“Erotics” engages questions of homoeroticism and bawdy poetry, two interconnected themes that appear throughout the Persianate literary heritage and the tazkirah tradition but pose problems for modern literary historiographers. While pre-nineteenth-century Persianate writing abounds in frank, unabashed depictions of homoerotic sexuality -- the dominant literary convention for depicting love -- modernizers of Persianate literature adopt a Victorian-influenced approach that emphasized bashful silence about sexuality, particularly homoeroticism. As Persian literary historians were faced with making sense of the ribald erotic poetry at the heart of the tradition they wrote about, homoerotic conventions coalesced as objects of scorn and relics of the premodern world against which modernizing historiographers positioned themselves