and their partners communing in gardens, coffeehouses, and hamams--and he has been well served by his publisher in the reproduction, in black-and-white and in color, of these images. They give the lie to any declaration about the absence of a tradition of homosexual sex and love in the precolonial Islamic world, and they constitute some of the most stunning works in any gallery of homoerotic art. Boone also brings to light a number of interesting later works and their homoerotic texture, such as the multivolume (but unfinished) encyclopedia written by the Turk Resat Ekrem Koçu in the mid-twentieth century.

The variety of manifestations of homoeroticism is amply clear. Persian miniatures portray sex between older and younger men and between those of similar age; they depict a whole repertoire ofsexual acts and courtship behaviours; and they aestheticise the practice of sodomy. Such variety continues: in more recent imagery, a sheik sodomises Uncle Sam in one Western image, while homosexuality has begun appearing on the Arab cinema screen, and some tantalizing homoerotic photographs have been found in the ruins of a Taliban stronghold.

The tone of The Homoerotics of Orientalism is measured and thoughtful. Boone provides a salubriously critical reading of Foucault, who cared little about the non-European world, and Said, who expressed little interest in homosexuality. While never denying racialist and colonialist undertones in commentaries on Middle Eastern culture, Boone is happily more concerned to identify and discuss homoerotic themes in literature and art than to fabricate an overarching political strategy behind them. Among these tropes are the