foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Foucault, Gender, and Male Homosexualities 157
the books from the Abbasid period are bound with love stories of this kind.
The handsome boy of fourteen, radiant like the full moon, soon became the
ideal of human beauty, and as such is praised in later Persian and Turkish
poetry" (Schimmel 1975, 289). As in the Greek tradition, the early budding
of hair on the youth's face was deemed a great tragedy, since it meant that the
courtship would soon be over. Persian poets such as Sa'di and Hafez used
many metaphors to refer to this stage of a young man's life (between the ages
of fifteen and eighteen) when his faint mustache was likened to a violet or
budding meadow (Shamisa 2002, 52).
Some of the famous love relationships celebrated by classical poets were
between kings and male slaves. The beloved could also be the slave of an­
other more powerful person. Many erotic Persian love poems, in which the
lover describes the secret and sporadic nocturnal visits of the beloved, refer
to such situations. Outside the royal court, homosexuality and homoerotic
expressions were tolerated in numerous public places, from monasteries and
seminaries to taverns, military camps, bathhouses, and coffee houses. In the
early Safavid era (1501-1722), male houses of prostitution (amard khaneh)
were legally recognized and paid taxes. Bathhouses and coffee houses were
also common locations for illicit sex. John (Jean) Chardin, the seventeenth­
century Huguenot traveler, recalled large coffeehouses where young male
prostitutes entertained customers. Customers could procure the services of
the boys, and the most popular coffee houses were those that had the bestlooking
ones (Ravandi 1989, 7:493).
Remnants of an ethics of homoerotic love, with similarities to that of
ancient Greece, continue to be reported by Western travelers. In the case of
Afghanistan, much of which was part of Iran until the late nineteenth cen­
tury, gender practices remained more traditional than in Iran. In the nine­
teenth century, ethnic Pashtuns from Afghanistan serving in the British colo­
nial army sang odes in praise of the young boys they loved.28 In the late
twentieth century, the predominantly Pashtun city of Kandahar, Afghanistan,
was referred to by some as "the gay capital of South Asia, " and the practice of
homosexuality was found at all levels ofSunni Pashtun society, both rich and
poor. A local joke in Kandahar was that "birds fly over the city using only one
wing, the other shielding their tail feathers" (The Times [ London], January 16,
2002).
Anthropologist Charles Lindholm observed that in the Pashtun culture,
a man's object of love was often a boy ar a handsome young man. Before
the advent of modernity, guests were entertained by dancing boys: "No as­
persions were cast on men who had sexual intercourse with a bedagh [pas­
sive homosexual ] . . . . Men who are bedaghs are laughingstocks, but they also