| Nowhere
does the exoticism of Western men that all
handsome, swarthy Arab boys are bisexual
clash with the traditional taboos of sexual
dalliances than in Morocco.
In the West, this country
was long seen as a “playground”
for Europeans who wanted to travel and have
sexual encounters with exotic Arab boys,
and many writers have memorialized their
adventures in travel letters and literature.
But, rightly or wrongly,
many Moroccans resent the view of their
men as bisexual, instead seeing it as an
economic corruption of their young men by
exploitative foreigners.
“This is a very
sensitive topic in my country, and it makes
me very angry sometimes,” said Mohammed
as he and I sat and talked late one night
at an open-air café in Casablanca.
Mohammed was clearly nervous, and he spoke
in hushed tones, and frequently turned around
to see if anyone else was sitting close
by enough that they might overhear our conversation.
Though Mohammed identified
as gay, he said that he felt he was in a
very small minority in Morocco, and he would
never admit he was gay to a fellow Moroccan.
At that, I raised the point that Morocco
used to be famous in Europe as a destination
for men to come and have sex with boys. |
 |
Mohammed
grudgingly admitted that was true. “But
it is not because so many Moroccan men are
bisexual,” he said angrily. “It
is because so many of them are poor.”
Mohammed insisted that
most men in Morocco who have sex with Westerners
do not do so because they are either gay
or bisexual, but because they are often
paid for their services, and need the money.
Some of the men are gay, of course, but
he is not sure that many are bisexual. “They
do it because they have to,” he said.
Part of his anger stems
from his belief that Westerners who come
to Morocco to have sex with young men have
aided that country’s conservatives
who paint homosexuality and bisexuality
as “foreign” illnesses and traits
that are hoisted on Moroccans by outsiders.
“That makes it
easy to live in denial that anyone here
is bisexual or gay, that anyone here would
do it for pleasure, not money,” he
said. “By blaming Westerners for this,
we do not have to face that it is part of
our society.”
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