🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

‘Go, friends, fetch our beloved; bring me that fugitive idol.’ -Rumi

In 1244, Jalal ad-Din Rumi was thirty-seven & very respectable—a jurist in Konya, modern Türkiye, a legal scholar & teacher who preached at the mosque. Then a dervish named Shams-e Tabrizi walked in & Rumi fell in love.

Shams had wandered from teacher to teacher his whole life, never satisfied. He was in his sixties by then, a strange old man in coarse black felt. Rumi looked at him & saw the midnight moon. They shut themselves away together for months, & Rumi stopped doing everything respectable.

His own son wrote: “after Shams, my father danced all day & sang all night. He had been a scholar & became a poet. He had been an ascetic & became drunk with love.”

Rumi’s disciples were furious, & the tension got bad enough that Shams left for Damascus. Rumi was bereft. He sent his son to bring Shams home, carrying a love letter poem. The son found Shams depressed, playing chess.

He came back, & they were happy together again for months. Then one day Shams disappeared—almost certainly murdered by those who thought he was corrupting their teacher.

Rumi didn’t believe it. He went to Damascus & walked the city searching for him, fearing the worst. Exhausted in grief, he began to turn in the street, one hand raised, & the poems came out of him in a flood transcendent. The original whirling dervish. A man spinning because the person he loved was gone, turning grief into beauty & love.

He wrote thousands of verses. He never signed them with his own name. He signed most ‘Shams-e Tabrizi’

Which brings us to modern Coleman Barks, whose versions made Rumi the best-selling poet in America. But Barks did not read Persian, the language Rumi wrote in, he rewrote older translations & cut out the Islam, & cut out the shameless love of one man for another. Millions love Rumi through a straight-washed version, by a man who never understood what he was reading.

The spiritual queer love was always in the Persian

Rumi closed that letter: ‘Take my greetings & my service to that jewel without price.’

It’s possible they had a platonic-love, but it was deep, spiritual, & true