In his 1911 manifesto “New Language,” the Turkish author Ömer Seyfettin (1884-1920) proclaimed the necessity of breaking with the Ottoman literature of the past: both newer authors, who looked “towards the West,” and the corpus of older literature oriented “towards Iran.” The authors he claimed belonged to the former tendency were largely his aestheticist contemporaries, but those epitomizing the latter were considerably more varied: the poets Nedim (1681-1730), Sünbülzade Vehbi (1718-1809), Enderunlu Fazıl Bey (1757-1810), Osman Rahmi Efendi (1832-1896), and the poet and playwright Muallim Naci (1850-1893). What linked these writers both to each other and to Iran was neither their particular language nor their literary style, but what Seyfettin viewed as shared mode of eroticism and desire, typified by the poetic figure of the çar-ebru [four-browed] young male beloved. This paper traces the çar-ebru through the works of these five poets, in order to explore how this particular trope became problematized, constituted in late Ottoman literary discourse as a locus of gender anxiety, and ultimately asserted as an effect of Iranian influence and thus foreign to an authentic Turkish culture. By reading these poets in connection with Seyfettin’s own writings on normative gender roles, the desiring and desired body, and the production of a “healthy” eroticism through the engineering of language, this paper argues that Seyfettin’s anxieties over the figure of the çar-ebru were foundational to his broader project of linguistic and cultural reform. At the same time, this paper explore how Seyfettin’s queering of the çar-ebru also served to constitute the Persianate as a contingent site of resistance to his proposed ideal of a heteronormative, monolingual nation-state: in particular, it discusses how actresses from the Ottoman underclasses utilized Persian guise to sustain and display condemned practices of gender-crossing in the form of Acem kantosu, or Persian cabaret. Ultimately, this paper concludes by noting the influence of Seyfettin’s project on the later linguistic reforms of the Turkish Republic, and the persistence of its shadow – the “queer Persianate” – in the form of deprecated language and modes of desire.