The Book of Beautiful Boys (book)

The Book of Beautiful Boys is a 2024 book published by Arcadian Dreams, publisher of Edwin Emmanuel Bradford's book My Love Is Like All Lovely Things (2023), and reprints and novel works of Michael Davidson. The book is an English translation of a long poem of the same name by Enderunlu Fazil Bey (1757–1810), a famous Ottoman poet who depicted the beauty of boys and women, from various lands of the Ottoman Empire. The book can be purchased on Amazon.

During his lifetime, Enderunlu Fazil Bey suffered greatly for his sexual non-conformity, and has been appropriated today by some LGBTQI+ activists in Turkey due to his same-sex desire. Published posthumously, he achieved fame through his erotic works, most notably The Book of Women which was banned in the Ottoman Empire.

Note that the English wikipedia page for him supplies no evidence for his attraction to men, and may be an example of gaywashing / rainbow revisionism, erroneously listing his book on boys as “The Book of the Beautiful [Men]” (sic).

The book description for the 2024 Book of Beautiful Boys reads:

Enderunlu Fazil Bey was an Ottoman courtier of Palestinian birth who had been selected as a beautiful teenager for education in the Sultan’s seraglio in Constantinople. He became an innovative poet of love not satisfied with stale conventional imitation of Persian precedents. Typically of a cultured man of his age and adopted land, he expressed erotic interest in both women and boys, but showed a more serious interest in the latter as a worthier subject. In his long poem The Book of Beautiful Boys, written in 1792/3, he answers from rich experience a beloved boy’s question as to which nations have the most beautiful boys.

A little over a century later, an anonymous Frenchman commissioned someone jokingly called the Pasha with Three Tails, allegedly at least a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Turk familiar with Fazil's work and sharing his taste, to adapt his poem to French ideas of the time as to what was scintillatingly and exotically erotic. The resulting Livre des Beaux, published in 1909 in a Paris that was then Europe's centre for the production of semi-illicit erotica, and now at last translated into English over another century later, is thus a charming blend of the erotic spirit of two lost ages.