#evliya

We have to separate pederasty and normal homosexual relationships. The first article I suggested is mostly about pederasty because that's what was common. But what is pederasty?  Pederasty or paederasty is a sexual relationship between an adult man and a pubescent or adolescent boy.  The meaning in a more general term is young boys (not officially kids but something like 12-20) + adult men (old men actually or high class officer) having sexual relationship. They based in on the ancient Roman and Greek traditions: One man can only find intellectual partner in anoher man (woman were only good for making babies....) and it went so far that "some poets maintained that only with a boy, one could have the best sexual experience." In ancient Greece it was totally common and normal among politicians and soldiers and then it became accepted in the Ottoman Empire too, especially after the conquest of Constantinapole. Ottomans took some of the Greek culture for example pederasty. Pederasty was was common among pashas/nobles/high class men and slave boys. They followed the ideology of ancient Romans: Homosexual behaviors at Rome were acceptable only within an inherently unequal relationship; male Roman citizens retained their masculinity as long as they took the active, penetrating role, and the appropriate male sexual partner was a prostitute or slave, who would nearly always be non-Roman.

Here is an example for pederasty among pashas: Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Paşa was dedicated a very homoerotic poem by the poet Ahmed Nedim, one of the greatest of the Tulip Era. Nedim had very influential patrons from Ahmed III himself to İbrahim Paşa and the Lord High Admiral. This Nedim usually valued the beards of beloveds in poets. So even though Turkish (even modern and back then Ottoman Turkish) doesn't have female and male form for words - sometimes its hard to decide reading a poem as if its for same-sex or not - sometimes its crystal clear that they are talking about men. I mean probably they did not wrote poems of women’s beard. Here is one quote from Nedim: "compared to a beard, the eyelashes and waist of the beloved, as thin as a hair, have no value" and "only his beard has captured me." Sprouting a beard has typically been the point at which young males cease to be attractive in Muslim as in other pederastic poetic traditions. The beard is a sex-linked attribute. Similarly, given the total depilation practiced by Turkish women, Nedim's ardent exclamation in another poem "from hair to hair, 1 consider every part of your body kissable" can only be directed at an adult male.

And we even know cases when a Damat (husband of sultan’s daughter) was gay: There were simply homosexual people also, there are known cases when in the harem girls became lovers (maybe they were just lonely though not lesbians) and there are pashas who were well knownly gay like the first husband of Fatma Sultan (Süleyman I's sister). We all know the story about it, but if you don’t here it is: Yavuz Selim I married Fatma Sultan in 1516 to the governor of Antalya, Mustafa Pasha. The marriage was not happy at all. Fatma begged her father in a letter to let her return home because “I have fallen into the hands of someone who treats me worse than a dog. Since coming here, I have not had a single hour of happiness, I have donned none of my robes. I have risen from the dead like a widow…. My sultan, dear father, let me wear cloth of coarse wool instead of the cloth of rudeness, let me eat barley bread, just let me live in your shadow". As it turned out, Fatma’s husband was homosexual and showed more interest into men and boys than into Fatma, so of course no child was born out of the marriage. In any case, they eventually divorced. Anyway, homosexuality of the pasha was so normal that Selim I didn’t bet an eye to the pasha’s behavior and while he let Fatma to divorce him (or maybe she only could divorce when Süleyman asceded it’s not clear), the pasha kept his position and title. 

And pederasty was common in the Janissaries as well... Among the Janissaries it was something like back in the days in Sparta: young boys became men if they became lover of older soldiers.

And what about Sultans? Even Mehmed II kept the young son of Greek/Byzantine noble, Lucas Notaras in his palace for sex. Lukas Notaras was executed after the conquest along his son-in-laws, uncles, male cousins and his sons. Only his 14 years old handsome son, Jakob was spared and taken to the palace of Mehmed. He stayed there until 1460 when he managed to escape and left to Italy. In Italy he was reunited with his sisters who left Contantinapole before the conquest. It is also said that Mehmed was in love with a Romanian noble (Radu). A Byzantine chronicler, Laonikos Chalkokondyles, said that Mehmed and Radu III the Beautiful (brother of Vlad the Impaler) were lovers and spent “days and nights together”. According to him, Mehmed once tried to kiss him against his will so Radu wounded his thigh and climbed up on a tree to hide from the sultan’s wrath. We don’t know what happened next but the chronicler recorded that the prince was again high in favour. Very possibly Mehmed II was both gay and using pederasty especially knowing his relationship with his female consorts. 

And were there any other sultans to be gay or perform pederasty beside Mehmed II? There is a story of Evliya about Murad IV. The point of Evliya’s story is that they talked to the sultan about a beautiful person, Handan, who the sultan loves and who Evliya says is really charming also. According to the story, the sultan asked Handan to take a rose from his/her hair and give it to Evliya to cheer up the grumpy Evliya. There would be basically nothing special about the story if it all happened in a Western empire. However, knowing the customs of the Ottoman Empire, it becomes clear to us that Handan could not have been a woman, since a harem concubine could not be in the company of foreign men, especially not with uncovered hair. It also makes it difficult to accurately recognize Handan that the name ‘Handan’ is a unisex name and that there is no male or female gender in the Ottoman language so we cannot know if Evliya talks about a he or a she. Because of this, many people think that Handan was a eunuch or a young man. Also Murad IV: For example, in his description of his life at the palace page school, Evliya Çelebi wrote of his experience of replacing Musa Çelebi, according to Evliya a favourite of Murad IV, who was murdered by the sultan’s former tutor. The sultan composed several poems, varsağı, about his beloved Musa, including the following, which he subsequently regretted and banned from being performed in the sultan’s presence. The sultan wrote of Musa: “The mouth of the beloved hints at the hidden mystery. / When he begins to speak, he hints at the magic of eloquence.” In Evliya’s account the sultan refers to Musa as dilber and mahbub, words often interchangeably used to describe a male beloved. Evliya wrote directly that he was there to ‘replace’ Musa. Evliya pointedly never refers to himself as a dilber. Even if the relationship between the sultan and Musa was not sexual and if Evliya’s role at court did not go beyond that of a boon companion, this episode still shows Evliya’s unease at even hinting at being in the position of a ‘beloved’. 

In the brothels there were feminine gay prostitutes also they were called köçek and were not simple prostitutes but more than that. A köçek would begin training around the age of seven or eight and would be considered accomplished after about six years of study and practice. A dancer's career would last as long as he was beardless and retained his youthful appearance. They were recruited from among the ranks of the non-Muslim subject nations of the empire, such as Jews, Romani, Greeks.  They performed to a particular genre of music known as köçekçe, which was performed in the form of suites in a given melody and so the boy danced. These boys often wearing heavy makeup, would curl their hair and wear it in long tresses under a small black or red velvet hat decorated with coins, jewels and gold. Their usual garb consisted of a tiny red embroidered velvet jacket with a gold-embroidered silk shirt, shalvar (baggy trousers), a long skirt and a gilt belt, knotted at the back. They were said to be "sensuous, attractive, effeminate", and their dancing "sexually provocative". Dancers minced and gyrated their hips in slow vertical and horizontal figure eights, rhythmically snapping their fingers and making suggestive gestures. Often acrobatics, tumbling and mock wrestling were part of the act. The köçeks were sexually exploited, often by the highest bidder.  Some of these dancing boys became extremely famous and were the cause of many jealous fights, especially among Janissaries in the taverns. When they boys lost their looks and their beards began to grow they abandoned their dancing and became drummers and trainers to the dancing boys... A group of these dancing boys was attached to the Palace. 

Did pederasty thing changed with time? Yes it did, and here I wan’t to go back tö köçeks. When the köçeks danced, men would go wild, breaking their glasses, shouting themselves voiceless, or fighting and sometimes killing each other vying for the opportunity to rape, molest, or otherwise force the children into sexual servitude. In 1805, there were approximately 600 köçek dancers working in the taverns of the Turkish capital and these situations with wild men went to general. They were outlawed in 1837 due to fighting among audience members over the dancers. With the suppression of harem culture under Sultan Abdulaziz (1861–1876) and Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1908), köçek dance and music lost the support of its imperial patrons and gradually disappeared.

After the law? Everything changed? Kinda yes. In a much-quoted document submitted to Abdülhamid II, sultan from 1876 to 1909, the historian and statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha wrote:Woman-lovers have increased in number, while boy-beloveds have decreased. It is as if the People of Lot have been swallowed by the earth. The love and affinity that were, in Istanbul, notoriously and customarily directed towards young men have now been redirected towards girls, in accordance with the state of nature. The decline in pederasty was, of course, salutary. However, the change also heralded the advent of Western-influenced heteronormativity in Ottoman society, and of the repression it inevitably entails.