There is a multiplicity of reports as to how the Ghaznavid Sultan Maḥmud (d. 1030 CE) fell in love with a servant boy named Ayāz. These short anecdotes about Maḥmud and Ayāz begin to appear in histories, biographical dictionaries, and Sufi poetry from the middle of the eleventh century. Given the nature of Persianate poetry, which allows for both secular and spiritual readings of love, the story of Maḥmud and Ayāz has understandably been received as both an admirable example of total submissiveness to divine love, or – in popular media – as a tale of “gay muslim heroes” of the Islamicate past. Of course, as the scholarship of Khaled El-Rouayheb and others has demonstrated, the pre-modern Islamicate gender system does not have an equivalent for the modern concept of homosexuality. Maḥmud and Ayāz thus cannot be seen as a pre-modern homosexual couple, but as a man and a youth in a homoerotic relationship. This paper explores the story of Maḥmud and Ayāz in the version of the Safavid poet Zolāli Khwānsāri (d. 1615 CE). His poem, a mathnavi of about 6000 lines, privileges a mystical perspective on their relationship, as opposed to a purely homoerotic one. However, I maintain that even though the homoeroticism of the text may be allegorical, a comprehensive reading of this text should account for both literal and allegorical levels of meaning. This paper therefore analyzes the construction of masculinities through the homoeroticism present in the text. A close reading shows that descriptions of Ayāz are consistent with the typology of the beloved youth found in other genres of Islamicate poetry, such as ghazals. However, given the longer mathnavi form, the story of the two lovers is also reminiscent of well-known heteroerotic romances, such as Khosrow and Shirin, or Layli and Majnun. Because of this overlap of genre expectations, Zolāli’s Maḥmud o Ayāz is not merely a short account of an infatuation, but a fully-fledged, homoerotic romance. As such, the poem’s construction of homoerotic masculinities is unique in the Islamicate literary sphere.