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 miniature and Orientalist art -- Looking again: twentieth- and twentieth-first-century visual cultures -- Postscript.