Brit man arrested in Morocco for being gay

[joninliverton]

Read this - barbaric country..

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/briton-locked-up-filthy-moroccan-4383882

 

[shyhedgehog]

Fucking obscene. My pink pound will certainly not be spent in that shithole

 

[peterh6308]

Although this is very unfortunate people need to know the laws when traveling abroad. It's illegal in many countries to be gay.

 

[tampa24]

And yet many travel agencies market Morocco quite heavily to gay men in particular as a gay friendly vacation destination. (In spite of homosexuality still being criminalized) I spent about a week in Morocco many years ago and have never ever had any desire to go back. It was not a pleasant experience for a backpacking college student.

 

[stowe1]

This is an outrage, but I would think you would do some research on the customs and folkways of a country to which you are traveling. I personally can't understand why anyone would want to travel to a country where you can't be yourself. It's like people in the US who go to Jamaica and bitch about its homophobia and that has been the subject of a legion of newspaper and magazine articles as well as TV reports. And it is not as if Jamaica is the only island in the Caribbean.

 

[joninliverton]

He has been released and is now home with his family. Read on.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29531605

 

[tampa24]

Thank goodness we have a happy ending for him at least. Now hopefully these travel agencies will stop marketing Morocco to gay men as if it is some kind of gay Mecca. As this man alluded to, over decades Morocco has gained a reputation for being a place not only where gays would enjoy vacationing, but a place where "sex tourism" is at least tolerated. While I don't condone sex tourism there any more than I do in infamous places like Thailand, I hope that their homophobic laws and customs cause a drop in the tourism revenue upon which they are so dependent. Maybe it could lead to positive social change.

 

[johnny]

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are. I take so much for granted. Being born and raised .
In San Francisco,California.
I sometimes have to be reminded how blessed I have been. Just Saying..

 

[Ambivalent]

Hey, Jon,

This totally sucks. (And not in a good, gay, way.) And yet I have lots of friends from the Continent who regularly holiday in Morocco, and have done so quite happily: and, as Tampa says, the place has been marketed quite assiduously, for many years, as a "friendly" place for gay men to holiday. (And no, Tamps, I don't condone gay sex tourism either, but. . . what if one wanted to take one's b/f for a nice holiday in the sun, somewhere?)

Jon, I will just say a couple of things:

*THANK GOD I'm a SCOT, and a REDHEAD - I burn like a lobster, and I have no desire to go to Morocco, Sharm el-Sheikh, or any other such places in the forbidding desert, where gay men frequently go to roast themselves. (The same goes for places in the JUNGLE, like Thailand, distinguished chiefly by militant fundamentalist insurgencies, and malaria.) Because, in places without the RULE of LAW, you're liable to get roasted a lot hotter, than you BARGAINED for. Let them have their books, and their creeds, and their subtly variable decretals: such places are NOT for me!

*If I ever can afford to take Mr. K. for a holiday at the beach - 'cause he's a brunet, and he can take it - it'll be to HAWAII (not even Florida - too many guns, too much violence, for Canadian tastes - at least, this Canadian's): and he can have a swim while I read The Collected Essays of Montaigne in the air-conditioned cabana, proximately, and littorally. At least THERE, I know that there will be a FEW REASONABLE authorities to whom one might resort, should the moment require it.

I have no desire, personally, ever to sun myself under the aegis of an absolute monarchy, or a dictatorship, which is labouring under the shadow of legal precepts derived from books or traditions (or local customs) which I find quite antithetical to those I find passably reasonable, and human. Unless I had a bunch of well-armed Russian Spetsnaz bodyguards by my side, and a helicopter waiting to evacuate me. *And the Russian special-forces guys are very good at these jobs, but quite costly to hire, on spec.*

Anyway, Hawaii, we may someday well do, for Mr. K.'s sake. Deserts, we SHALL NOT DO. (Jamaica, either.) I prefer holidays in cool, rainy places, with great cathedrals, and historical monuments, to survey. There is too much beauty in the world, to see (I think): before we RACE to be persecuted or crucified, in the midst of barbarism.

"A" XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

*"I have not lingered in European monasteries" ~ Leonard Cohen: http://www.poetryinvoice.com/poems/i-have-not-lingered-european-monasteries

*"The Lady of Shalott" ~ Loreena McKennitt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttv0ljOiPSs

 

[joninliverton]

Ambi - I hate the heat too, being a pasty Brit. Give me northern Europe or even staying here on our little island and I'm happy. Saying that I did enjoy my visits to California and surround states but I wasn't a beach bum - I was a tourist, taking in all what we see here on TV. Favourite place for me was south of Palm Springs in the mountains. We drove through the mountains to the Mexican border and just popped in to Tijuana for a few hours, before rushing out lol.

I also liked SF and spent around 3 days there. Loved the clam chowder and couldn't eat enough. Chinatown was fabulous as was the view from a top of one of the hills which I cannot remember the name of.

So back on thread, you won't find me in any rag head country or in the far east with all the old perves after young boys which are readily available.

 

[joninliverton]

Here is a BBC News article headed - [h=1]How Morocco became a haven for gay Westerners in the 1950s[/h]A British man flew home from Marrakech last week after being jailed for "homosexual acts". There was a time though when Morocco was renowned as a haven for gay Americans and Britons, who fled restrictions in their own countries to take advantage of its relaxed atmosphere.
Take a walk down one of the main streets in Tangier, the Boulevard Pasteur, turn left past the Hotel Rembrandt and descend towards the sea. Then follow some steps into a narrow side street that smells of urine and screams of danger.
Overlooking an empty space that looks like a disused car park or the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, is a family-run hostel called El Muniria, a white block with blue windowsills and a crenulated roof.
It was here in Room 9, in the 1950s, that William Burroughs, high on drugs, wrote one of the 20th Century's most shocking novels, Naked Lunch. The book, banned under US obscenity laws, is a mixture of autobiography, science fiction and satire, peppered with descriptions of gay sex.

When I enter the Muniria, the youngest member of the family tells me that I can look around, but that Room 9 is locked, as his uncle has "gone away with the key."
The corridors are desolate with some mould on the walls. A black and white portrait of Burroughs in hat and dark glasses stares blankly back above a rubber plant. The bathroom is bleak, like the inside of an asylum, with white tiles everywhere, exposed yellowing pipes and a loose mirror about to fall into the sink. The toilets look like the end of the world.
I venture downstairs to the quarters where the family live. The landlady shows me around. We stand in front of Room 9, which is still locked. I ask if it's possible to see inside. She replies that it is a bit messy. I tell her I don't mind, so she comes back with the key and opens the door. Inside is an unmade bed, an old radio and dark wooden wardrobes. A single naked light bulb dangles from the ceiling.

She tells me Burroughs had lived in Room 9, while fellow Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had rented Room 4 and Room 5 on the floor above. Very occasionally, she says, the American novelist Paul Bowles, the author of The Sheltering Sky, would use number 7 at the top. Like Naked Lunch, The Sheltering Sky was another groundbreaking novel that explores the dark side of the human psyche amid the desolate backdrop of the Sahara.
But why were these giants of American literature so attracted to Tangier?
"I think you know the reason," replies Simon-Pierre Hamelin with a smile, when I put this question to him, and says no more. He runs La Librairie des Colonnes, a bookshop on the Boulevard Pasteur, owned by the former boyfriend of Yves Saint Laurent.
Its bookshelves are another reminder of Tangier's huge literary legacy which includes Jean Genet, Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Joe Orton, all of whom were gay or bisexual, as well as many others, from Samuel Pepys to Mark Twain, who were straight.

Tangier's Boulevard Pasteur, 1944
For decades Tangier and other Moroccan cities were magnets for gay tourists. In the words of the English academic Andrew Hussey, Tangier was "a utopia of dangerous, unknown pleasures." The Americans who turned up in the 1950s were escaping from a repressive society where homosexuality was outlawed. In Morocco, attitudes were much more relaxed and, provided they were discreet, Westerners could indulge their desires, without fear of harassment, with a limitless supply of young locals in need of money, and smoke an equally limitless supply of the local cannabis.
The differential in wealth between foreigners and Moroccans created a thriving market in prostitution, but relations were not only based on the exchange of money. Paul Bowles had a long-lasting friendship with the artist Ahmed Yacoubi, while his wife Jane, lived in an apartment upstairs in the same house with a wild peasant woman called Cherifa.
In his early days in Tangier, Burroughs was not particularly sensitive to local culture. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg in 1954, he is not even able to keep track of his conquests:
"I go to bed with an Arab in European clothes. Several days later… I meet an Arab in native dress, and we repair to a Turkish bath. Now I am almost (but not quite) sure it is the same Arab. In any case I have not seen no.1 again... It's like I been to bed with 3 Arabs since arrival, but I wonder if it isn't the same character in different clothes, and every time better behaved, cheaper, more respectful… I really don't know for sure."

William Burroughs, circa 1965
In his 1972 autobiography Second Son, David Herbert, an English aristocrat and long time resident of Tangier, bemoaned the city's "Queer Tangier" reputation. "There is one aspect of Tangier life that many of us who live here do find disagreeable and occasionally embarrassing." He added that its "old reputation as a city of sin" attracted Europeans who seemed to imagine that "every Moroccan they see is for sale. Great offence is caused by their lack of discrimination and if someone gets knocked on the head it is usually their own fault."
In his diary, the English playwright Joe Orton recorded a conversation at the Cafe de Paris in 1967. Orton was sitting at a table with friends beside a "rather stuffy American tourist and his disapproving wife." To further stoke their disapproval, the playwright began to talk about a sexual encounter. When one of those at the table reminded Orton that the tourists could hear every word, he replied, "they have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts."
For some straight men the predominance of gay men had its advantages. The septuagenarian American travel writer John Hopkins says: "I was the only heterosexual writer in Tangier at the time. In terms of women, I had the field to myself!"

Although some think the writers were rebelling against a soulless, suburban McCarthyite America, Hopkins says it was more straightforward. "They were after boys and drugs. That's what drew them. The Moroccans were charming, attractive, intelligent and tolerant. They had to put up with a lot from us."
So why did Morocco, an ostensibly devout Islamic country, allow homosexuality to thrive? The author Barnaby Rogerson says it is a society that is full of paradoxes.
"It is... a place where all the four different cornerstones of culture: Berber-African, Mediterranean, Arabic or Islamic, share an absolute belief in the abundant sexuality of all men and women, who are charged with a sort of personal volcano of 'fitna', which threatens family, society and state with sexually derived chaos at any time," he says. The word fitna, he suggests, "means something like 'charm, allure, enchantment, temptation, dissent, unrest, riot, rebellion' or all of these at the same time."
But despite a certain fear of this chaos of sexuality, there is also an understanding that it is just part of human nature and that ultimately you have to live and let live. "Morocco," Rogerson says, "has always been a nation where tolerance is practised but not preached."

 

[tampa24]

Yes. So now we know how Morocco gained such a reputation for being gay tolerant. Even though I still don't condone sex tourism for either gays or straights.

 

[Ambivalent]

Hey,

Thanks, Jon - fantastic article! I had, of course, read about the follies of Burroughs and his circle in Morocco - but this article offered a little more salient, and gritty, detail.

Tampa, the paradox about North Africa is - while we (nowadays) think of Muslim societies as being much LESS tolerant, in days of yore (the 1940's, '50's, and 60's) some enclaves within them were (paradoxically) MORE tolerant of homosexuality than most American cities of that time.

There has always been (I rely on some of my French professor-friends, for this) an undercurrent of homosexual activity in North Africa, as (of course) everywhere. But it was especially rife, there, BECAUSE (and this has been well-known in certain European circles since the 19th century - just read some of the poems of Constantine Cavafy, for literary markers, in this regard):

Because Islamic societies were so HARSH in their demands with respect to chastity as between young men and young women, before marriage: in some (but not all) of them - a certain tolerance of "boys playing with boys" grew up. Not something officially condoned, but something *winked at*, because it wasn't the main event in life ~ the main even in life being a heterosexual marriage. AND, in previous centuries, more naïve than our own : the only REAL SEX being considered to be, the insertion of a penis, into a vagina.

In this regard, many Islamic societies have historically demonstrated an ethos not unlike that of ancient Greece, i.e.:

*The desire for sex is universal, and the quenching of this desire is necessary - until a legal (heterosexual) marriage, is possible.

*There is nothing morally wrong with engaging in sexual relations with someone of the same sex, AS LONG AS - one is the TOP (not the bottom) and the partner in this encounter is younger, weak, and powerless. (I know, not so nice, huh?)

*In both Islamic societies (where it was NEVER talked about, explicitly) and in ancient Greek society (where it was talked about, a LOT): deep shame attached to being the submissive partner in a sexual encounter: viz., the one who sucked or GOT fucked. (The guys who were DOING the fucking, of course, got off Scot-free - as MANLY MEN who were just having a little fun in their spare time!)

*As I am sure you know, Tamps, the ancient Greeks did dress these harsh realities up, a whole lot. They even devised an ethics, and a culture, in which it was considered acceptable (and even admirable) for an older man to keep a younger one as a lover (and relate to him in this way - though the physical realities of this situation were rarely spoken about in philosophical tracts) - as long as it was recognized that the older man would act as a tutor and mentor to the lad in question (usually the relationship would end, when the younger man's beard began to grow); and that, it was IMPERMANENT.

When the younger man grew up, it was understood that he'd go off and marry, and engage in politics or military campaigns (or both): and take his place as a citizen. Thankful and grateful for the lessons and affection his older lover (who was likely also married to a woman) had given him - but moving on decisively to his new role as a heterosexual citizen, and not really talking about the past, all that much.

*The Islamic societies which have given a bit of scope to homosexuality, have done so on a VERY DIFFERENT basis. It has gone on for centuries, but it is all, completely, on the down-low.

You can't afford to get married? Or you are waiting for your marriage to be arranged? Contact with ANY woman is STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. But maybe. . . . if you hang out with your best friend from school, and mess around a bit - we'll look the other way.

That's the way it's been in Morocco, and Algeria, and Tunisia, for centuries. And that's the reason rich (gay) Westerners have loved to go to these countries, for decades. The combination of "winking tolerance" and the power of MONEY, helped a lot of people get laid, by cute Arab boys, over the years. Before the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism.

***************************************

Tamps - I totally agree with you, about sex tourism. It isn't healthy; it isn't good; and it invariably involves (relatively) richer people enjoying themselves at the expense of much poorer people, who are so HUNGRY, they pretty much have no choice. This is tragic, I think.

Though this is a totally separate subject, when it comes to the subject of prostitution in our own countries, in the West, I have become much more liberal than I ever thought I would be.

Tamps, while I have never employed the services of a "rent-boy", and never would - it just wouldn't seem right, to me - I also know that many of the "johns" out there, are not bad people. . . they are just lonely people who feel that they would never have the opportunity to have an experience of physical love, with anyone, unless they paid for it.

And some of the "rent-boys" who do this sort of work (while I don't know any of them, personally) are kind of (I think) the NEXT STEP BEYOND our "Broke Straight Boys". They are SO BROKE, they resort to escorting, to keep themselves fed and lodged, or to care for their families. (Of course, there is no denying that a substantial number of them, just like in gay erotic video, need the money to feed drug habits, and etc.)

Anyway, Tamps, as a matter of public policy (with implications for both the legal and public health systems) ~ though I never thought I would say this, when I was 25!!!! ~ I increasingly think that (for humanitarian and practical reasons): prostitution should be legalized. NOT because I think it's good. And NOT because I would ever encourage anyone to engage in it, BUT BECAUSE:

I have a sense that legalized and regulated prostitution would:
*Begin to remove a little of the stigma that is attached to people who do this work, now.
*Begin to mitigate some of the dangers and risks that follow people who do this work, now.
*Begin to allow systems so that people who feel they need to do this work, will not feel they are required to do it under the aegis of violent criminals. And so on.

Tampa, we just had a BIG debate about this, in Canada. Our current government decided to tighten UP the laws regarding prostitution, a LOT - following the "Scandinavian model", which has demonstrably failed. (The "Scandinavian model", as you probably know, saves the sex-workers themselves, harmless - while prosecuting their clients, vigorously. And this model has demonstrably failed, because it drives both the sex-workers and their clients underground, and leads to higher levels of exploitation and violent crime.) http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com...bedroom-with-new-legislation-on-prostitution/

That's just what I think. Hey, I'm a Christian (albeit a bad one), and a romantic, and my hope for EVERYONE is that he (or she) finds someone who truly loves and cares for him, or her.

But Tamps' comments about sex tourism sort of prompted me to reflect on this important public policy issue, which has been big in Canada, lately. So, sorry for the digression, but - - - digression is in my nature.

"A" XOXOXOXOXO

 

[Ambivalent]

P.S.

Sorry for typo's. I am really overdue for new glasses.

"A" XOXOXOXO

 

[tampa24]

No worries Ambi. I dread it myself though when I have caught so many typos of my own lately after the fact. lol I never want people to think that I don't know how to spell common words. haha

Your comments on prostitution, escorting and the like are well thought out in my opinion. There were a few times in my life when I considered the possibility of buying sexual favors. But it never happened. Maybe because I always figured I would be in that tiny percentage that either caught something, got busted by the cops or ended up with dangerous rough trade. In addition to the moral conflicts, I also figured it wasn't worth all the risks. The emotional and psychological damage the work does to the person performing the services is also a consideration.

 

[Ambivalent]

No worries Ambi. I dread it myself though when I have caught so many typos of my own lately after the fact. lol I never want people to think that I don't know how to spell common words. haha

Your comments on prostitution, escorting and the like are well thought out in my opinion. There were a few times in my life when I considered the possibility of buying sexual favors. But it never happened. Maybe because I always figured I would be in that tiny percentage that either caught something, got busted by the cops or ended up with dangerous rough trade. In addition to the moral conflicts, I also figured it wasn't worth all the risks. The emotional and psychological damage the work does to the person performing the services is also a consideration.

**************************************************

Totally with you on all points, T.

"A" XOXOXOXOXO