Re: Ottoman Istanbul and Boy Love.
Posted by kit on 2026-October-14 02:55:16, WednesdayIn reply to Ottoman Istanbul and Boy Love. posted by Sick Rose on 2026-October-13 11:38:07, Tuesday
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Unfortunately I don't think there is yet a good general history of pederasty in the Ottoman world - which is suprising, given how culturally important boy-love was in early-modern Turkey. There are histories of Ottoman culture, like Wishnitzer's As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark, which lay a lot of emphasis on the culture of poetry, wine and boys. And there are wide-ranging histories of 'homosexuality' in the Muslim world like Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World. A lot of recent writing on the subject of boy-love is of course written through a fairly unfavourable lens. But the most interesting sources for most of us are probably the poets themselves - writers of divan poetry like Fazil Bey, selections of which can be found (of course) at GLTTA. The website also mentions the following text which I don't know but is likely worth chasing up: W.A. Andrews & Mehmet Kalpakli, The Age of Beloveds, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005. An academic study of pederasty in early modern Ottoman literature and its wider background, scholarly but a little spoilt by a politically-correct tone, including a certain amount of gaywashing. |
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