This paper challenges the ways that scholars have interpreted the expression of erotic desire in canonical and prestigious Arabic poems from the 9th and 10th centuries. It does so by focusing on how these poems have been used by historians of gender and sexuality and other social historians in order to describe a normative system of socio-sexual relationships and desires. The worlds that these poems describe have often been taken as a proxy for the lived experience of a society in history. This form of analysis has been performed and utilized in debates about Islam and secularism and in projects to recover a queer Muslim past as well as in academic scholarship. This paper describes the contradictions at the heart of this interpretive practice and suggests that it is limited by an implicit basis in heteronormative expectations and strictly binary gender. Most revisionist scholarship in the history of pre-modern Islamicate sexualities has focused on dispelling older Orientalist myths about normative penetrative bisexuality or a heterosexuality irrespective of its object, by emphasizing the empirically sound insight that there was no homosexual identity in pre-modern Islamicate societies and centering the terms of Foucault’s analysis over the values, debates, and structures of feeling in pre-modern Islamicate texts. This paper breaks with this school of thought and turns our analytical attention to the predominant dimension of sexual violence and coercion in Classical Arabic erotic poetry. Sexual violence becomes a new perspective by which to make sense of the social world that these texts create, contest, and represent and through this analysis the supposedly stable gender categories that underpin these models of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual masculine desire begin to fray. In this paper, the author will focus specifically on the poets Bashshār b. Burd (d. 167/783) and Abū Nuwas (d. 200/814) to draw attention to the centrality of sexual violence to the Classical Arabic literary canon and the modern reading practices that continue to distract from it.