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Preface: re-orienting sexuality -- Theory and history. Histories of cross-cultural encounter, Orientalism, and the politics of sexuality -- Beautiful boys, sodomy, and hamams: a textual and visual history of tropes -- Geographies of desire. Empire of "excesse", city of dreams: homoerotic imaginings in Istanbul and the Ottoman world -- Epic ambitions and epicurean appetites: Egyptian stories I -- Colonialism and its aftermaths, Gide to Chahine: Egyptian stories II -- Modes and genres. Queer modernism and Middle Eastern poetic genres: appropriations, forgeries, and hoaxes -- Looking backward: homoeroticism in miniaturist painting and Orientalist art -- Looking again: twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual cultures. The place of the Middle East in European heterosexual fantasy is well documented in the works of Edward Said and others, yet few have considered the male Anglo-European (and, later, American) writers, artists, travelers, and thinkers compelled to represent what, to their eyes, seemed to be an abundance of erotic relations between men in the Islamicate world. Whether feared or desired, the mere possibility of sexual contact with or between men in the Middle East has covertly underwritten much of the appeal and practice of the enterprise of Orientalism, frequently repeating yet just as often upending its assumed meanings. Traces of this undertow abound in European and Middle Eastern fiction, diaries, travel literature, erotica, ethnography, painting, photography, film, and digital media. Joseph Allen Boone explores these vast representations, linking European art to Middle Eastern sources largely unfamiliar to Western audiences and, in some cases, reproduced in this volume for the first time
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