How Morocco Became a Haven for Gay Westerners in the 1950s
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.
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.
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."
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29566539
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