Part Two: The Gay Ottomans: Homosexuality in the Medieval Ottoman Empire

Cool Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did cool stuff.

You're a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things. And then sometimes Margaret, when trying to explain that, goes on a long deep dive and does an entire week of context.

I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy.

And my guest today is doctor cave Hoda of the House of Pod.

Hi.

Thank you so much for having me back. This is one of my favorite places to be.

Yay, you're one of our favorite guests. We don't say that to every guest. I'm going to listen and find out how many people you've said that. Yeah, no, that's fine. But also on this call is our producer Sophie. Hi, Sophie, I have favorites. Sophie's my favorite producer. Sophe's just transparent about it. Yeah, I have favorites.

That's all I'll say. I'm sure you have stories that one day we'll do a podcast just about that, just about producer stories. I have stories, I have favorites, I have enemies.

I think that behind the Scenes podcast one off, so people would eat that up. Although now that I'm like, wait, no, I don't want stories that gossip about me. Never mind, I'm against this.

No, no, no here. What people would love is like a podcast like once a year where I'll come on, I will follow on this granade, I will host where we tell stories, behind the scenes stories of your podcast, and we get Robert on as well, and you all can answer some of these listener questions. They must have so many questions.

We do do listener question episodes when we're I mean not when we're out of other ideas, but.

When we're tired. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got to do a mail bag episode. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, smart.

But a story that I want to hear from you, Kave, is that overbreak we were talking about how there's a lot of news out of Iran and I was wondering if you had anything wanted to well, to be clear, I already asked you this. I'm not putting you on the spot to be like, yes, you're in the diaspora, how is it like?

But I think it's important that people here. I appreciate it, by the way, I mean, I really do. It's you know, in the last couple of months, it's been a weird time to be Iranian. It's been a weird time to be in the diaspora. You could argue it's been a weird time for like the last forty plus years, but it's been particularly weird. And then that got ratcheted up when the president of the most powerful military in the world threatened to annihilate a civilization of which you are part of. So that was a really it's been a strange couple of months. Boy, I've lost track of time.

Ninety days, it's it been three months.

I did, don't even know. It's been the shortest and longest war all at once.

You know, time is a flat circle, and I have lost sense of what's happening. So I recently went to the World Cup game in Los Angeles with Iran playing New Zealand. Really fascinating look into the diaspora and how they're interacting and responding to what's happening in Iran now, because as you know, the diaspora is really wide, really varied, and there's lots of different opinions on it and less so now. But in the beginning, there was incredibly strong emotions on both sides. There were some people who were very excited about the prospect of their being war with Iranians being excited about it to see the regime faull and there was people who were really concerned about war because war is terrible and they saw the human cost

that would ensue. So you saw a lot of that at this World Cup game. It was fun. It was a weird little microcosm of that. So I took my son's we went to the World Cup. My first time ever going to a World Cup game, so it was a trip. They're playing New Zealand. By the way, you know the name of the New Zea team, it's the All Whites. That's the name of the team. Is the All whiteside? What does it mean to them? I'm assuming it's because their jersey is all white. I don't I'm assuming it's not like I think, because it do have like Mallori players and like non you know, white players on it. But that's the name of their team historically, is the all Whites. Guys can't get over that. It's bizarre.

I knew going into it was going to be weird. There's never been a time in modern history where Iran hasn't played somewhere on the world stage, and Olympics a World Cup something like that, and there hasn't been a lot of drama around it. There's always something. These poor players are just like these kids who just want to play, right, Yeah, that's all they want to do. But there's all this stuff around it, and there's no exception. Now they're not allowed the team has not been allowed to stay in the US, so they have to like come in from Tijuana, go to their games, go right back. They don't have time to relax and rest. There's all this weird stuff that's going on with the team. It's really uncomfortable. That

being said, so we go to the game. Sorry, this is taking forever, and I'm gonna try and to limit this because this is not what the podcast is about. We have a lot of really important gay stuff to discuss.

Yeah, we gotta talk about stuff from a thousand years ago. We can't talk about anything happening now.

Yeah no. But so anyways, you go in. It is a wild experience because there are people there who are you know, monarchists who want Rezopolay to come back. There are people that were there who are were pro regime. There are people flying both flags. Technically FIFA said you weren't supposed to bring in the Lion flag, the pre Islamic Revolution flag, but people had it anyways, and first of all, fuck FIFA, Yeah, fuck FIFA. Oh yeah, absolutely, that was hard. I mean I had a whole discussion with my wife about going because we didn't want to support FIFA, but at the same time, you want to support these players, right.

Like football is life for so much of the world, you know it.

Really it must have been like whiplash and very confusing to not on Iranians that were there because the crowd was mostly you know, pro Iran. It's La Tarandulus, so it's like a home game for you know, for Iran, and there was my seventy thousand plus people there all cheering for the Iranian players. But anytime they saw like a flag with the Islamic Republic regime like logo on it or they had and they were very careful they put that on everything, as opposed to previous World Cups where it just be Iran would be on like the jersey or the shirt you buy, these all have ire Islamic Republic of Iran, Okay, so they're really trying hard to brand it that way. And FIFA was making everything that way, So anytime they saw that there would be

instantaneous booze, so you'd be like whiplash between like cheers and then booze and cheers.

So it's like we support you and we hate the regime.

Exactly, but it's so hard, I think for people to I don't know how the players received. Hopefully they saw that people were there too. For the large part, there were some monarchists outside who were like, this doesn't even end us because they are playing for this regime. And I think for the most part that the people in the stadium were for the players and supportive of the players and could separate them from the regime. But it was complicated. It was a really interesting vibe and I think it really could show what's happening in the Iranian diaspora. Now. Yeah, it's been a weird time.

I got to imagine, like I am not a big fan of the Irunian regime, and like my friends who I've talked to are in the diaspora had a moment of like feeling really isolated from a lot of their friends, where they're like, I hope someone destroys the regime, you know, but like, yeah, and obviously you know, my friends aren't idiots.

They knew that it wasn't necessarily going to be good, right, and like, obviously, like the Irunian people seem to be the people who are suffering most dramatically from it. But I like watching the United States lose that war was like oddly dissatisfying. I am like not a campus. I'm not like like the Iranian regime. Like everyone I talk to you is like, oh, that's the imperial power in that part of the world, and like it's not good.

They're not the good guys. It's still like, you know, you're talking about like, oh, the most powerful military in the world is threatening to destroy an entire culture, and it's like, yeah, they're not very good at it.

Yeah. That's also part of the confusion for people like me. I'm like, what's I upset when they killed a couple of the fascists over there? You know, I'm never pro death, but like, I wasn't upset about it because the regime is terrible, right, it's awful. They hurt their own people, that kill their own people. They need to go. But at the same time, did I feel like this was the way to do it? I feel like this was the administration that could pull it off. Do I feel like this administration actually gave a damn about the Iranian people? No, obviously not. And so it is kind of weird having this play out in a way where it's like the worst case scenario in a way, because lots of innocent Iranians got hurt and they're probably coming out of this

just as well as they did before. Yeah, we exchanged one comedy for another. He was younger and more angry at us. You know, there's more fascist hardliners. There's no intent really for regime change. This was the worst possible outcome, done by the worst possible people to be doing it. And it's just it's hard being an Iranian person because it's like it's fantastic on one hand because we're beautiful and hairy, but on the other it's like we're always stuck between the option of having like an Islamic fascist dictatorship or some imperialist powers in place, or some cycle between the two of those. That's all there is, you know, And it has been a bit confusing, I have to say.

And I would love, love, love, love to see the regime topple and go away. Yeah, for so many reasons, but the fact that I can also appreciate where you're coming from, where you're like, it's also kind of like funny that the US couldn't do it right.

I want the Runnion people to overthrow their government, not in a like it's on them, Like I understand why they're like desperate for the world help, and it just the whole thing makes me sad. It's like it's gallows laughter if it's anything although a detached you know, like just caring about some people.

A thing that has sat with me for a very.

Long time is that there's a book I helped edit years ago about the Kurdish rebellion in Rashava. I'm called a Small Key can Open a Large Door. And there was a man who translated it in Iran who was put in prison for doing that, and I haven't been able to follow up in years, and so like in the back of my head like always is kind of this, Like I didn't write that book. I worked at a collective publisher that did a lot of work around doing English language books around Rashava and like just being like a thing I helped produce, this man is in prison for like yeah, right, has always sat in the back of my mind. Yeah, anyway to go way back in history to talk about kind of the same region.

Actually, we're going to talk about Persia more explicitly a lot, yes and exactly.

Yeah, okay, but there's one more thing we have to talk about before we can talk about homosexuality in the medieval Muslim world, and that, unfortunately is the reason why I was like bummed about all these episodes. We have to talk about the age of maturity. Oh yeah, if you're like me, you spend a lot of your time looking at the age of various people when they got married at various places and times, in various social classes, and like charts and graphs, because that's interesting to you.

If you're like me, for example, you know how like if you read an old timey book about ye oldie sword times in Europe, all of the nobility gets married off young as shit, you would assume that the peasants are even more fucked up and they're all.

Getting married young as shit too. Yeah, this is not the case.

It was only the upper classes of medieval Europe who were getting married young as shit because they were being married in order to structure power. Only in this case, not just at like a small family level, but at the state level.

Right, no power comes no responsibility. Yeah, I see, yeah exactly. The rich are actually worse.

Yeah, only the pearls are free or whatever. The peasants were more likely to marry for love, and they married much later, like five to ten years later than the average noble person. I have read really contrasting things. One thing I read was like, women are getting married so much later, like fifteen to twenty instead of like ten to fifteen or whatever. But I read another thing that was like women were getting married till they were like twenty five to thirty. So this modern age, which is like when most people would assume a European peasant is.

Dead, is when they were getting married. Yeah, because I assume they're going out at thirty.

Right, which actually has to do with like the skewing of Well, you might be shocked to know this, but before modern medicine, a lot of people did not survive childhood.

Again, you and your vaccines, okay, Margaret. Yeah.

When I think of the things that I'm like the least want to get rid of, like antibiotics and vaccines are pretty much the top of that list.

Top of my list.

The mRNA vaccine is the most exciting thing that's happened in my lifetime.

Like, yeah, absolutely, Can I ask an aside about the age of maturity and consent and stuff as a historian someone who's you know, read a lot as a Papa story and I guess the historian. Do you ever wonder if, like someday one hundred years from now, people are going to look back at our current time and be like, can you believe they felt the age of consent was eighteen.

Or it was sort of like twenty four or thirty like that forty five? Yeah, you know, like what or whatever you know is there? Like how do we decide because we kind of we all know like what's too young?

We think, right? But like right, are we still wrong? Like how would we know? How do you know?

I do think all the time about what are the things that we assume is totally normal now that people are going to be like I can't believe they.

Thought that shit? Right?

Yeah, and around like cultural stuff like queerness or whatever, right, Like you know, when we look back at like old timey ways being trans people are like, oh that's silly, And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure, whatever we're doing is gonna look silly, So I bet age stuff will be part of that too, But I like it gets messy because at some point you're like, well, now you're just denying people agency, right, and so like, I personally not around age of consent stuff, but like the idea that things get knocked up to twenty one, like drinking, Like it's kind of offensive to me because I'm like, are you an adult or not? And maybe it's because like my very neurotypical brain likes being able to categorize things,

and so like in my mind, I'm like, look, you're either an adult or not. You know, Like I'm old enough to die for this country, but I'm old enough to drink. Was very strongly how I felt when I was eighteen. On the other hand, I lived in Brooklyn and then was a traveler. I had never had any problems drinking before I was twenty one. This was not a problem I had. You weren't beholden to those laws.

I get, yeah, but I don't know. I also think that we'll probably start seeing it less as like as soon as someone crosses this lat everything's totally fine.

You know.

When people are like, ah, Yes, it's totally fine to date an eighteen year old when you're you know, like like the Leonardo DiCaprio model is not.

A good one. Yeah, for many reasons.

Yeah, I think that our understandings around consent will change.

But I don't know.

I know the argument around drinking has to do with like destroying your developing brain or whatever.

But as I've gotten older, one thing I talked to my kids about is, you know, I'm not opposed to them if they want to explore certain things when they get older, but I do worry about anything that affects like their prefrontal cortex or they're developing brains until they get to a certain age and we think, now that's like you know, early twenties, twenty four to twenty five.

So do I want them to not be able to drink until then? You know, that's a tough conversation to have, you know, And I don't know, but at least in moderation, So it's something to consider, Right, There's a lot of context.

And prohibition tends to have the contradictory effect, you know, Right, So it's possible. When I talk about the numbers, the age of marriage numbers in the medieval Muslim world. I'm talking maybe about social elites, because that might be the only thing we have numbers for.

I actually don't know.

I tried to find class stratified numbers and I was not able to do so. But in general, and this is not wildly different than Europe. I know, I was just talking about peasants get married at twenty five, but like people were married in medieval ages, like puberty largely right, if your nobility, boys are getting married a little bit older than girls. And that's how it was in the medieval Muslim world. It was rare for boys under the age of fifteen to get married, but it was normal, but potentially not common, as one scholar points out, for girls to be married as young as nine. But there were also laws and customs that would allow a girl who is married before puberty to get divorced at puberty, maybe by her family but not I read so much

contradictory ship for this fucking episode, because I'm talking about a huge multicultural society.

Over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years.

But my inference none of this was determined by Ottoman law, but by local cultural customs and religious law. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, and then in nineteen seventeen, the Ottoman Empire, on its death Knell passed laws moving the age of marriage to eighteen for men and seventeen for women. But interestingly enough, you could still marry a nine year old girl if a judge allowed it, which makes it before you're like, oh, those crazy Middle Easterns, you can do that shit in America, like I learned very recently, you know how, like in America a family or.

A judge consense, you can an adult can marry a minor.

That minor is not allowed to get divorced without like a parent's consent, right without a parent or judge consent, because that's when you say eighteen is the age consent and like illegal coming of age, and you make this loophole anyway, it's terrible.

The world is terrible.

And so when you're like, oh, those terrible old timey like America is looked at as very backwards in much of the world for the fact that people let children get married.

I really hope that doesn't happen very often. I really I wish it wouldn't happen at all, but I do wonder. And then you also like run across.

Like I met a homeless guy once who was like I was talking to him and he was like, oh, I'm on the sex offender registry because when I was eighteen, I was caught sleeping with my sixteen year old girlfriend, you know, and like now he like can't get a job, and like I think that's why they're like understanding the like shifting whatever. Anyway, this is not my People who get to into the age consent are fucking sketchy.

It does get weird when when there's the dude who knows the age of consent in every stage. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That man has a problem and should be dealt with as a problem. But a fascinating thing that I kept in the script because you were my guest. While I was looking for consent ages, I learned that the Ottoman Empire had informed medical consent for centuries before Europe. To quote a paper, I love a title like this. To quote a paper titled a written consent form dating back to fifteen twenty four in Sharia court records and a proposal for a new start date for consent forms. Which is the name of the paper for a catchy title, Yeah, the authors argue. Basically, the title they argue, quote Obtaining Consent in scientific research from human Beings, was considered to have originated from the Nuremberg Code. However, with this study,

it has been shown that the concept of informed consent was already present in the Ottoman period during the sixteenth century, and that the original consent document dates back to fifteen twenty four pertaining to a surgical intervention.

You know, it's actually I mean, I'm going to be that Irandian guy who's going to everything. Persians did it fair. Probably we had all these things. That's a really good Persian impression. In case didn't know out there listeners, if you didn't catch that impression, that means you don't have enough Persian friends. Yeah, but yes, there is. Actually I am writing a script for another story about a very famous Persian physician, someone who's considered the father of modern medicine.

And it was in this part of the world where the idea of consent for procedures for testing first started. But it wasn't codified in any way back okay then, but yeah, this was certainly not something that I think was happening in other parts of the world, at least in Europe.

Yeah, whenever I'm doing research and I find like the first time this happened in the world, and I'm like, do you mean written down by a white person? So I think you mean written down by a white person, And like it doesn't surprise me that even this like fifteen twenty four is like like, nah, this is probably like reasonably standard. And as they're saying, it was like just hadn't been codified necessarily, right exactly. Yeah, but do you know what is codified into our contracts?

Yeah, we have to pay homage to the brave men and women and non binary folks behind the ads that support good podcasting. That's right, here they are and we're back.

So okay, I'm talking about how, like, you know, people are getting married fairly young in medieval the medieval Muslim world, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines. In order to respect local customs, they had to raise the minimum age of marrying girls from twelve to thirteen.

Wow. So and there's probably like the whole like the in cells of the time up at arms. Yeah. Yeah.

And the reason that this age of consent stuff matters to this story is that the homoerotic literature produced at simply astounding rates by the medieval Muslim world focused on what today we would call pederasti love and or sex between adult men and teenaged boys. And that was the like dash shit, I've already started writing this moment for me right for a long time, and we're going to talk about it skewing older later, although that might be cherry picking that I am both prone to and the people I'm reading might be prone to. For a long time, the idealized sexual partner was basically a fourteen year old boy who was just starting to get facial hair. And I almost didn't want to do these episodes because I

get sad about how often I have to untangle this particular not on air. The history of same sex love in Europe and Southeast Asia, and those are the two places I've read about, is the history of older men sleeping with younger men and or boys. And that's what's written about, and what's been studied, and what's known about the most same sex relationships between peers, whether adult men or adult women. Is much harder to find him for me about. But you're still talking about a much more permissive society for actual consenting adult homosexual relations. But I think that it's important to understand, like, like cultural relativism will only take you so far. Like I can look back and be like, I, you still shouldn't have done that, right,

but like it's still important to understand cultural relativism. It's it's important to understand that this is a culture that considered these boys to be men, albeit very young men, and that also heterosexual relationships were far worse.

When it came to pedophilia.

So I feel like that's the important context, YEA to understand this with.

You know, it's so complicated, and I think, goodness, you're the one trying to untangle it me because well you're also smarter than me, so that you need to be the one to do it, but like you can't. I don't know. The whole cultural relativism thing is hard for me because in my brain, the first time I heard the term was in defense of slavery, and it felt like at the time you could always argue that it wasn't the right thing because there was always cool people doing cool stuff against slavery. Right in this situation, with the definitions of being a man at the time being different, it's hard to take that out. It's hard to take that out of a story. I mean, I think it's important that we address it, but I mean I don't

think it means we can throw the whole script away, you know. I think there's so much here that I I'm learning that I would love to hear more about that we probably all should hear about.

I think that's the thing is because like I think that engaging with like the messy past, I think is essential to understand like who we are and where we are, because even like the cultural relativism around, like slavery is actually a decent example in this particular case, right, because like I am not going to defend ottomn and slavery and then specifically it's going to tie in later to the slave st in Africa and therefore the slave trade into the New World and like the Muslim world, right, But it's still different. It doesn't necessarily make it better.

Although I would argue that the chattel slavery in the New World is like one of the most uniquely horrific things that has ever been done in history, but it's like slavery in the Ottoman Empire was a fundamentally different system and I might be reading lots of apologists who were like really emphasizing the fact that like, yes, it was mostly Christian children being enslave to serve the state, but Muslim families, poor Muslim families were like jealous. They wanted to be able to sell their kids into slavery because it was like a way to come up, you know.

Like it's just like when we look at things from our own perspective, it's not going to give us an accurate picture, and it's not going to help us understand why people made decisions. But it's messy, and sometimes I don't want to do it, and yeah.

I appreciate you doing it. I just want to make that clear. I appreciate because I know it is not easy. Yeah.

And so it's not like some men were gay and therefore pedophiles who liked little boys.

In Automan society.

Is that it was considered socially acceptable to seek younger sexual partners of any sex because sex was about structuring power. It was okay to subordinate women and boys who are unroughly the same tier, but not grown men. So even when we say like, oh, this fourteen year old boy or a man, they're also like not a man. Right, they'll like talk about them as a boy, but they're still fundamentally saying, like this person's like old enough to consent and to like whatever. Right, they're not like a child.

I'm not trying to piece this the power and make it okay. But like, yeah, it's funny because it's like on some level it's misogyny, right, It's like women are the same as like teenage boys, you know, and.

They're only as good as our youngest men.

Yeah, it's terrible, yeah, basically, and it's about structuring power. It's about, among other things, about domination. This might be too cynical. I've read scholars who make these arguments. It's probably not the main way that people saw it at the time. Attraction to young people was seen, at least in poetry as an attraction to fleeting beauty. There is this seventeen seventy four translation of a poem by Massihi quote be gay too soon the flowers of spring will fade.

And people quote that one because it's funny because it's great. Yeah, right, but like and they didn't mean it, you know, they meant it and to like be happy, right, But like, yeah.

It's related you know, in this concept of it being youth and poetry, isn't that for and even for us these days? She was just seventeen, if you know what I mean. Oh yeah, you know from the Beatles, there's like this is a recurrent sort of theme in Yeah, it's creepy when we hear it now, but I can see its presence, you know, even still to this day.

I think we are living in like almost an aberration of time where people are like, maybe you shouldn't fuck kids.

Yeah, Like, you know what, that's really an optimistic view, and I like that this is not the worst of all times, because this maybe one of the few times this and hopefully at lasts, yeah, where we're like, you know what, that's not a good thing to do.

Yeah.

Like I remember reading this like forum and people were like, yeah, but by that standards, every single rock and roll star is a rapist. And I'm like, yeah, that seems almost certainly true.

I see your terms and I accept them, Yeah, exactly. Like Chuck Berry is one of the greatest musicians of all time, and his work is monumental important in my life and every musician's life in America. Yeah, but they were a creep and the like that needs to be noted, like we have a dark history in music.

Yeah, but I actually think that connection is worth understanding, right, because the only thing I don't want to have come out of this episode is for people to be like, oh, Margaret said that, like the Ottomans were uniquely pederastic or whatever, Like I have covered Greek pederaste on the show, and I wish I hadn't, and like it is a non unique thing about this culture, although some of the ways it expresses itself is interesting and leads to interesting things, which is a terrible thing to say before I read the next sentence of the script, which is that boys and girls alike were trafficked. I think that's the best word for when someone is forced into sex work when they're too young to consent, even if that's me saying that.

For my own cultural perspective.

And so you have like dancing boys and dancing girls often together, dancing for soldiers for coins. Young boys were often groomed by their parents to be sold into sexual slavery to the rulers of the empire, and that was a prestigious way to gain rank and social standing for yourself and your family. There's darker parts of it that I just decided not to include in the script.

It's morbid dark.

Earlier, you mentioned that your people are a Heresuit people. We sure are that ties into us.

Okay, good.

My understanding is that it was Again I'm speak about the Ottomans. I don't know how universalizable this is. Most women were attempting to remove all of their body here back then.

Yeah, you know, I don't know, because I have seen like ancient portraits, like drawings of like from the Ottoman Empire or I mean, actually was it just personal? I don't know. But I've seen from this region, the Middle East, like ancient manuscripts, and some of them include women who have, like, you know, a full mustache. Oh sick, because at the time it was considered like a sign of beauty. Oh interesting, Okay, but I don't know. I don't know if that was universal or not. I'll tell you now. Iranians have made amazing progress in the world of electrolysis, in hair removal and waxing and all. I mean, we've moved the needle forward on that a lot. In fact, there's I appreciate it.

As a bearded woman, I very strongly appreciate it. I hope you enjoy our work.

Even though when I go in for a laser, I always am like, everyone's like so supportive. I found a really nice place and everyone's so supportive, and I'm a little bit like this is bad that we all do this, right, you know, that we need to do this, and it's like it's not it's complicated, you know. But I'm like, because I'm like, you don't need to get rid of your mustache, only I need to get rid of my mustache.

And I'm like, oh, I see how that's like a weird thing for me to think.

Right, I fear that's just girlhood. I know.

No, absolutely, girlhood is us sitting around being like I think we're doing a bad thing.

But it together and have fun. Yeah yeah. Yeah.

And one scholar and I don't remember which one, had a line about like there was this intentional differentiation in that, like I think even the scholar was saying Persian women were like removing all of their body hair, and so that might have been a specific time or place that might have been a class based thing, like I don't know, you know, but so this is like part of why young boys who just have the hint of a beard was like the thing in a lot of the poetry.

Once men had a full beard, they were expected to go from the bottom to the top, essentially, And a common way to insult an adult man was to claim that he bottomed for another man. The medical establishment figure this was a form of mental illness called a ubnah, And this is sometimes translated as homosexual, but that's an incorrect translation, at least according to a medical scholar, because it was the term for a medical condition of an adult man who wanted to be anally penetrated. So I've read that there's a stigma against peer same sex relationships because heterosexual relationships are not actually between peers, like structurally right in the society, so they're not peer relationships either.

But another thing that I read discussing in the eighteenth century more specifically said basically, you don't talk about sex and polite conversation. So whatever people do at home their own business, and therefore same sex pure relationships between adults were probably just as common then as any other time, and since they were tacitly accepted, probably more common regular places.

Yeah, is this similar to because I've heard people explain a little bit about the Greeks and their I guess the same sort of relationships with younger men, with soldiers and spartans, for example. Are there similarities between this, I don't know if you've looked at that.

I actually think that they like probably come from a common route, Like honestly, Like, it's so funny because most of the civilizations that we talk about like sort of existing today or influencing things today, most of them kind of span from like Italy to China. You know, I'm making really rude generalizations here, but a lot of them are like South Asian, Southwest Asian, and like Southeastern European, right, And there's a lot of cultural stuff that's happening there that have a lot of shared characteristics. So we have a lot of assumptions about like, oh, this is what humanity does, and then people are like, you look everywhere else.

That's not the way they do it, right, Yeah.

Yeah, And so I believe that the like Greek style of love is what the Victorian gay men would call it, that specifically, like the attraction to to boys as a like normalized thing in society. I assume it's the same cultural root. Yeah, But we covered a bunch on an episode about the most famous cynic Diogenes, who like lived in an overturned urn, and he seems like a very like punk like don't tell me what to do, he like pisses on the rich kind of interesting guy. It gets said that he's really specifically against gay sex, but he's really specifically against pedisti even though in that case he's also talking about like adult young men sleeping with older adult men and he's like against that too, And it's.

Like, so that's too, because it would have been really nice to have seen like a perspective against this from that time that wasn't just against gay.

Sex, right, That's the problem is that mostly people didn't talk about like what we would call gay sex.

They mostly talked about.

PEDERASTI right, yeah, and also like sapphic love man just like not talked about just like fucking.

Women are there? What I don't know?

And like this wasn't really legislated or discussed as much because sex is about power, So who cares what the powerless do amongst themselves? Is my inference, And there is like I read one scholar is like there needs to be more scholarship about this. You know, like people are just starting to talk about like sapphic love, you know, even though the word saffik comes from Sapho, a poet who was queer as fucking Greek, you know, But I've learned so much here. Sapo is great. Sapho has a line, oh, sweet mother, I cannot weave for slender. Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl. Was she a woman?

But interestingly, I believe the word woman can be translated in that case as both a woman or a young man.

Like the core of woe and man.

Well, that it was just the like from the Greek, like she's writing in Greek, and gay sex between men was often in various places still a crime. Even if the Ottoman Empire's legal structure didn't extend to the home life, Islamic law still did, and the penalty ostensibly was usually death. But for most of Islamic history, no one cared. And think about all of the things that for dear Christian listeners, think about all the things that the Bible tells you to do, like sell your daughter into slavery for doing whatever thing. No one follows that shit. Homosexuality, both sex and relationships was regularly tolerated or even accepted, and at least the wealthy families and medieval Islamic societies. The quote

author Mortiza Haji Sedea quote classical literature from Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Syria suggests any prohibition of homosexuality was often treated with leniency. Meanwhile, while this is happening, the Christian West is getting more and more anti gay. For a long time, homosexual sex was a pretty minor sin in Christianity. It was like masturbating. You're not supposed to do sex things except to have kids. But eventually places were like, nah, it's a big deal. We're going to cut your dick off or we're going to take your property. By fifteen thirty three, that piece of shit. Henry the eighth said it deserved the death penalty and created the anti Buggery law, and Europeans tended to view it as a vice imported

from one of two places, one from the Muslim world, or two it was left over from the pagan, pre Christian world. And it's funny how these days, especially if like you ever run across like Soviet anti homosexual.

Stuff, I surprisingly have not.

I can't believe people don't spend all their time reading this kind of stuff.

We run in different literary circles. I guess mine is much more boring.

Yeah, no, doesn't know what I could talk to about this except when I got on anti Tanky rents on the internet. Lenin and the early Bolsheviks did legalize homosexuality, and then Stalin recriminalized it basically. But overall there's this idea that homosexuality and the acceptance of homosexuality is bourgeois Western decadence, right, it's the influence of those damn progressive liberal Westerners, you know.

I bet you A big part of that is the Islamic reaction to homosexuality these days now too, I think.

So we're actually going to talk about how like specifically, the Western colonization is kind of what got rid of the homosexual acceptance in Southwest Asia.

And so in the.

Modern world people might see homosexuality as Western decadence, both in like the Islamic world and parts of the Islamic world, and in like you know, Russia in certain times and places. But historically it was seen as a trait of the wild and animalistic, non civilized peoples, right, like the wild warrior people we're all having gay sex. Even as homosexuality entered the conversation again through the Renaissance into the Victorian era in Europe, people would be calling it neo Latin or be interested in Greek love, like Oscar Wilde is like, I'm interested in the Greek style of love. Although I'm only he did sleep with a younger man, but I believe he was a man. I don't know, don't come at me. And so basically they were saying, we got

this idea from our orientalist reading of the Mediterranean and ancient cultures.

Right.

They were like, ah, we're doing things in the Mediterranean way, the Greek way. You know, this is what the Sufis might have done. Exotic, Yeah, yeah, exactly.

How other Yeah, that's something that people do all the time. They're like, Oh, we're just like the insert culture here, right right, We're just like those from this insert story here.

You know, I want to appreciate your listeners for a second for the fact that you've mentioned orientalism a number of times, and I think they know and like, I don't, like, I mean, that's so interesting. Yeah, Like I know because I'm Middle Eastern and I have some familiarity with Edward said and some of the thoughts behind that. But I don't know if the Rank and File podcast listeners the manosphere probably has no idea what orientalism is, and if they do have heard of it, they're probably using it wrong.

So like, I think that's a very cool thing.

Yeah, it's like and for anyone who's made it this far and isn't quite sure, I would say it's the exotification of the quote unquote near east. And I'm using near East kind of on purpose here because that's like an Orientalist term, this idea of this like there's this exotic, interesting other right over there, you know, And it's specifically the orient That's not a word I've used on this podcast before.

I love Oh good you are giving definitions on the spot.

You until a beautiful and collegen woman. I'm so glad you did it because I was like, can I pull this off? I was going to try, but you did get it right, Like, yeah, that's how my understanding of it as well, and that people can read Edward Sayid's books about it. He's written about it. He has a book, famous book called Orientalism, and it's a great breakdown. He's an interesting guy for a lot of different reasons.

I admit that I was an in depth review of that book that I got a lot of, like, rather than having read the book, yeah, was where I got a lot of that came up when I was doing oh some other episode about probably the first time I read something about the Ottomans, I was like, gosh, I should at least get some basic idea of this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So what I've been able to find is less about the specific sexual acts that people were doing in medieval Anatolia and more about the Muslim world's rich history of homoerotic art and poetry. So that's like what's more recorded, especially peer relationships. Stuff was kind of behind closed doors. We don't know as much about that.

We do.

You know that people fled Europe and went there to go try and live out their lives. Okay, but the art and the poetry, as we mentioned before, But do you know what else is poetry?

Oh?

The sweet sound, the sultry voice of the ad readers that are about to bring us some fantastic ads. I'm assuming it's mostly erectile dysfunction ads.

Probably, Yeah, if Robert's reading it.

It'd be fun night if I were a company that's sold dick bills, I'd pay him extra. They do, Yeah, Robert doesn't add read of it, Yeah they do. Yeah. No, shame fuck it yeah yeah, no shade there. Read it, yeah, and we're back.

The Islamic world produced us an incredible wealth of homo erotic poetry starting in the eighth century or so. Some of it, a lot of it was about idealizing a young boy lover just out of or, to quote the author Khalid el Royehebb from before Homosexuality in the Arab Islamic World fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred quote, much, if not most, of the extant love poetry of the period is pederastic in tone, portraying an adult male poet's passionate love for a teenage boy. Other poetry, though it just didn't specify what gender of who it was about. It was just sort of assumed by the reader to be speaking about men or boys. Persian poetry in particular did this because Persian is a non gendered language, and once

the Sufi started writing this stuff, it became harder and harder to sort out whether the horny poems were talking about God or men or women. Yeah, that's the best kind of poem.

I know.

I know. That's why Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah such a great song. Is it about spiritualism? Is it about God? Is it about you know, just a man or a woman? You know, it's it's I It's so good. Yeah.

Absolutely, And just like describing love as divine and or just like blurring all of those things is beautiful to me. As I mentioned before, the search for the divine was almost sexual sometimes, and there was at the very least a lot of poetry that discussed an erotic connection between teacher and student. This is where I come up with my terrible hypothesis. Obviously a lot of this was because of same sex attraction, like people writing this kind of stuff, but it was also just the idealized form of sex and love, the sort of pure form. So if you're talking about sex and love at its most basic in this sort of literature's language of how you talk about things, you're just going to talk about gay sex is the

way to do it. And to be clear, I'm trying to speak without prejudice about the perception of sex and various cultures. My personal opinion is that sex should not be about structuring power, and that teachers shouldn't be fucking students, and that adult shouldn't be sleeping with teenagers. But I think people are aware of that. But I just want to be real clear. I've read that this homoerotic poetry was widely accepted and seemed to be giving a past. I've read a couple different reasons of this. It was accepted and seemed to be given a past because it was beautiful and because it spoke to the basic truths about love.

I think free speech is also a modern conception, but the idea that artists need to be unhindered in order to speak basic truths about existence is also an oldest shit idea. And also I read that because there isn't a gay identity and Islamic law only outlawed specific sexual acts, being a man interested in a boy was seen as perfectly natural and legal. Islamic visitors to Europe were basically all shocked by the fact that men simply wouldn't discuss their attraction to boys. It was like so utterly normalized that it was confusing for them to be in a place where it was absent, and they were like, why is all the poetry about women, like, I don't get it, what about other men and boys? And to be clear, again,

the only thing that was absent in the world was people talking about their attraction to boys. Western culture regularly celebrated pedophilia that related to girls, and of course almost every power structure that has ever existed around the world ends up perpetuating pedophilic acts. That is the thesis of behind the Bastards, as far as I can tell. And so it's not like the Muslim world was worse than the European world. There's just different social conventions around things.

And as for why we're specifically talking about at least an Ottoman society, we're talking about poetry is that both histories and fiction at the time largely didn't discuss day to day life or romance. Poetry was the most important form of literature, and fortunately for my interest in all of this stuff, Eventually, the cultural object of sexual desire started to shift older. By the eleventh century, there was, to quote the Encyclopedia Ironica quote, a perceptible growing elasticity in the conception of the homo erotic beloved as an adolescent boy. From this time, the Turkish soul in most cases considerably older than fourteen becomes a stereotypical beloved.

Okay, growth sort of. Yeah, no, I read that.

I was like, oh, thank god, I could still do this episode, Like, oh.

Thank god. Oh.

But also even before the Turks through the Ottomans conquered a lot of the Muslim world, the Turkish were often written about us, the Hattis, although the Ottomans were really into white Christians as the hotties too.

Colorism has been around for a long time in the Middle East. Yeah.

Yeah, I was like, I don't know a lot about like Turkish versus Persian, like as nations of people, ethnicities or whatever. So I was like, I wasn't sure if it was a colorism thing or what, or if it was like proximity to the West or like what do you think?

It's an interesting topic. It's something that I've discussed the number of times with Persian people, Middle Eastern people. I mean, we all Persians are an interesting group of people because we do consider ourselves different and better than the rest of the Middle East in ways that are problematic. Sometimes ways they are like cute and charming, so the ideal standards of beauty and a lot of those countries are in my opinion, like you know, the time, we're created by Persian culture and you would see like their ideal the eyes and their old drawings would be like the Persian eyes or sort of all men shape and that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, why that is? How that just because it was maybe a powerful group, I

don't know, but you know, it's dynamics about beauty that I'll never fully Understandfication for sure, and colorism is a part of a big part of it. And around you know, like a lot of places there in the Middle East, the lighter you are is you know, that is considered a good thing. They may not say it explicitly these days, but you still see it, you sense it a little bit.

And it's an issue that we have, and it's an issue that we in the Iranian world to this day. Getting back to what we talked about in the beginning, I think still is a part of the problem because a lot of the Iranians that were really happy about the war that we talked about, with the US attacking Israel attacking Iran, I think that in their minds they see this war going something more like or they saw back when you know, it started as hey, this is going to be bad, but in the end of the day, we're going to be like Germany.

We'll get our secular society.

Exactly, and in love of Arinan see themselves as different than other parts of the Middle East, like Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of the world where you know, statistically speaking, I think the numbers are more likely that we would end up being more like those countries after a war.

Yeah, where the US goes and just makes everything worse exactly.

So, I mean, we've seen the track record there. But I think that's a part of it, is that this exceptionalism that Iranians feel makes sense. And a lot of that's kind of the look too. A lot of it is we look like Iranians are oftentimes very proud of looking whiter than other parts of the Middle East. Interesting, Okay, so there is this color there in Turkey's you know, because closer to Europe. That's the proximity. And I'm assuming I don't know their their history, but because of all things you've already mentioned, I think they probably are held up as a standard of beauty to big part because of polarism.

No, it makes sense, and also like things that go in and out of fashion in terms of literature and like sex, poetry and all this shit. You know, like probably go all kinds of directions. Like beauty standards have changed so much in the time I've been alive. Like looking back at movies from the nineties, I'm like, huh, okay, I'm not trying to body shame anyone, but man, standards.

Of beauty have changed, you know, what do you mean?

Like okay, like like like the heroin Chic though, like I'm really not trying to shame people for being any size that they are want to be, but like you know, in the nineties, the beauty standards in America, like we're very explicitly about thinness, like not even like athleticism or anything else.

It's unfortunately come back. That's a bummer.

That's a bummer as long as they let us keep having thick eyebrows.

I was just about to say, I hope the thin eyebrows do not come back.

I don't love those, and like, if people want their thin eyebrows, that's fine. But I have naturally very thick eyebrows, and I used to pluck them when I was a younger. I would have called myself a cross dresser at the time, and it was.

Pain in the ass, and now I don't have to. Well, you and me both sister, and that's why I big Persian eyebrows. I'm like maybe two shades away from being Eugene Levy at this point. So I hope we don't go thin on the eyebrows.

Yeah, but anyway, everyone should do whatever they want with their beauty, and we just shouldn't have beauty standards as a society.

That's my theory. That's fair.

By the eighteenth century, I had this incredibly important poet, Ahmed Nadeem, sponsored by the Sultan and the Grand Vizier themselves, and he is not fucking round with gender ambiguity or obsession with youth. He likes his men tall and bearded and body haired. He called tall men walking cypresses. There's this whole poetic language around, like different symbols that they use for certain things. But he liked his walking cypresses.

And when he wrote in Persian, which he also did, okay, so since Persian didn't have gender, he was like, man, I don't want anyone think I'm writing about no fucking girl or no fucking youth. So he would write about beards and he was like, beards are amazing, and he would specifically talk about how hot body hair was. And a lot of the poetry I found, which might be selection bias on my part or the bias of the things that I'm reading, doesn't mention age one way or another.

Like I'm only going to read you one dirty poem and it's a two line thing. It's from this poem from the Turkish poet Issa Nakati, who died in the year fifteen oh nine. When the rose holds Carnival, the tulips smartly shown to the door. And in this case, rose means anus and tulip vagina. So when the anus holds Carnival, the vaginas smartly shown the door. Who needs vaginas when you got assholes around.

Roses and tulips? I'm swem okay, I see the rose the tulip. How is that more vaginal? Honestly, every flower is so vaginal. Maybe two lips is in the phrase nature.

Really likes making Dixon vaginas, Like that's the two shapes you see everywhere in nature.

I mean, yeah, it works.

Yeah, And so part of the reason that poetry wanted to describe same sex relationships and possibly also like why people saw them in real life between two men was that they wanted to talk about a relationship that wasn't about power. Sometimes right, that could be between peers. Walter Andrews wrote an ottoman lyric poetry quote. There existed an often expressed notion that true and open, intellectual, spiritual, and erotic relationships were fall more possible with a male partner.

Which is funny because there's something I used to like joke when I was like trying to make fun of the right wing. This isn't the best joke that I ever had, But I was like, we hate women. Marriage is one man and one man, just like God intended. Why do we let women into this? You know? And when translated into European languages, especially like Persian poetry in particular, European languages demanded a grammatic like you had to give a gender to things, right, and so it's even like staff out being like you know, fell in love with a like a slender effort ideas overcome me with longing for a girl, Like that's like a choice that was made by the translator. But European languages would assign the

lovers as women, despite the fact that by default they would have been writing about boys. And this is interesting to me because it like they did it because they wanted to be able to sell this shit right, and no one wanted to read no gay stuff. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people wanted to read gay stuff, but like, you know, there are operating onder the assumption.

But at the same time it works against their efforts to like play up the degeneracy of the East as like, because that's a big thing with Orientalism too. Orientalism is a double edged sword. Both edges are bad, you know, where you're either like, oh, you're so like mystical and interesting, but it's also like you're so fucking different and degenerate.

And part of European Orientalism has to do with false assumptions that women had no rights and that everyone is polygamous. Polygamy was absolutely present to some degree, but it started dropping off fast during the medieval era. People became more sedentary, the military became more professionalized. Women started getting more rights as well, including in some places, as I understand it, you had have a right to divorce your husband if you wanted to marry someone new and be in a polygamist relationship, like you couldn't be forced to be in a polygamous relationship. Yeah, by the sixteenth century of Islamic moralists saying basically a virtuous man, the best man would be content with one wife, and scholars at the time

believe that permitting polygamy instead of like outright banning it, but just being like it's better to be monogamous, was to prevent people from living in inappropriate ways. Right, You're like, oh, I got a lot on my guess, because otherwise they're gonna do it anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. The Orientalist view of polygamy in the Middle East is odd enough that it's still even though it's not widely practiced in Iran, for example, it's still such a part of our imagination of what the Middle East is where. You know, in my experiences dating when I was younger, dating like you know, white women and American women, it came up a lot more than you think. Yeah, people would be like, I'm not gonna lie. It did benefit me in some ways to be sort of like this exotic thing, you know. Yeah, but there was also this thing of like, oh, you would want to have like a harem, and you would want to have like this, And I'm like, I, yeah, I don't. I don't think you're reading the situation right, what I'm all about very well.

Also, like harems weren't exactly I actually know essentially nothing about Persian culture and harem's. I know a little bit about the Ottoman culture in Harams, but like that's not what normal people have.

Yeah, the sultan, right, Yeah, that was it for the rest of the people, the other people.

But I think it was just the salt. I don't I don't actually know, but it was not a regular person thing.

Yeah, you didn't have a lot of money for that sort of thing. Yeah.

If there's an overarching moral to my research into history, it's that European colonialism fucks up everything. The end of the Muslim acceptance of homosexuality, both in practice and art, seems to come because of the expansion.

Of Western colonial powers.

As I understand it, you get these two things happening kind of at once. In response to the Western colonial push, the Muslim world both starts like trying to like identify itself as not European. It starts getting stricter about Islamic law. It pushes for nationalism. Various groups are trying to reinforce their own identity against these Western powers, ironically by joining the Western powers in their crackdown on homosexuality, but also at least with the Ottomans. They're increasingly politically tied into Europe.

They're like more and more joining all of the European wars. They're like more and more being propped up as they start kind of failing in the nineteenth century, they're being sort of propped up because like they're like, oh, we kind of want I'm a little bit out on a limb here minute since I read this particular thing, but like a pattern that still exists where the European powers want a group that they can work with in Southwest Asia.

And so they're modernizing, right, and a lot of that modernizing seems to include a lot of things like actually enforcing the old laws against morality in the middle of the nineteenth century. They're modernizing means centralizing things, which actually comes out of a lot of it comes out of progressive urges. A lot of it comes out of like, oh, we need to like make sure that the laws are like this instead of like this or whatever. But when you centralize power and you like try and make people enforce the laws, sometimes it's better to have worse laws that aren't enforced than like better laws that are less bad laws that are enforced. And so suddenly the state starts dictating family law. And some of this was actually

about increasing the rights of women, and I can't speak as much of that because I didn't actually do much research this week about the rights of women in the Ottoman Empire, And of course in nineteen seventeen they raised the age of marriage substantially, But yeah, so there.

I think it's probably.

Not a coincidence as that they're like trying to hold on desperately and like centralize and like become stricter just as they start to fall apart. Remember talking to an old hippie lived on a commune, and I was like, don't all communes fall apart? And he was like, well, all the hippies that started communes in the sixties had a lot of rules. Those ones all fell apart. And I'm like, oh, when you try to hold on really tightly to everything, it slips through your grasp. And that was like part of the Ottoman success is they're like, now we just want you to pay taxes. Yeah, like, yeah, you just got to give us stuff and call yourself Ottoman.

Yeah that works well.

Okay, And then there's a strange final note that is one of the most fascinating things about this whole thing. You know, we have this idea that like, homosexuals are decadent and weak, and like strong men are the reason that we have a society that can allow weak men to be gay or whatever. Right, that's very Western concept.

It's not played out by history. The increasing heterosexuality of the Ottoman Empire directly maps to its increasing decadence and lack of military might. It's military peak was achieved in part, I'm not defending this in part with slave armies of boys who are picked for their sexual attractiveness, who never married, and so when they died, their money flowed right back into the and they had no family to distract them from war. What's more, the earlier system that was gayer was more meritocratic aside from the sultan himself, and so most rulers didn't have families, so they're not trying to carve off a little peace for themselves. To quote drawer zevy from hiding sexuality the disappearance of sexual discourse in

the late Ottoman Middle East.

Quote.

Eighteenth century Ottoman functionaries were more uxurious. I promised you a word that I didn't know what it was, and I had to look up. It's this word exorious. It means devoted to your wife. Eighteenth Century Ottoman functionaries were more uxorious than the world conquerors of the fifteenth century, and the voluptuousness of the last centuries of the Empire was more heterosexual than it had been for the more bellicose earlier generations. Thus, any correlation between a focus on homoerotic relations and military political decadence is negative, as it was for ancient Rome, with more pederasty among the generations of conquerors than among those of the crumbling empires.

Wow, you hear that San Francisco giants pictures? Do you hear that? You want to be a fucking warrior? Yeah? How do you do it?

Find an adult man? But find a man? Right, those are some impressive words that that person did well on their SATs.

I can guarantee I believe so as well. Yeah, I also like couldn't even I was like I don't know this person's trying to make a claim one way or the other about like morality. Here, they're just like this is showing off. Yeah, and it's like it's this is fascinating to me because of the same way that like medieval Europeans were like, oh, those savage Pagans were the ones who were gay. Like homosexuality is like a a like rawness and naturalness has been part of gay male culture, including in Europe, for forever as far as I'm aware of, but like not what gets focused on, you know, and I I think about the same with like women, I associate much more with the misogynist assumptions of the medieval era of Europe than the misogynist assumptions of the modern era,

because the modern assumption is that all of us women are like weak and like tame and whatever. Dem Yeah, the medieval misogynist conception is that we were wild and natural and raw, right, we were like just like living crazy chaotic lives and like, which is cool because then that that's really similar to how gay men were seen right in certain cultures, right, Like anyway, whatever, I just get really into this shit.

I think that's fascinating, you know, having all this discussion about how these perceptions have changed in how narratives and definitions even have changed over time. I think this is so fascinating and keeps coming back to this concept of historical relativism or moral relativism for me, and I think it is a really interesting thing. And one thing I'd say is this, like, I wonder if in the past discussed historical relativism as much as we do in the modern era, Like right, the fact that we're actually discussing how things can change and shift, I feel like that's probably a really positive sign about where we are, you know, because I imagine that in the past when they had rules that we've seen was strange. I wonder if they even

thought or if they had, you know, philosophers discussing that, hey, maybe things could change over time, like we at least acknowledge that we who knows where we're going to be thirty forty years from now, you know, Like, and I wonder where if they had those conversations is.

No, this is interesting to me. I don't know the answer to it. I have read stuff like from I don't remember exactly what it was. I remember reading like ancient you know, like I think ancient Greece people being like, well, now we've really progressed, Like things are real different than they were at like seven hundred BC. They probably didn't call it that, right, but no, that is interesting. I love thinking about all of the shit that people are going to look back on it be like wait, what the fuck and like there's a quote and I don't remember who it's by. I'm really good at this. Whereas just like wisdom is the understanding that more than one thing that's opposite can be true at the same time,

you know, and like I tend to think that my ideas are right right, Like I think in order to go through life, you kind of have to be like I'm doing the right thing, you know. But I think it's really important to understand that, like so were people in other times, and like you can look really easily at like everyone knew the American Project was an evil nightmare society, Like even England the most colonial backup second most nightmare people were like, oh that's a bit much, don't you think, you know, Like I covered it last week that like the British stopped whipping people in public because they looked over at the American South and we're like, we don't want anything to do with those people. We

don't want to do anything that looks like what those people do, right, But overall people are like trying to do what they think is right, and like, maybe it'll be really weird that people were like homosexuality was an identity. Why would you have an identity based around It's just a thing you do, right, And like I wish I could do that as girl. Like I'm like, that's just my gender, but I don't need it to be a big thing, you know. And then I'm like, it's a big thing because everyone tells me I'm not allowed to do it, so then all of a sudden it becomes a big thing.

You know.

So it's just like it will be really interesting. I would love I want a time machine, but just to do historiography or whatever, historian work or whatever, just to go back and be like, yeah, but what do you all think about?

This? Can totally nominate you can. I ask you the dumbest like podcast question, huh, who if you have the opportunity to talk to anyone in history language not an issue, one person in all of history you could talk to, who would that be? Oh?

Okay, this is interesting because, like, I think I would learn more by going further back and finding someone who I disagreed with more. I would probably go and talk to Erica Mela Testa, an Italian anarchist who wrote just so much incredible stuff, and I would just like sit around and be like no, like tell me your story or even like what the fuck should we do now?

To get his opinions. But I think if I like really thought it through, I'd probably be going further afield substantially and talking to someone that I like, don't look up to as much. Why because I want to know stuff and you don't learn stuff from people who know the stuff that you know you know and like, so it's like I would go back and talk to Diogenes, right, the like philosopher who I think was probably a cranky old shit who lived in an urn. And I'm like, on the other hand, ideally i'd find someone who didn't get to write as much, you know, like, ye, yeah, I don't know. Who would you go talk to?

Uh, you know there's the obvious ones. You'd talk to religious figures, see what they were like, yeah, cool it talked to the Founding Fathers to see if they understood the things that they were doing that we were going to look back on. Oh interesting question. Yeah, like slavery and guns and that sort of thing. Pine in Washington into a room and then but there. You know what I'd really like to speak to you is Spartacus.

Oh my god, that's it.

I think the story of Spartacus is fascinating. And there's all these weird stories around him and the woman he traveled with, and like whether you know she was doing spells and she was a witch. In all the different forces he was trying to pull together, some of which were terrible people, and how he was able to accomplish what he did with finding out what kind of training he actually had, how this slave was actually able to lead a successful revolt, and then finding out why when he was leading his army north and they were going to escape and turned around. Oh I have a theory. Yeah, tell me what the theory is, because that's the part I want to know. Okay, my theory.

I did a couple episodes about Spartacus recently, and I got really obsessed with it because one a theory that I talked to a historian whose name escapes me, but I interviewed him. Recently, he wrote a book called Radical Antiquity. I think that Spartacus might have identified as an anarchist because anarchia and Greek didn't have the negative connotations that later, like Renaissance era it started to. It just literally meant like no one's in charge, right, And clearly Spartacus and other generals were in charge of the military structure. But they built this whole other society, right, They built this kind of a galitarian society where you're not allowed to have loot and it all has to support the effort.

But I think that it was a fairly a galant that fully but fairly a galitarian movement, because most of them are coming from much more galitarian cultures, because like he's from Thrace or something like from north.

To east Thracian or Thraki in Africa.

How I say it, I think they were all going to go escape, and they marched north, and Spartacus was like, and well, all the generals and all the people chose to go do that to walk everyone home. I think they went up there and they said, everyone who wants to go home, cross the Alps, go back to Germany, go back to Thrace, go back to the various places you've been stolen from. Here's your chance. The rest of us are gonna go fucking kill these motherfuckers.

Wow, that's so dope. That's so dope. I would love that. Ah, that's really cool.

No, Spartacus is my answer. I've changed my answer to be the same as your's. No, because because we only have him written about as this horrible villain by people who hated him and like they crucified, like thousands of them, you know, no.

Up and down the road. No, I would love you. I would just go back and fight fuck it like I prefer you just talk and I want yeah to this day. If I have to give my name at like a coffee shop, I'll give them Spartacus in the small hopes that other people will stand up and be like, I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus. That's a deep cut for your listeners from a very old movie.

Yeah, all right, Well, I think that's going to do it for us this week on Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm really grateful that you were my guests for this. Thank you for helping me peace through a complicated thing. But I think is important and interesting to me and like provides context for so much else that happens in the world.

I agree. Thank you so much for having me. I feel I always feel smarter leaving your show. I think this is a fascinating subject that we don't talk about enough. I think it needs to be discussed. I'm so glad you're doing it, and you're the right person to do it, so I'm very grateful for that, and thanks for Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been a blast. Yeah.

Well, if people want to hear more of your voice, is there a podcast that they can do it on?

Oddly enough, there is. It is called The House of Pod. You can find it anywhere you get podcasts, and I think you will enjoy it. We cover topics that range from public health crises, public health failures, to wellness and medical grifters. So there's some cool people and then there's some non cool people we discuss, and you know, I think if you're worried that's going to be a little dry.

If you're worried that hearing about medicine or science topics will be boring, I understand. It's why I don't really listen to many other medical or science podcasts, But We tried to make it as you know, approachable as it can get. And you know, when people tell me that, you know it helps them with their fear of dealing with the medical system in general, that's like the best compliment I can get. So that's what we're here for here to make all this stuff a little more approachable and fun and to learn something along.

Oh yeah, the thing I want to plug is that as of last week, as of when you could be listening to this, if you list when it came out, fifteen people were indicted in Minneapolis on charges for conspiracy basically for organizing against ice. And if you read through the indictments, like ninety four pages and it's like over and over again, they just were organizers.

That's what happened.

They organized against ice and they might end up called the damn fifteen because the group is called Direct Action Minneapolis or Minnesota I think.

And right now.

There's a fundraiser up. I don't know where it will be at by the time you listen to it. But pay attention to them. Don't let them get disappeared, don't let them fall out of people's paying attention to cycle, because they, like others, are facing like literally they're being Most of the accusations are like they made shields, like they talk about the aggressive use of shields.

Is this big?

You know?

Anyway, it's worth checking out. They'll throw them like Captain America. Yeah, yeah, bounce off the vice agents.

Yeah, they discussed how to run at police holding shields.

All right, shields. These are the fucking snowflakes.

Anyway. That's why I like to plug. Pay attention to the probably damn fifteen. Maybe some of the chargers get dropped. Who knows, maybe it won't stay called that, but everyone should pay attention and I'll see you all next week. The Bye Bye.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. The more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website folzonemedia dot com. Check us out on the irt radio app I'm a Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts,

Part Two: The Gay Ottomans: Homosexuality in the Medieval Ottoman Empire

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