Travel Tips: Morocco

The Guardian.

As ever, just because a country has laws against homosexuality, it doesn't mean they are routinely enforced. *

The shocking case of Ray Cole and Jamal Wald Nass was an exception, not the rule.

* This is a widespread canard in both the gay and straight media.

Both from just yesterday; The Spread Of Gay Rights, The Economist - which implies you get stoned to death for being gay in some countries cause they haven't embraced neo-liberal globalisation.

And When In Rome, Think Of Gay People In Iran, Libby Purves, The Times.

No serious observer believes men get arrested, never mind executed, in Iran, just for being gay.

If this were true they must have the most incompetent police force since the Keystone Cops.

Ray Cole: I'm Still Waiting

Respect where it's due, this interview with Ray Cole by Patrick Strudwick does foreground the plight of his Moroccan lover, Jamal Wald Nass - released two days later, but pending an appeal - a man all but invisible in most other accounts

Jamal Wald Nass: Whatever Happened To Him?

An Englishman, Ray Cole, and a young Moroccan, Jamal, are walking in the streets of the Gueliz district in Marrakech. They are not doing anyone any harm.

Some passing police think otherwise: they arrest them and accuse them of homosexuality. A judge then sends them to prison. The proof of their “crime” is the text messages and private photos that the police found in their mobile phones, which show their intimate relationship.

This scene, which might shock people in some western countries, is commonplace. It happens several times a day without the media taking any notice.* What changes everything is Cole’s nationality. He is British. And Britain is not just any country. The image of Morocco, a land of tolerance and generosity (according to the advertising slogans), is very much at stake here. There is danger in sight: a disaster for the emerging tourism sector.

Quick, quick, let’s cover it up, let’s release the Englishman, we’ll deal with the Moroccan later, he’s not so important.

The Moroccan authorities took a while to react. And that they eventually did so was because Cole’s family and friends rallied round strongly on his behalf and began to create a fuss about his case in the international media.

And Jamal, the young Moroccan? What’s happening to him? 

Abdellah Taïa, Guardian Online.

* Be interested to hear if anyone has evidence of this sort of thing.

Morocco: Unbound

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...

BBC News Magazine follow in the dusty footprints of Bowles, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Orton et al.

Although some think the writers were rebelling against a soulless, suburban McCarthyite America, [John] 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."

Joe Orton, pictured in 1967, with a helpful young tour-guide.

That intro is so silly though. 

Morocco is still a haven for gay American and British tourists.

The arrests of Ray Cole and his often forgotten friend Jamal Wald Nass for 'homosexual acts' last week were exceptional.

That is why they - or rather the British Cole's - were so newsworthy. 

It is ridiculous to suggest men are routinely arrested just for having gay sex, or that there is some homophobic clampdown going on. 

Can you tell me the last time a British or American gay tourist was arrested?

Ray Cole: British Father

Great news, British father, Ray Cole!

Hopefully they freed your 'friend', Jamal Wald Nass, too, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.

Presumably on account of him not being British or a father.

Or white.

Daily Mail: He may be gay, but he's our gay Briton!

The Sun: Well done, our plucky gay Brit!

Update: Nass has apparently now been freed on bail - let me know if you see any mentions of this in the UK media.