Morocco: A Dream Destination Between Fascination and Exploitation

The quintessential North African dream of longing was Morocco. Beyond painters and musicians, it was especially writers who fell under the spell of the country. Moreover, they found, particularly in Tangier and Marrakesh, an infrastructure for sexual activities that elsewhere were prosecuted.

Initially, it was people whose professional obligations brought them to the country. They produced the first non-Arab Moroccan texts since antiquity. Samuel Pepys was involved in the dissolution of the British Tangier base, Eugène Delacroix and Pierre Loti accompanied diplomatic missions, Alexandre Dumas traveled on government orders, Mark Twain as a reporter on a cruise ship, Edgar Wallace as a special correspondent, Friedrich Glauser served in the Foreign Legion, Jean Genet and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry performed military service, the latter later also becoming a commercial pilot and airfield chief in Tarfaya, Ian Fleming conducted intelligence activities toward Tangier, Roland Barthes fulfilled a teaching obligation in Rabat. In these cases, Morocco was not actually chosen as a destination, but yielded to the circumstances of work.

Why Morocco?

Only since the second half of the 19th century did novelists and poets, painters and musicians begin traveling with the primary aim of seeking ideas, exotic local color, and new ways of expression. With such motivation, the reasons for choosing the country must lie in Morocco itself. They can be summarized in a few points.

Proximity. Morocco was distant and yet near, culturally distant but not geographically far, reachable by ship from any port city. Since 1922 there was a daily Toulouse-Tangier air connection on the Latécoère line. In the early 1920s, the train ran twelve hours from Paris to Marseille. The Marseille steamer, with a stop in Tangier, took three days and three nights to reach Casablanca. There was also the option to travel from Paris via Madrid to Algeiras or Gibraltar and board the ship there to Tangier or Casablanca. Algeiras–Tangier were three hours by sea, Gibraltar–Casablanca ten hours. From other European port cities and from New York, Casablanca, Tangier, and Gibraltar were also served in regular service.

Climate. In travel writings, diaries, letters, and novels, Morocco’s climate is celebrated; Tangier became a summer destination, Marrakesh was sought for its warm and sunny winters.

Flair. Morocco possesses all the ingredients a successful tourism destination has always needed—varied landscapes, from beaches to mountains to deserts and oases, sun, sights, and a tourist infrastructure that was continually improved under French rule. Fez and Marrakesh can still satisfy orientalist dream images; Tangier did so at least until independence. It was exotic, idyllic, picturesque, small and yet international—a dream city, as Paul Bowles put it, with all the dream accessories.

Costs. Especially in Tangier, which held the greatest appeal for the literati, everything was available, and everything was cheap to obtain. Those who stayed longer and thus spread expenses over time could live in Morocco far more cheaply than elsewhere in Europe and America. This remains true today, if one forgoes alcohol and luxury hotels.

Freedom. Above all in Tangier one could permit freedoms not available anywhere else in the world. The city’s international society lived in a lifestyle that was eccentric and even excessive to the point of madness, and thus generous and tolerant regarding individual life forms. The well-traveled William Burroughs, the father of the Beat writers who refused to bow to any constraints, aside from his drug habit, repeatedly emphasized this in his letters to Allen Ginsberg.

Drugs. All kinds of drugs were available in Tangier and cheap to buy. Cannabis was and is everywhere accessible and continues to render the poor forgetful to this day. Especially for the Beat Generation, drugs were the magnet; without drugs, Burroughs’s work would not exist. Even so, some of Paul Bowles’s writings were hallucinated onto the page under hashish influence.

Homosexuality. An unusually large number of artists who traveled to or lived in Morocco were—most openly—homosexual, such as Hans Christian Andersen, André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, Paul Bowles, Charles-Henri Ford, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Brion Gysin, Willam S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Chester, Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo, Hubert Fichte, Roland Barthes, and also the musicians Camille Saint-Saëns, Aaron Copland, the painters Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, Max Peiffer-Watenphul, the photographer Cecil Beaton. Others harbored at least homosexual leanings, such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

Homosexuality was not a taboo in Tangier
Why exactly Morocco became the magnet for homosexual artists is not easy to understand and has many causes.

Since the 19th century, as French influence grew, homosexual artists also traveled to Algeria and Tunisia, for example Camille Saint-Saëns, André Gide, Henry de Montherlant. The political development in Algeria differed completely from Morocco. Algeria was under Ottoman rule; Morocco was not. Algeria was a colony, not a protectorate; the decolonization process from France was even more difficult and bloodier, and after the Algerian War came communism, then Islamism, civil war, and military rule. Such a political history is not conducive to tourism development and was at times quite hindering.

Also in Tunisia there is, like in Morocco, the homosexual variant of sex tourism to this day. But compared with Tunisia, Morocco is more diverse, varied, colorful, more fruitful for tourism and probably also more fertile artistically. This may explain why Morocco holds advantages over Tunisia, also for homosexuals. Furthermore, Tunisia had no Tangier with international status.

In Tangier’s liberal international community, homosexuality was not a taboo at a time when it was still criminalized in Europe and America. The obvious and perhaps indifferent attitude may also derive from the fact that David Herbert, who for half a century set the social tone in Tangier, was himself homosexual, and as the second legitimately disinherited son of a British aristocrat perhaps chose Tangier as his residence for precisely that reason. The second influential circle, the jet-set, was Barbara Hutton; as heir to the American Woolworth fortune she was long regarded as the richest woman in the world. Herbert and Hutton were friends—and she, too, broke many bourgeois social norms with her seven husbands and numerous lovers both short- and long-term.

In any case, the sexual availability of young men drew homosexuals to Morocco. Yet this was prostitution—services rendered for payment—and its cause lay in economic hardship and, in Tangier’s heyday, the hunger of adolescents; it was an expression of power relations, of socio-economic inequality between the partners.

Sex work by minors

There is no doubt that many of the young Moroccans offering sexual services were underage. “Female prostitution is largely confined to licensed houses. Male prostitutes, on the other hand, are everywhere. They take anyone’s presence to be homosexual and openly address passersby on the street. I was approached by boys who could not have been older than twelve,” William Burroughs wrote in Interzone (1989). The moral awareness of child abuse was not well developed, overlooked, or covered by a general sense of superiority toward the residents of the visited country. Some might have believed they could buy their misdeeds with money. “Tangier has long been this place where one hopes to lose one’s guilt,” Tahar Ben Jelloun says in Harrouda (1973).

Other Moroccan authors such as Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Mohammed Mrabet, Mohamed Choukri also illuminate the shadows behind the pretty illusion, poverty and misery, rural flight and slums, child labor and sex work. “Nackt das Brot” (The Naked Bread, 1973) is the extraordinary story of Mohammed Choukri’s childhood and youth on the streets of Tetouan and Tangier, where he worked as a beggar, thief, male prostitute, and mule for smugglers—unhappy, miserable, desperate, hungry years beyond imagining. “Begging is the business of children and the frail old. For a young boy capable of stealing if he cannot find work, it is shameful to beg.”

The pleasant was joined to the useful
It happened that over time friendships developed between writers and their Moroccan lovers. Kiki supported Burroughs when he had no money because he had spent all his reserves on drugs. But Kiki knew from experience that Burroughs’s next check from his parents would eventually arrive. Similarly was the relationship between Alfred Chester and his friend. In some cases one might conclude that financial interest joined the friendship; the pleasant was joined to the useful.

Also with Bowles and Genet, liaisons grew into friendships that endured for years; both supported their friends, Bowles also in artistic terms. Yet Bowles ultimately broke with all of them. Genet hoped to help several of his friends, not only the Moroccan one, advance in their careers, and he always failed. There is no doubt that Genet’s friend el-Qatrani, a few months after Genet’s death, died of grief by crashing his car into a tree.

But among the Moroccan lovers of the artists, it was not exclusively homosexuality. They were either married or in the process of getting married. The whole town apparently knew of Mohammed Mrabet’s impending marriage, only Bowles did not. He was the last to learn, as John Hopkins records in his diary, and he was usually well informed.

Also many lesbian and bisexual women writers
Among the few women writers who traveled to Morocco, there is also a high share of homosexual and bisexual individuals. There is Gertrude Stein, who once traveled to Morocco with her sister and also with her partner Alice B. Toklas; Colette, who went to Morocco with (a later) husband; Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, traveling with Sartre, and Jane Bowles. She had Moroccan female friends and with Cherifa a lifelong struggle. As Truman Capote recounts in Prayers for the Dead (Answered Prayers) (1987), it was clear to her that Cherifa’s interests, a “draining personality,” were financial in nature; she even feared being poisoned by her.

Isabelle Eberhardt, who as a teenager in Geneva wore men’s clothes and traveled through North Africa as a man under a male pseudonym, maintained a gender-role change that leaves her biographers puzzled.

Patricia Highsmith and Marguerite Yourcenar were brief visitors. Yourcenar, whose work is marked by homosexual themes, undertook another Morocco trip late in life, a few months before her death in 1987, taking her to Tangier and Fez. Yourcenar said of herself that she would have liked to be the lover of men who love men. After the death of her partner, she traveled with a gay young man. Also Marguerite Duras, heterosexual, had a gay young partner in her later years, and one of her biographers, Vircondelet, contends that she loved men in her androgyny.

Undoubtedly, heterosexual women writers also visited Morocco. But it is remarkable that several world-famous authors, whose work at least tangentially included Morocco, were homosexual or bisexual or displayed such tendencies.

Pioneers of today’s mass tourism
The artists of the 19th and 20th centuries were the forerunners of today’s mass tourism; their works in pictures, sound, and words served as advertising and laid the groundwork for further developments. In the 1990s, investors began to buy and renovate decaying houses on a large scale. Today in some medinas—in Marrakesh, Essaouira, Rabat and elsewhere—entire streets are foreign-owned or refurbished for tourist needs.

Today Morocco remains a magnet for creatives; the scene has diversified geographically as well as by genre. Filmmakers and fashion designers, designers and ceramicists, knick-knack crafters and garden designers settled here, part-time or full-time. Hand in hand with national tourism promotion and the international tourism industries, they continue weaving the familiar stereotyped images of Morocco and celebrate exotic-entry approaches. Thus the Orientalization of Morocco progresses—but that is another chapter…

Our guest author Ingrid Thurner is a cultural and social anthropologist as well as a publicist in the field of science communication. At Löcker Verlag she published the book “Exotik, Erotik und große Worte. Literaten in Marokko, Marokko in der Literatur” (Amazon Affiliate Link).