As the work of numerous scholars (foremost, Chabbi, Hermansen, Mojaddedi) has demonstrated, Sufi biographical works (tabaqat/tazkereh) should not be treated as simple “repositories of factual information.” Rather, they are better understood as highly-structured discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) that seek to inscribe a transhistorical communal identity and establish normative Sufi behavior through the discursive construction of Sufi exemplars. While this understanding of the Sufi biographical literature limits the utilization of these works as transparent reflections of social reality, it also opens up new avenues of research for scholars interested in discursive analysis. Theoretically, the present work is based on this latter approach. In this paper, I examine the narratives of homosexual desire and shahed-bazi in some of the major biographical accounts of the famous thirteenth century Persian mystical poet, Fakhr al-Din ‘Eraqi, in order to advance some preliminary hypotheses about the “cultural poetics” of Sufi homoeroticism within the larger discursive tradition of medieval Persian Sufism. The principle conclusion of this paper is that within pre- and early modern Persian Sufism we see what I would like to call a “regime of aesthetic homonormativity” that simultaneously celebrates male beauty and homosexual desire while condemning its actualization in physical acts. At the theoretical level, these observations have important implications for the ongoing “genealogical” study of “pre-homosexuality,” as David M. Halperin has termed it. My case study is principally based on the biographical accounts of ‘Eraqi’s life in the long, anonymous introduction to ‘Eraqi’s divan (which was appended to many early manuscripts of his d?v?n and is the earliest biographical account of him); Nur al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s lengthy entry on him in his "Nafahat al-Uns min Hadarat al-Quds"; and Dowlatshah Samarqandi’s "Tazkerat al-Shu’ara’." Some consideration is also given to the smaller accounts/references to ‘Eraqi’s life in Jami’s "Ashi’at al-Lama’at," Sultan Huseyn Bayqara’s "Majalis al-‘Ushshaq," and ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani Qazvini’s "Tazkereh-ye Meykhaneh."