Poetic production and recitation for Iranians and Iranian-American remains one of the biggest shared cultural markers that crosses political, religious, and class divides. In examining the cultural effects of poetic recitation, this project is situated in an analysis of the reading and social practices of Iranian STEM PhD students in the US. These students come together as a group to read from Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi’s epic poem the, Masnavi-ye Ma’navi (Spiritual Couplets). Most notably, this paper examines the way in which these students engage with the sexual elements of the text, and how they navigate both state (read: Iranian) and self censorships. Through participant observation of this mixed gender reading group and a deeper analysis of the textual reproduction/recitation of the Masnavi, I argue that contemporary readings of Rumi (even in diaspora) preserve a censorship of sexual/queer desire in order to maintain a form of heteronormativity. This censorship mirrors what exists in the conservative social fabric in Iran today even as it contends with historically rooted accounts of homoerotic desire. As an extension of new scholarship that has focused on the absence of queer narratives in Persian Poetry such as Wendy DeSouza’s Unveiling Men: Modern Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Iran, I further argue that the development of discourse surrounding same-sex desires in Iranian mystical poetry is both under-explored in the literature and at the same time insufficient in marking homosocial spaces or homoerotic practices as queer in the modern sense of the term. I continue by showing through an investigation of seminal works on Sufism, e.g. Anne-Marie Schimmel’s, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, that any attempt to draw out queer expressions in Rumi can only occur as a contemporizing force, one that seeks to explain the more licentious metaphors of the text vis-à-vis a modern discourse of gender and sexuality. That is to say, in reading, interpreting and analyzing the sexual themes in the Masnavi, the reader cannot parse between their understanding of gender/sexual identities with the content and context of the poem itself. Finally, this paper attempts to reconcile these arguments and explore the dissonance between translation, gender theory, and the social constructions imbued in its recitation. In exploring these themes, this paper hopes to broaden the discourse in re-investigating classical poetic works through the lens of contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality.