The Traffic in Boys: Slavery and Homoerotic Liaisons in Elite ‘Abbāsid Society

The prominence of cultured slave women in early ‘Abbāsid Baghdad, as objects of sale, gift, infatuation, and scandal, is well known, not least from a famous monograph about them by al-Jāi. Less attention has been paid to a similar situation obtaining with regard to slave boys. Numerous anecdotes testify to this phenomenon, however, and a preliminary analysis of the available material suggests that the ‘traffic in boys’ developed in imitation of that in slave women, sometime after the public expression of homoerotic sentiment in general had come to be accepted. The parallelism is nevertheless imperfect, due to several complicating factors, including the possibility of eunuchs serving as an object of erotic attraction as well as lingering resonances of an earlier paternal rather than erotic stance adopted by gentlemen toward their valets.