Byron and Ottoman love: Orientalism,Europeanization and same-sex sexualities in the early nineteenth-century Levant

Abstract

Byron has been seen as central to a Romantic vision of the Levant, the struggle for Greek independence and an idealization of Greek male love. Yet not much sustained attention has been given to Byron’s same-sex experience with Muslims or to the Ottoman culture of his beloved Greek boys. Byron grasped opportunities for same-sex erotic experience that the Ottoman Empire offered; yet by helping to establish a homogeneous Greek Christian state, he helped magnify the power of the Orthodox clergy that still acts in Greece as a brake on homoeroticism. In helping to Europeanize the Greeks, he helped destroy aspects of the Islamic world that deeply appealed to him. Byron’s Orientalism made him a bridge-builder between East and West; today we should recognize both the patriarchal despotism and the sexual and cultural wealth of the Levant he celebrated and helped destroy.

Keywords

Lord Byron LGBT Greece Islam nationalism Romanticism

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