativity to describe
earlier systems of sexuality and gender.” The main reason for this is the lack
of or little efort in scholarship toward “historicizing heterosexuality” (“Past”
23). Even when critics are careful to highlight the historicity of homosexuality,
recent scholarship in Ottoman sexualities inadvertently approaches hetero-
sexuality and heteronormativity as ahistorical categories, failing to acknowl-
edge how certain sexual practices and their representations were marginalized
and became aberrant only after the nineteenth century.
Almost all of the works on Ottoman sexuality start with the inquiry: “Why
same-sex?” However, posing this question can be a heteronormative move – par-
ticularly if the answer to this question collapses sexuality into gender. Although
very careful in terms of avoiding essentializing any sexual identities, Andrews
and Kalpaklı’s vital work, for example, is at times trapped in a heteronormative
angle, especially manifest as they constantly try to elucidate why Ottomans
preferred same-sex interactions and expressions of love, as if there must have
been a good reason to go astray. The reason has to do with gender segrega-
tion and availability of men: “When all the world’s a stage and women are not
allowed on it, then the beloved is always a boy, however dressed” (22). Similarly,
Ze’evi, who is also attuned to historicity of sexual identities, and careful not to
simplify same-sex desire by referring to gender segregation, still cannot help
but declare when it comes to literary representations: “High-culture texts such
as Sui poetry, classical literature, and the theological discussions sometimes
preferred male homoerotic metaphors to heteroerotic ones, because the intro-
duction of women, in and of itself, was far more sensitive” (143). Irvin C. Schick
similarly sees gender segregation and Islam as the “likely” reasons for same-sex
love-object preference in Ottoman poetry, while nonetheless comparing it to
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the oral tradition, which mostly represents cross-sex love relations (90). Such
conclusions naturalize heterosexuality while seeking a reason for the wide-
spread fashion and preference of the literary expression of same-sex love.
What’s more important for the emerging ield of Ottoman sexualities is to
generate a history of the ruptures and turns in sexual and moral paradigms,
which may provide us the language and tools to better study premodern rep-
resentations. The widespread representation of same-sex love, the multitu-
dinous nonnormative sexual categories in Ottoman poetry, and the absence
of heteronormativity, therefore, urge us to observe when the change in this
type of conceptualization of the aforementioned preferences and the poetic
convention emerged, and when the expressions of same-sex eroticism were
silenced in order to highlight the processes of heteronormativity in the society
in which this literature was composed.
Same-Sex Male Desire and Poetry from the Fifteenth

to the Eighteenth Century
If your heart is not bound in the knot of his heathen belt
You’re no true believer but a lost soul among lovers.
– Mehmed II
Pious one, should you see those Frankish boys but once
You would never cast an eye on the houris in paradise.
– Revani
In early modern Ottoman literature, the gazel (lyric poetry) is the prevailing
genre of poetry, and the trope of love for a young boy features as the hallmark of
this poetry. Almost all early modern poets, from the ifteenth-century Sultan
Mehmed II, who conquers Constantinople but cannot conquer the heart of a
Christian boy in his poems, to the seventeenth-century libertine poet Revani,
who never cast his eye on heavenly women after seeing a Christian boy, to
the eighteenth-century court poet Nedim, express love through same-sex male
object of desire in their gazels. I focus here on literary materials that exemplify
the portrayal of the beloved boy, how the boy and the poem become one for
poets, and how poets compete with other poets for boys through their poems.
In celebrating their love for beloved boys in gazels, early modern poets often
describe their poems as symbolic bodies of their beloveds. The sixteenth cen-
tury marks the height of this trope. One of the most famous and respected
poets of the period, Zati, describes the poem itself as the beloved:
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By describing the beloved’s ruby [lip], the poem becomes a sweet-spoken

beloved
With sugar-bearing words the poem becomes a sweet, tender beloved …
Magically, I brought together ire and cotton in one place
“What is this?” I said, and the poem replied “The heart is cotton, the paper
lame.” (95–96)4
Similarly, Fevri, who was a slave in his youth and later a well-known poet as
well as a law professor, describes his poems as beautiful boys: “Each of Fevri’s
couplets is a lovely new-bearded beloved / On each one of whose hands are
written poems” (99). For another famous poet, Ishak - Çelebi, a scholar and
Islamic judge, “Poem is a jasmine-cheeked, new bearded, matchless beauty /
Heart attracting, well formed, sweet of speech and action,” and he writes
poems only when he is in love with a boy: “No matter I renounce poetry time
and again, when I fall in love/With a faint-mustached young lad, helpless, I
must compose a poem” (99).
Gazel is also a medium to attract the beloved. As the famous poet Mesihi
writes, the poet “aims to hunt that gazelle with gazels,” and likewise, as Sani
says, “The heart used poetry to bring that gazelle eye thigh-to-thigh / The
gazel is a wealth of capital to the boy-chasing reveler” (92). Not just written
poetry, but also speech links beloved and poem. Zati, for instance, sees Jesus
speaking in the image of the boy:
Let me say, longing for your lip,

should you recite a poem,
O idol, it would bring dead to life
like the speech of Jesus. (97)
Early modern poetic form and the homoerotic imagination are, thus,
inseparable.
Gazel did not solely address imaginary young men. In many gazels, we
see how poets compete with one another to steal a beautiful man’s heart, or
simply a kiss. The beloved boy’s name, in these examples, is hardly a secret.
Zati writes poems to his bath boy Nimet, who “stripped us, Oh Zati, he who
shaved us” (101), or publicizes Muharrem, whose mouth’s vial makes “[Zati]
lose [his] mind” (103). Similarly, a poet and a judge, Vasi, who is under the
patronage of the grand vizier Ali Pasha, explicitly declares his love for a janis-
sary named Memi: “Don’t praise the sun or moon to me saying they are loved
/ No beauties of this world do I love but Memi Shah” (104). Another boy, Kaya,
was so popular that there were at least ifty-six poems directly addressed to
him.5 Some young men, furthermore, were so popular in the sixteenth and
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seventeenth centuries that certain poetic catalogues – the genre of sçehrengiz

(city-thrillers)6 – ubiquitously circulated among people to describe the disposi-
tion and physical beauty of these young boys.7
Same-sex male desire in poetry becomes the object of criticism with the rise
of zealous anti-Sui movements in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. The homoerotic dynamics, nevertheless, continue in eighteenth-century
literature. Poet and man-lover Fazıl Enderuni writes his Hubanname (The Book
of Beautiful Men), cataloguing and praising the features of beautiful men from
many countries including Britain, France, and the New World as well as various
Eastern regions in this century. In his Defter-i Asçk (The Book of Love), he poeti-
cizes the four male lovers of his life; and his Çenginame (The Book of Dancers)
includes licentious portraits of boy dancers, köçeks.8 Similarly, the most famous
and celebrated court poet in that century, Nedim, openly writes about boys and
men with beards: “I wish there were me, a musician and a river side; and should
there be an attractive young man, too” (qtd. in Sılay 97). For Nedim, “compared
to a beard, the eyelashes and waist of the beloved, as thin as a hair, have no
value,” and subsequently, he yearns: “Oh Nedim, hair, beauty spot, eyes, lips,
and the lovelocks.… All these have captured you; however, only his beard has
captured me!” (100). Nedim’s striking and unconventional stress on the beard
and hair of the beloved men suggests the possibility of egalitarian same-sex
relations besides transgenerational relations. Evidently, the beloved is not a
beardless boy in Nedim’s poem, as he usually is in sixteenth-century poetry,
but an adult man with a beard: “From hair to hair, I consider every part of your
body kissable; / Please help me to choose which part of your body you would
like me to kiss” (100). In spite of antihomoerotic discourses, the eighteenth-
century poets further develop the Sui tradition and enrich the homoerotic
tradition in literature with the image of the beloved as adult man.
Dildo Women, Lesbian Desire, and Women Writers

Same-sex female desire and relations in early modern Ottoman literature is still
the terra incognita of Ottoman studies. Interestingly, early modern European
travelogues appear as a source for critics to uncover same-sex female rela-
tions. Sılay, for example, asserts: “Besides veiling, the separation of men and
women in daily life and the formation of exclusively male and female groups
must have provided some of the required circumstances for the expression
of homosexuality in that society. It is well-known that many Westerners who
travelled to the lands of the Ottoman Empire mentioned in their letters their
observation concerning homosexuality among Ottoman-Turkish men and
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women” (92). (Female) homosociality brings forth (female) homosexuality,

opines Sılay. Similarly Rei k Ahmet Sevengil uses these travelogues to claim:
“This psychological sickness [lesbianism], which clinical medicine calls ‘love
between same gender,’ was common in the past among women, too. There
were such wealthy women who made love to each other in the harems. They
had several young and beautiful girls and women in their service in order to
satisfy their sexual desires” (qtd. in Sılay 92–93). Sevengil thus distinguishes the
women of the “Islamic Middle Eastern Ottomans” from the healthy women
of the Europeanized Turkish Republic. Such generalizing readings do not
provide us with any textual evidence that can prove the existence in the early
modern Ottoman imagination of the notion of “lesbianism” as a psycholog-
ical disorder or sexual identity deriving from spatial arrangements. The very
discourse of the travel writers that interpreted homosociality in the Ottoman
Empire as a reason for the lascivious and unrestrained sexuality practiced in
certain spaces continues in the frame of such arguments.9 I must note that, of
course, there were same-sex relations between women in the Ottoman era,
but same-sex female relations are not represented as explicitly as male ones in
the male-dominant Ottoman literature.10
Deli Birader Gazali’s work, which I analyze in detail in the following sec-
tion, mentions same-sex female relations and butch/femme sexual roles,
albeit from a male point of view for male readers: “In big cities, there are
famous dildo women. They put on manly clothes, they ride cavalry horses, and
they also ride kochis [covered wagons] for fun. Rich and noble women invite
them to their houses and ofer them nice shirts and clothing. These women
tie dildos on their waists and grease them with almond oil and then start the
job, dildoing the cunt” (qtd. in Kuru, “Scholar” 235).11 As Andrews and Kalpaklı
point out, it is clear that a satisfying sexual relation between two women was
unimaginable by the Ottomans, and not even an idea to be entertained: “We
have not been able to locate a single instance in the Ottoman legal literature
of a woman being accused of illegal or immoral sexual relations with another
woman” (172). This silence is to be expected in a society where sex means pen-
etration and dominance. A literary work on sexuality would then represent
all kinds of sexual activities, even with animals, yet ignore woman-woman
contact because of the nonpenetrative and nonphallic aspect attributed to it.
However, as this example shows, Gazali does not reduce penetration to a male
activity. Apparently, the dildo woman becomes the very manifestation of the
possibility of female-female penetrative sex.
A closer look at the representation of women in writings by women writ-
ers may help us avoid phallocentric readings of the representations related to
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female desire. Known women poets of early modernity such as Mihri Hatun,
Zeyneb, Aysçe Hatun, Nisayi of the Royal Harem, and Tuti Hanım may help
us revisit the question of same-sex female love. In most of the poems, we can-
not clearly say if the gender of the beloved is male or female, while we can
infer that the speaker is a woman from the use of a female penname/speaker
in the last couplet. Mihri Hatun (d. 1506), an educated and unmarried woman
in a male-dominated society, is an interesting case. Considering marriage as a
norm for Ottoman women, Mihri’s case as a igure resisting marriage opens
her work to queer readings. Huriye Reis sees her as a poet subverting the
dominant values and norms, and calls her “Sappho of the Ottomans” (156).
Yet, Reis, on the other hand, asserts that “her position in her poetry as a lover
is not distinguishable from that of a man addressing a woman beloved” (150).
Based on this assumption, Reis interprets the speaker in her poems as “he” and
the beloved as “she” even though Mihri uses her name as penname (mahlas) in
the last couplets, leaving no doubt about the speaker’s female gender. Another
woman poet, Fitnat Hanım of the eighteenth century, addresses the beloved
as “faithful” and “cruel,” leaving the gender oblique. Likewise Zeyneb Hatun’s
call blurs the gender of the addressee, while hinting at a female beloved with
the use of “veil”: “Remove your veil and illuminate the earth and skies” (qtd.
in Andrews, et al. 53). Leyla Hanım in the nineteenth century competes with
other rivals:
I see my rival is chasing you – Come lie beside me …
Who cares what they say.
Leyla, indulge in pleasure with your lovely, moon-faced friend;
Make sure you pass all your day in joy.
Who cares what they say! (Halman 39)
The androgynous beloved – male or female – is the passive object of the

woman lover, which subverts gender/sexual/social roles and opens the poems
to further investigation.
Boy-Lovers, Woman-Lovers, and Other Categories

While most of the male poets choose the young man as the object of desire
in their works, or female poets such as Zeynep Hatun blur the gender of the
beloved, some male poets such as Hayali Bey desire both female and male
beloveds, while other poets such as Tacizade Cafer Çelebi exclusively prefer
to write about cross-sex love. It is a popular literary dispute among poets
whether it is men or women who best represent love.12 The famous poet Fevri
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writes: “the man of [true] love doesn’t look at the women of this world/ Does
an accomplished man conform to one ‘deicient in reason and faith?’” (135).
Similarly, another famous and inl uential sixteenth-century poet, Tasçlıcalı
Yahya Bey, in his own mesnevi, Sah u Geda, expresses his distaste for traditional
narrative poems (mesnevi), which use cross-sex love as the basis of their exem-
plary love stories, such as the widely circulating Hüsrev u Shirin, and Layla vu
Mecnun.
Those, woman-chasing, lacking taste
These, sufering, cure-less, and chaste
What do they know of love’s mystery
Of the rapture of love and its ecstasy.
A lover true forever tries
Making sleep unlawful to his eyes
Let him love bodies like cypress trees
Sufer, like Job, love’s agonies
Mirror of body and soul let him shine
As slave to a robust boy repine
Who grieves the love of a lovely boy
Never will Husrev and Shirin enjoy. (56)
While love for woman is carnal, love for boys is superior, deeper, and purer,
writes Yahya. The male body is a divine relection; and after enjoying this love
for man, the lover will never take pleasure in even the most famous stories fea-
turing cross-sex love stories.
Prominent sixteenth-century scholar, courtier, bathhouse owner, and der-
vish Deli Birader Gazali provides us with the most obvious one of these dis-
putes in Dâi ’ü’l-gumûm ve Râi ’ü’l-humûm (Repeller of Sorrows and Remover of
Cares). The worthiest love, for Gazali, is the same-sex male love for many
reasons: “Beautiful boys are always with you on campaigns. Moreover they
don’t have any guardians. You can take them into an empty room, or accom-
pany him to a promenade. You can put your arm around him, or pull him into
your arms and kiss him. Touching his face with your face, you can suck his lips,
or you can get him drunk in your arms. Neither judge nor master would stop
you. Is there anything better than this in the world?” (177–78). His erotic prose,
written when he was in the court of Prince Korkut, also presents complex and
l uid sexual categories and discourses that help us apprehend the sexual cul-
ture in the period.
Starting with advice that poses marriage as “the reason for continuity of
lineages, and the cause of reproduction; it is the basis of a family stock, and
the practice of the prophet,” Gazali notes also that marriage keeps one away
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from masturbation and the reproach of a beloved (158). After presenting

marriage as the normative union, he goes on to describe various nonnorma-
tive sexual practices: same-sex male contact, bestiality, masturbation, and so
on. As for the ideal love, he suggests the beautiful young man as the beloved,
after giving a lengthy chapter on a dispute between a gulampare (boy-lover)
and zenpare (woman-lover). Interestingly, women lovers are dressed “lady-
like” and their bodies “grow weak and soft” and feminine, while the boy-
lovers are masculine and heroic with their manly attire. The object of love,
for Gazali, has the power to emasculate or enhance the masculinity of men.
Gazali ends the chapter with a gazel celebrating anal sex. The chapter is
mainly about desire and pleasure: what is the most desirable to penetrate?
It compares sexual pleasures – anal and vaginal – while contesting iden-
tity categories of gulampare and zenpare: “ass is like a jasmine faced beauty
with rosebud-lips and apple shaped chin and with silver limbs” (174). Male
anality is described with exactly the same terms that traditionally character-
ize a beloved boy. Losing the dispute, the woman-lovers explore pleasures
of anal sex on the body of an old catamite, manifesting how l uid these
categories are.
Gazali further demonstrates how same-sex male categories may be com-
plex and instable by diferentiating various same-sex male preferences. One
group loves “fresh” young boys whose
cocks are sweeter than sugar cane
Their shit tastier than jelly
Their small balls are like rock
And their penises shaped like fresh almonds. (188)
Sugar cane as an active phallic image, reinforcing “cocks,” complicates active/

passive roles, making it diicult for readers to make the generalization that
the boy is always the penetrated passive one. Another group of men loves
guzeshte (young men with beards). Lovers of young men, not prepubescent
boys, ask if boys are really men, praising love among equals: “Guzeshte beau-
ties are able to appreciate the worth of a lover” and know how to have good
sex (190). The inal group is lovers of old men who don’t like boys or young
men with black mustaches but men with white beards: “One loves bearded
boys other loves jasmine-faced boys … / [But] I fell for a white bearded one in
order always to be alone with him” (191). However, Gazali pathologizes one
type: mukhannes, a man with a disease stemming from having a young boy’s
sperm inside his anus, which irritates and causes the anus to itch, as a result of
which he desires to be penetrated for a cure. Interestingly, the only category
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pathologized among the known categories in medieval Islamicate cultures is

ubna, which stands for a man who wants to be penetrated.13 While ubna origi-
nates from birth, mukhannes is what a man may become in case of reversal of
positions in same-sex relations. His stigmatization is evidently due, then, to
subversion of the hierarchy of the penetrator and the penetrated. A young
boy may be penetrated temporarily – it is quite acceptable because of his
young age – while an adult man’s desire to be penetrated is a taboo, a disease,
whether a genetic one or a later al iction. However, as Gazali’s explanation
reveals, there is always a “risk” for an active man to be penetrated in same-
sex relations and to become a mukhannes because of the boy’s potential for
altering roles.
Another prose example evincing l uidity of early modern sexual catego-
ries is Nev’izade Atayi’s Heft han (The Seven Stories) (1637), which narrates the
story of two friends and lovers, Tayyib and Tahir. They emerge from their
stages of müsçteha (sexually desirable) and emred (beardless youth), and make
a transition to the status of levend (adventurous) lovers.14 As young adults,
they follow boys in taverns, streets, and parks, and spend their nights with
other boys in Istanbul.15 Later in the story, these two friends become cap-
tives of two European men, fall in love with their masters, and develop erotic
relations with them as submissive beloveds in European gardens. Finally, this
strong loyalty to same-sex love unites all four men back in Istanbul, and the
two European men convert to Islam. As Atayi’s story demonstrates, although
there are expected roles for certain ages, the roles are l uid regardless of the
expectations. These two unattached young men are active while they are free,
but submissive when they are servant to the two Italian men. Mastery and
service as well as Christianity and Islam are imagined in this active/passive
matrix.
Rather than sexual identities, it is primarily penetration and dominance
that determine early modern Ottoman sexual discourse. As Atayi’s story
shows, the relations are structured in accordance with social roles, and as
Gazali’s text indicates, the younger party does not have to get pleasure; it is
the older man who experiences the erotic satisfaction, while the younger gets
gifts, money, praise, assistance, or a poem in return. To borrow Halperin’s
assertion about the ancient Greeks, “This is sex as hierarchy, not mutuality,
sex as something done to someone by someone else, not a common search
for shared pleasure or a purely personal, private experience in which larger
social identities based on age or social status are submerged or lost” (115).
Instead of a strict homo/hetero division, moreover, we see an evaluation of
diferent avenues for sexual pleasures and activities depending on penetration
156
along with a celebration of marriage as an ethical and religious union with a

reproductive imperative.
Westernization, Heterosexualization, and the Birth

of the Pervert in the Nineteenth Century
The homoerotic nature of Ottoman literature and popular genres started
to disappear in the post-Tanzimat era, the second half of the nineteenth
century, when, as Ze’evi’s impressive work shows, with the inl uence of
Europeanization and the strength of the ulema class (scholars of Islamic law),
as well as that of certain pashas and intellectuals who were critical of the
homoerotic aspect of Sui traditions, Suis changed their ceremonies, reduc-
ing the staging of boys. The literary materials including homoerotic relations
started to be censored and “needless to say, homoerotic love and sex did not
disappear, but now any discussion of such themes became shameful” (Ze’evi
97). Not only Sui texts and practices were controlled in this era, but all textual
materials that portrayed sex very explicitly, like dream interpretations, medical
and legal texts, and shadow theatres, were silenced. This is manifest in the new
literature that emerged in the nineteenth century with new styles in poetry
and new genres such as the novel, drama, and short story borrowed from
Europe. So, not only are medical, legal, and religious discourses Westernized,
but the literary tradition itself has also been revolutionized with new genres,
themes, and morality tales.16
Cevdet Pasha, a leader of the nineteenth-century reforms, for example,
reports in his autobiographical Maruzat the striking change taking place in the
moral conduct of people in the 1850s, referring to the eradication of same-sex
practices: “With the increase of women lovers the number of boy-beloveds
decreased and the sodomites seem to have disappeared of the face of the earth.
Ever since then the well-known love for and relationships with the young men
of Istanbul was transferred to young women as the natural order of things”
(qtd. in Ze’evi 164). This is the very adoption of Victorian discourses, implied
in Cevdet Pasha’s emphasis on “the natural order of things.” As Leslie Peirce
asserts, “the impact of the West on nineteenth-century Middle Eastern society
is undeniable, whether by force of intellectual inspiration and imperialist aura
or on the ground in the form of colonial administrators, missionaries, com-
mercial agents, governesses, young Muslims returning from European educa-
tions, and so on” (1336). The post-Tanzimat period engenders marriage and
family as normative institutions as well as a process of heterosexualization; and
accordingly, the literary representations undergo alterations, now promoting
157
Arva s
heterosexuality. As Deniz Kandiyoti writes, this new sexual discourse used

by reformers “attempts to institutionalize monogamous heterosexuality as
the normative ideal” (284). In the same period, Fazıl’s explicitly homoerotic
works from the previous century are banned because of their hostility toward
marriage. Heterosexualization, by eradicating homoerotic friendship and the
expression of afection, now replaces this once-best love.17 This process reaches
its apogee with the twentieth-century republican discourses of sexuality that
attribute hedonism and all nonnormative sexualities to the Ottomans. Yakup
Kadri Karaosmanoglu’s novel Sodom ve Gomore (1928), for example, depicts the
Ottoman elite of Istanbul, in the days immediately following World War I, as
decadent and hedonistic, with lesbian and gay relations as well as orgies taking
place in the last days of the Ottoman Empire – presented as the immoral other
to the twentieth-century, Westernized Turkish Republic’s men and women.
Although the change in the sexual discourse and the production of sex-
ual identities in Turkey occur around the same time as in Europe, the shift
in literary works of the two societies is incommensurable. All current queer
categories in Turkey – ibne, köçek, gay, lesbian, gulampare, queer – are sociohis-
torical and contingent productions, and do not originate from the emergence
of homosexuality in the nineteenth-century West. While in Europe the older
categories of sodomite, catamite, or efeminate man reemerge in the forma-
tion of the abnormal, pathologized homosexual identity – “the unrational-
ized coexistence of diferent models” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms (47) –
the Turkish discourses produce homosexuality as a new category blending
with and often including the older categories while simultaneously disowning
homosexuality as European “immorality.” Take, for example, the term ibne
in modern Turkish, which serves as a derogatory term indicating a man who
desires to be penetrated by another man, while at the same time signifying gay
men in recent usage. Deriving from the medieval notion of ubna, ibne uneasily
blends sexuality-as-orientation, based on the sexual object-choice, with sexu-
ality-as-hierarchy based on active/passive roles. Ibne, therefore, amalgamates
an Arabic-originated word and signiication (ubna/passive) with a European
term and connotation (gay/psycho-sexual identity). The deployment of the
Western-originated identity categories of gay, lesbian, or homosexual to refer
to non-Western queers may lead to the latter’s exclusion and oppression as
Westernized, immoral perverts by the state and some other political groups.
However, carefully studying older categories and their historical changes in
literature (i.e., gulampare [boy-lover], emred [boy], guzeste [man with beard],
levend [adventurous young man], luti [sodomite], mukhannes [passive/bot-
tom], ubna [catamite], köçek [dancing men], beautiful men, the feminine, the
158
androgynous, the eunuch, the hermaphrodite,18 or the masculine woman, the

unmarried woman, the dildo woman, the intimate friend) will not only limn
a strong literary history of and for sexually marginalized people and their
expressions of their desires but also help us show the complexities of queer
relations and representations. At the same time this cultural history will denat-
uralize and denarrativize discourses based on patriarchy, homophobia, hatred,
and Occidentalism.
Notes
1. From the travel accounts of Nicolay’s The Navigations (1585), Sandys’s A Relation
of a Journey (1610), Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), English
writers openly recognized the existence of female same-sex desire/sexual activ-
ity and located its center in the Ottoman East, associating it directly with social
conditions such as gender segregation thought to be peculiar to Muslims and
the Ottomans. Rycaut, for example, connects same-sex practices to gender
segregation and interestingly to the Ottomans’ misunderstanding of Plato’s
Symposium. For more on early modern travelogues on same-sex relations, see
Matar.
2. Abdulbaki Golpınarlı and Atilla Senturk exemplify those views: Golpınarlı
declares the Ottomans as perverts, while Senturk ignores the gender of beloved
to point out that it is love not the beloved that matters. According to him, all
such representations seek a unity with God by divorcing love strictly from sex.
3. We must take into consideration that all kinds of extramarital relations,
including cross-sex ones, were sexual crimes. Same-sex male relations were
condemned because they were extramarital. Moreover, even with gender seg-
regation it does not follow that cross-sex activities were unavailable; there was
access for men to heterosocial spaces through marriage, taverns, brothels, and
public places like picnic areas and gardens.
4. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the translated works are from
Andrews and Kalpaklı, with some silent alterations.
5. On naming the beloved in gazels, see Kuru, “Naming.”
6. Sehrengiz, mostly erotic genre of obscenely cataloguing beautiful men of the
cities, is borrowed from Persian models, and it evolves to include diferent
countries while the empire expands its boundaries. For more on the genre, see
Levend; Stewart-Robinson; Oztekin; Tugcu. On how this genre is transformed
into a visual cataloguing by European modernist artists, see Boone.
7. Bahname (book of libido) or medico-erotic treatises were famous examples of
erotic literature from the thirteenth century onward. See Bardakci for exem-
plary passages from Bahnames. Some other genres to observe such represen-
tations are highly obscene shadow theatres (Karagoz), jokes (Nasreddin Hoca),
mani, sarki (song), hamamiye (on bathhouses), and biographies of poets. For an
159
Arva s
excellent overview of sexuality and gender in Ottoman-Turkish literature

from medieval to contemporary, see Schick.
8. On Fazil Bey and his inl uence over the queer reorientations in the West, see
Boone.
9. For more on the Western travelers’ writing on same-sex female relations in
Ottoman Turkey, see Traub, Renaissance 198–206.
10. On female homoeroticism in the Middle East excluding Turkey, see Malti-
Douglas; Habib; Amer.
11. All references to Gazali’s work are from Kuru, “Scholar.”
12. Tezkire (biographies of poets) is another genre where these disputes are
stressed. The early modern biographers, like Asçık Çelebi and Latii, stress the
poet’s boy-loving or woman-loving disposition when describing a poet, evinc-
ing that erotic preference was something worthy to record about poets.
13. On medical categories, see Rosenthal; Nathan. Ze’evi also argues that ubna
was considered to be originated from the imbalance of semen of the male and
the female at the moment of procreation. For more on ubna and mukhannes as
sexual categories, see Ze’evi; El-Rouayheb.
14 For more on these categories and an in-depth analysis of this story, see
Andrews and Kalpaklı 59–84.
15. Some spaces are associated with speciic sexual activities. While describing
social life in sixteenth-century Istanbul, Mustafa Ali Gelibolulu talks about
taverns as spaces for same-sex love relations: “Some come to the tavern with
their boy lover, they eat and drink, and when evening falls they make their way
over to the tavern’s private room. According to the demands of their lust, they
extract milk from the sugar cane [they achieve orgasm]” (131). Bathhouses,
another popular space for erotic contact, appear in Asçık Çelebi and Evliya
Çelebi, as well. Asçık Çelebi describes his and other poets’ visits to bathhouses
to l irt with and watch beautiful young men. Evliya Çelebi, in his travel-
ogue, mentions the erotic atmosphere in the bathhouses and how lovers and
beloveds enjoy each other’s company in the warm waters. Some of the other
sexual spaces are Tophane and Galata taverns such as Efe Meyhanesi and Yani
Meyhanesi, the banks of Bosphorus and Marmara, gardens, cofeehouses,
picnic areas such as Goksu, or Kagithane. On Asçık Çelebi, who gives us these
sixteenth-century poets’ biographies, see Aynur and Niyazioglu. On sexual-
ized spaces, see Andrews and Kalpaklı 63–84. On garden as sexual space, see
Hamadeh, “Public” and The City.
16. What may be called the “modern state” emerges – with notions like vatan
(motherland), hurriyet (liberty), inkilab (change), and milliyet (nation) – in this
era, while, as Andrews and Kalpaklı show, the nascent forms of these may be
observed in the sixteenth century. See Ze’evi’s excellent overview on medical,
religious, and legal changes. Najmabadi’s description of nineteenth-century
Iran suggests a similar shift. Massad argues that comparable changes take
160
place in Arab-speaking societies. He suggests Foucauldian arguments should

be revisited by considering the emergence of modern Western notions of sex-
uality with respect to civilization building.
17. By no means do I suggest a total eradication of homosexuality in nine-
teenth-century literature. Post-Tanzimat homoerotic literature includes the
nineteenth-century anonymous Hançerli Hanım; Ahmet Rasim’s Ulfet, which
focuses on lesbianism; and Sait Faik of the early republican era. Recent liter-
ature has widespread representations of queer sexualities by popular writers
such as Atilla Ilhan, Arslan Yuzgun, Murathan Mungan, Kucuk Iskender, Elif
Shafak, Orhan Pamuk, Perihan Magden, Selim Ileri, Adalet Agaoglu, Bilge
Karasu, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, Latife Tekin; and ilm directors such as Fatih
Akin, Ferzan Ozpetek, and Kutlug Ataman.
18. For more on eunuchs and hermaphrodites in Islamicate cultures, see Rowson,
“Efeminates” and “Gender”; Marmon; Ringrose; Hathaway; and Sanders.
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8

From the Pervert, Back to the Beloved:

homoerotic examples in early modern poetry to uncover commonly used

The Ottomans, Ottomanists, and Homosexuality

Same-Sex Male Desire and Poetry from the Fifteenth

By describing the beloved’s ruby [lip], the poem becomes a sweet-spoken

Let me say, longing for your lip,

seventeenth centuries that certain poetic catalogues – the genre of sçehrengiz

Dildo Women, Lesbian Desire, and Women Writers

women” (92). (Female) homosociality brings forth (female) homosexuality,

The androgynous beloved – male or female – is the passive object of the

Boy-Lovers, Woman-Lovers, and Other Categories

from masturbation and the reproach of a beloved (158). After presenting

Sugar cane as an active phallic image, reinforcing “cocks,” complicates active/

pathologized among the known categories in medieval Islamicate cultures is

along with a celebration of marriage as an ethical and religious union with a

Westernization, Heterosexualization, and the Birth

heterosexuality. As Deniz Kandiyoti writes, this new sexual discourse used

androgynous, the eunuch, the hermaphrodite,18 or the masculine woman, the

excellent overview of sexuality and gender in Ottoman-Turkish literature

place in Arab-speaking societies. He suggests Foucauldian arguments should

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