Don’t Go to Morocco
U.S. mainstream media have ignored Morocco’s gay crackdown, so pass the word. It’s time for a boycott.
In the bright noontime sun we entered the maze of Marrakech’s ancient Kasbah. A tall young Moroccan man in a red and white tracksuit immediately approached us. He called himself Mustafa and asked us where we were from. We said California, smiled and moved on. Minutes later he’d caught up with us again, this time to tell us we were headed down a dead end street.
“Are you two friends?” he asked, pointing at my husband.
I felt a rush of danger. “Friends” suddenly seemed a dangerous word. Was he really trying to determine if we were a gay couple?
“Of course we’re friends,” I said loudly, with as much incredulity as I could muster.
Another young man lurked nearby. As we tried to extricate ourselves, Mustafa pointed in the direction of a museum and then asked for money, since he’d “helped” us through the labyrinth. The other young man moved in close. I gave them the equivalent of a dollar and they scurried away.
Encounters like this are common when traveling in the developing world, with locals seeking the spare change of relatively affluent visitors. As a seasoned traveler, I’ve experienced dozens of these situations.
But I felt a tinge of terror when visiting earlier this year because Morocco is the midst of a witch-hunt, targeting and imprisoning foreign tourists suspected of being homosexual. A person does not need to actually engage in any type of gay sex or overtly gay activity to be picked up and thrown in jail.
It happened to Ray Cole, a 69-year-old retiree visiting Marrakech last October from England. He’d started an online relationship with a young Moroccan man and flew down to visit. As the two men stood at a bus stop the police pulled up and started berating them with homophobic slurs. Homosexuality is a crime in Morocco, and the young local man was apparently already on a list of suspected gays. So when the two men were spotted talking to each other, that was enough evidence for police. Both men were jailed, and Cole was sentenced to four months in prison after investigators found information on the senior’s locked cellphone that allegedly confirmed his orientation.
Cole described the prison as a “concentration camp” with filthy, deplorable, overcrowded conditions. He would have languished there, but when his family discovered his fate they started a campaign on social media that was eventually picked up by the mainstream news media in Europe. The British government objected, and the bad press reportedly led to a local drop in tourism inquiries to Morocco. After serving 20 days of his sentence, Cole was released. Then following additional pressure, the Moroccan man was also freed.
It’s not the only case. A 35-year-old Canadian man was arrested and jailed in April after having a consensual sexual encounter with a security guard at a five-star luxury resort in the seaside city of Agadir. In June two French women were arrested and deported after kissing in the capital of Rabat. And arrests aren’t the only concern: a gay couple this past May said their reservation at an upscale spa hotel in Marrakech was abruptly canceled after management discovered that they were a couple.
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Mainstream American news organizations have ignored nearly all of these incidents, leaving travelers woefully uninformed about these new dangers until they arrive. The U.S. State Department has not issued an official warning, only noting that, “Consensual same-sex sexual relations are criminalized” in Morocco — a dramatic understatement that leaves LGBT travelers perilously unaware of the current crackdown.
Homosexuality has long been against the law in Morocco, as it is in much of Africa and throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, but there was a time when Morocco was much more tolerant. In the 1950s, Morocco was considered a gay destination as artists, writers and free thinkers of all sorts escaped from the repression of America’s McCarthyism and flocked to places like Tangier, where same-sex encounters could be pursued with willing Moroccans. The scene attracted the top gay literati of the era: Jean Genet, Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and Joe Orton. William Burroughs reportedly wrote “Naked Lunch” in a Tangier hostel.
In more recent decades homosexuality was tolerated, as long as it remained hidden. That’s typical in many Muslim cultures, where views of men having sex with men can be more nuanced than they are in the west. No one speaks of it publicly, but sexual encounters are not uncommon between men, especially young men in countries where sex between Muslim men and women are illegal outside marriage, and subject to harsh penalties, including death. So some men secretly have sex with each other until they are married, and don’t consider it a big deal. Even those who clearly prefer sex with men still get married and have families. By our standards, these men are living a lie, but not to them — they co-exist in both worlds, and they don’t understand why people in the west seem to choose between gay and straight. In fact, some Muslim men completely reject those definitions of sexuality as simplistic.
I know this because these are the stories I’ve heard over and over again when traveling and talking to men from Muslim countries, including Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Emirates.
But when we arrived in Marrakech in May we discovered an atmosphere of fear and despair. When I chatted with locals via gay social media phone apps they said it was too dangerous to even chat in cafes. Others on the apps aggressively tried to get personal information from me, or wanted to determine exactly where I was in the city, leading me to think they might be Moroccan police lurking undercover in a sting to try to make more arrests.
After that, it’s no wonder we were so paranoid when Mustafa approached us in the Kasbah and asked about our relationship.
So what’s happened to Morocco? Some blame the Arab spring uprisings that have toppled dictatorships throughout northern Africa.
Morocco is a monarchy, and by many accounts is a benevolent dictatorship when compared to the old regimes of Libya and Egypt. In fact, there’s a strong argument that Morocco is immune to the type of revolution that threw those countries into chaos because King Mohammed VI is believed to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed. Moroccans are proud of this lineage (a taxi driver, unsolicited, bragged to me about the divinity of his monarch), and any rebels might have a hard time claiming that Allah was on their side in any holy war.
That said, it’s difficult for the nation’s leaders to ignore the changes sweeping through the Muslim world. Some fear that the self-proclaimed caliphate of Isis portends a regional shift to extreme religious conservatism. So there’s a thought that if these conservatives are placated, there’s even less of a reason for any rebellious uprising in Morocco. And as history has taught us, there’s no easier way to appease religious conservatives than targeting gays. Such a crackdown might also help end rumors of gay people within Morocco’s royal family.
And this has made Morocco suddenly an unsafe place for gay people to visit. They should not go, and neither should anyone concerned about these issues. Morocco depends on tourism revenue, and perhaps the only way to put an end to the crackdown and decriminalize homosexuality is to vote with our dollars.
There’s no doubt that such a boycott would hurt ordinary Moroccans first, since most live in poverty and depend on that money, but many in the general public seem to support the crackdown, and local gays are suffering as a result. In June police arrested 20 Moroccans on suspicion of being homosexual and “incitement to corruption.” Then two local gay men were jailed in Rabat for standing too close to each other while posing for a photo in front of a historic site. Moroccan news media salaciously publicized the men’s names to enrage the public, and angry mobs set up hateful, bigoted protests in front of the men’s families’ homes.
And these are just the reported cases. How many more have been arrested and imprisoned in secret?
Morocco had been considered one of the more progressive Muslim countries. If people there truly want to veer in an ugly new direction, then I suppose that’s up to them. But we don’t have to fund such a move by visiting and spending our money. And we certainly shouldn’t become the next martyrs left to rot in jail cells because we weren’t warned about this nasty turn of events.
Now you know. Don’t go.
