Homosexuality in Morocco has two other H’s to contend with: Hchouma (shame) and Haram (sin).

LAETITIA GROTTI & MARIA DAI¨F

IT REALLY DOESN’T MATTER WHAT ANYONE THINKS ABOUT THEM, THEY EXIST. THEY MAY BE OUT OF SIGHT, BUT THEY HAVE A VOICE.

Homosexuality in Morocco has two other H’s to contend with: Hchouma (shame) and Haram (sin). It was just a year ago that Mohamed Asseban, a member of the board of ulema (doctors of Quranic law) of Rabat-Sale´ announced to the press: ‘Gays deserve the death penalty!’ Moroccan society, like Moroccan law and religion, is undeniably homophobic. Such being the case, it is difficult to change people’s attitudes to those they prefer to think of as ‘sexual deviants’ or even ‘abnormal’. Indeed, many take the view that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’ since it does not lead to procreation, the sole acknowledged purpose for sexual relations. Nevertheless, the fact remains that homosexuality has always existed and continues to exist in Arab and Muslim countries just as it does anywhere else. This has not been without its difficulties for anyone wanting to live in peace and quiet with their sexuality or trying to affirm their sexual identity. ‘Coming out’ is just not an option, still less laying any kind of claim to ‘rights for homosexuals’. In the land ruled by the Prophets’ descendants, to live one’s life as a homosexual is, more than anything else, to live one’s life in secret. Why? So as not to be an object of universal ridicule, so as not to be a victim of scandalmongers or indeed of ‘queerbashers’. What is it that bothers people basically? Is it the sex act itself? It is perhaps not quite that simple if you take into account the importance this culture attaches to the difference between ‘active’ and passive participation. It seems that what really upsets people is the idea of love between two men. Whilst it may be possible, on condition of being extremely discreet, to have sexual relations, it is much more unusual to engage in a romance or to plan a future together – unless of course you decide to leave the country.

SECRETS AND LIES LAETITIA GROTTI

COMING OUT IS NOT AN OPTION FOR MOROCCAN HOMOSEXUALS AND THEY ARE FAR FROM HAPPY ABOUT IT

‘I’ve got three faces,’ says Hassan, a 20-year-old from Casablanca, ‘one for my parents, one for my friends and the one I see when I look in the mirror.’ Whilst he is quite prepared to admit that he has to live a double life if he wants to live in peace, Hassan has nevertheless chosen to accept his homosexuality. That means, first and foremost, accepting it for himself: getting over the feelings of shame and guilt that constantly arise from his family and, by extension, from society. Such feelings are deeply rooted in everyone because they have been nurtured throughout childhood and adolescence. For Jamal. a 30-year-old from Marrakech, this kind of background is what makes it most difficult. ‘In our country, you really have to have a strong character if you’re going to accept your homosexuality. You need to have some kind of reference points. Unfortunately, nowadays in Morocco, when you’re 15 and you start feeling attracted to boys, you’ve had it. There are no reference points, no examples to follow, no gay visibility. You feel isolated. There are some people who think they are the only ones. When you’re in that situation it’s difficult to accept yourself for what you are. You try to kid yourself that maybe you’re bisexual or it’s just a passing phase.’

Hassan had his first sexual experience at 14 with a friend. ‘I didn’t feel as if I was doing anything wrong. As far as I was concerned it was me discovering sex, it was just a game, just two boys messing about. Except that my mother caught us. She was the first to tell me what it was all about: then she told me that it was very bad and that we must never do it again.’ He was brought up in a family that was reasonably well-off, openly homophobic – ‘especially my big brother’ – and his adolescence was psychologically very difficult. He was pulled this way and that, tugged in one direction by his real need to feel love for other men and in the other by family pressures and the norms imposed by society. When he could get hold of certain novels that were banned in Morocco he read them in secret. At school he even went so far as to pretend to be more homophobic than the others so as to seem to be what he was not, to be what all the others seemed to be, to be ‘normal’.

But it is not easy to fool everyone else without losing something of yourself. And so, because he could not bear to carry on with this pretence any longer, because he had friends that he could trust, Hassan took the plunge and confided in them. Doing so meant embarking on protracted drawn-out process of educating them about himself and his homosexuality: repeating over and over again that he is not a deviant, that he is just like everyone else, that he has the same dreams about living with someone as a couple, about a future life lived in peace. Whilst it is true that he managed to find a few people who would lend a sympathetic and attentive ear and were open-minded enough not to judge or reject him, it was actually in France, in Paris, where he was a student, that the real turning point came. ‘I discovered new horizons. For a start, simply because it isn’t illegal in France there wasn’t that feeling of fear that you get here. I was able to go out, to live my life the way I wanted to, read the books I wanted without having to hide them. But what really changed things was my flatmate. He was a Moroccan, from a state school. We just got talking quite naturally; the subject of my homosexuality came up and, to my great surprise, he accepted it without any problem. That’s when I realised that I could live as a homosexual in Morocco.’

This admirable degree of optimism, strengthened by youthful hope, was to push him further: to come out to his mother. At the start he was to hear all the usual conventional responses: ‘You’re young, you’ll grow out of it,’ then later the divinely inspired threats: ‘It’s a sin, it’s unnatural…’ It was only when he used the word ‘love’ that the final sentence was pronounced: ‘If you live like that here then we don’t want to see you ever again.’ Since then, this poor woman, at her wits’ end because of her ‘deviant’ son, has been trying desperately to get him married off. As far as she’s concerned, one thing is for sure, the only way to get him back on track is to put him in an institution. And in fact Hassan says that he does not feel ready to give up his social status, at least not yet. Because he promised his mother, he has broken up with his boyfriend, burned all his books and, in short, seen his life torn apart. So now he’s like the vast majority of homosexuals in that country who, because they don’t have Hassan’s courage, prefer to live in secret, hiding from anything that might give them away. All those that we met say the same thing: if you want to live in Morocco as a homosexual, there’s only one way: absolute discretion ‘unless you don’t mind being laughed at by everyone in your district, at university or at work’ adds Jamal, and he goes on to say: ‘You can do what you like but you mustn’t give people the chance to be sure about you because, after all, there is always some doubt in their minds. Lots of gays encourage that element of doubt so as to avoid any trouble.’

How many of them lead a double life? For the daytime, the younger ones invent imaginary girlfriends or dates with girls; the older ones get married and have children. But the night belongs to them. That’s when they can do what they want to do. Because, let’s be clear about this, coming clean about your homosexuality to your family or even to your friends is practically impossible. That involves too much fear, too much bewilderment, too much condemnation of course and even too much guilt about what you’re doing. And so, at best, sisters, cousins, sometimes mothers, might be let into the secret. At worst, and in the vast majority of cases, the person faces his dilemmas, his deceptions, his suffering alone. Those who are most successful at coming to terms with their lives are those, such as the 40-year-old from Tangier, who speak about the work that still needs to be done to improve the way of life of young gays: to teach them not to despise themselves and to acquire a measure of self-respect. This is all the more necessary, as Jamal points out, because: ‘Nowadays nobody speaks out in public to defend homosexuals. Not even human rights organisations, not feminist groups either. The feminists are so often accused – wrongly – of being manoeuvred by foreigners into destroying our values that they leave lesbians well alone.’

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
DESPITE THE PROBLEMS, GAYS DO MANAGE TO MEET, CHAT EACH OTHER UP, ENGAGE IN A LITTLE SEDUCTION

‘I don’t have a problem expressing my sexuality normally and I’ve never considered leaving the country,’ says Wadie, a young homosexual from Tangier. Wadie is 21 and shares his life with a young man from the same town. As long as his acquaintances are not in the picture, there is nothing to stop him, says this young lad who feels that ‘there’s no need to change anything in Moroccan society’. He tells us that in Tangier, as in other large towns, there are meeting places for homosexuals: cafe´s, night clubs and hammams (communal baths). So as soon as someone on his own decides to look for some company, he’ll know exactly where to go.

But it’s in Marrakech that everyone says they feel most comfortable. A young man from Casablanca tells us: ‘In Marrakech, I can pick up people anywhere and it’s the only town where I can even pick up in the street without worrying that I’m going to get beaten up.’ Like his friend, he goes to Marrakech to be able to ‘breathe more easily’ and to get away from his parents’ watchful eye. ‘When I’m in Casablanca I do everything I can to dress in a way that won’t attract attention. But as soon as I get away from there I dress differently and think differently too.’ They have all learned ways round the restrictions: since it’s very rare for their friends and family to be in the know, they can even invite their partners home without anyone becoming suspicious.

Ahmed is 45: ‘My parents have met all my partners and got on fine with them. Of course, they never suspected anything; they thought I’d just invited back a few friends from the office’. Wadie stresses, half in jest, half in earnest: ‘It’s even easier for a gay couple than for a hetero couple to express their sexuality to the full because two men can live together, travel together and even share a hotel room. There’s no law against it. But a hetero couple who aren’t married will have a lot more problems in living together.’ So what Wadie seems to be saying is that, provided you keep it quiet, anything is possible: meeting, picking each other up and having a full sex life.

Yassir unhesitatingly confirms this: ‘I’m 35 and I’m entirely comfortable with my sexual orientation. That’s not to say I shout it from the rooftops, but things have always worked out fine with my partners, especially since I stopped living with my parents.’ Yassir lives in Casablanca and, as with many of his friends, the places he can pick up other gays are nightclubs or private parties, even though he admits that he’s not particularly good at it: ‘But I never try for pick-ups in the street, even if other people do.’ For fear of getting it wrong? ‘No, not really because gay pick-ups are very discreet. There’s none of your ‘‘Psst, how about it, then?’’; no bad language shouted at passers-by.’ Jalal explains his technique: ‘When I’m walking down the street and a boy catches my attention, I look him straight in the eye and I keep walking. Then I stop a few yards from him and turn round. If he stops as well, then it’s worked.’

Another unusual feature of the gay scene is that all social classes meet each other and it is not unusual ‘for a young man from the Upper Anfa district to have a relationship with a boy from Hay Mohammadi’. And of course the explanation is: ‘Groups already excluded don’t exclude each other.’ So dates? Pick-ups? How does homosexual love life work? ‘That’s where it gets tricky. Very few love affairs last very long given the pressure that we’re all under. Having said that, there are some couples who manage to hold on, especially if the two partners have both left their parents’ homes and are financially independent.’ Ahmed agrees: all his relationships have lasted more than two years. His parents live in the east of Morocco and he lives in the west and, in the district that he’s lived in for 18 years, he never speaks to anyone.

GAY NIGHTS IN CASABLANCA

MARIA DAI¨F

MOST HOMOSEXUALS ARE FORCED BY CIRCUMSTANCES TO BE INVETERATE NIGHTOWLS. UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS AND IN THE FEW PLACES THEY CAN TO SOME EXTENT BE THEMSELVES, THEY MEET OLD FRIENDS AND MAKE NEW ONES

It’s half-past-eight and I’m in a cafe´ fronting one of the town’s main roads. It’s a very ordinary sort of place on two floors. As with most cafe´s in Casablanca, the clientele is almost entirely male. This is where I am to meet Yassir. He is a company executive and campaigner for homosexual rights, working for several international organisations. He arrives on his own. None of his friends would agree to meet a journalist, even though Yassir tried to reassure them their names, jobs, addresses wouldn’t be used. Their response was absolutely final: they were not going to meet a Moroccan journalist.

Yassir has hardly sat down before he tells me, with a touch of mockery: ‘You’ve chosen to sit on the hetero side; gays stay on the ground floor.’ Looking at the men sitting at the tables, you won’t see anything specific to back up what Yassir says but he’s a regular and knows these places well. This is the place he often comes to in the late afternoon to be with his friends. For some years now, this cafe´ has been one of the few places that homosexuals have taken over and turned into a meeting-place, somewhere to pick up others, a kind of headquarters where they can ‘all be together’. Yassir explains: ‘That doesn’t mean that there are only homosexuals here, but it’s only the homosexuals that know who is and who isn’t.’ Eh? Yassir smiles and comes back with: ‘I can’t explain it! I can tell, and I’m hardly ever wrong, who is gay and who is hetero’. Then he thinks for a minute and says: ‘The way people look at each other is really important. I can tell by the way that one man looks at another man sitting at a table whether he’s gay or not.’

The cafe´ owner and the waiters know that the place is a favourite haunt of homosexuals. So are they welcomed with open arms? ‘The fact that we meet here doesn’t mean that the owner encouraged it or wanted it that way. He just closes his eyes because homosexuals are good customers. Wherever we go, we spend a lot. That’s what you’d expect: we don’t have wives and children to support.’ I look around: there are men coming in and out of the cafe´. I catch myself wondering about their sexual orientation. No good, though. Here, everything is done very discreetly. People are picked up with just a look or a smile. Anyway, everyone here knows everyone else. Yassir explains: ‘Yes, of course, you can talk about a gay community: a community that frequents the same places, has a sense of humour and a set of codes of behaviour in common.’ And I’m told that, since the word has very strong pejorative overtones in darija, the local dialect, they had to use French expressions, with meanings specific to the gay community, to indicate that someone is gay. So they say things like: ‘Il est comme c¸a’ (He’s that way); ‘Il marche’ (He’ll go with it); or ‘Il est du domaine’ (He’s one of us’).

About ten o’clock Yassir suggests going for a walk around Casablanca to see the avenues and parks that are the classic places for meetings and pick-ups. We’re in one of the city’s main boulevards. Everything looks very quiet and normal. ‘It’s too early; there aren’t many people about. A man looking for a partner knows he can come here. All he has to do is go up and down the boulevard, either on foot or in a car.’ As we go further on, I learn that such and such a street is a night-time haunt of women prostitutes, another transvestite territory: the parks are the places for all sorts of forbidden lovemaking. ‘The prostitutes sometimes bribe the fuzz to look the other way. If they didn’t do that, when there are raids, they’d fabricate all sorts of charges accusing gays of prostitution, even though it’s just not true.’

Half-past midnight and we’re in a city nightclub. It’s the only one that, for some years now, gays have used to have a good time with their friends, to pick people up or to engage in prostitution. Yassir teases me by challenging me to tell who is gay and who is not. It’s difficult, and there’s a good reason for that. ‘You get all sorts here: heteros, bisexuals and gays. The heteros are more at ease here: they can let themselves go.’ But the place isn’t a bit like a Parisian gay nightclub and there is nothing to distinguish it from any other Casablanca night-spot. What’s more, there is nothing to shock any hardline homophobes: no signs of love or affection between the men sitting at the tables. Yassir explains: ‘It’s unthinkable. Gays don’t even dare to do the sort of things that heteros might do with each other. Holding hands, for example. The only way that they have of letting themselves go is in the way they dress, the way they dance or the way they move about.’ I watch the dance-floor. There are two men dancing together, facing each other. There is nothing to give away their sexual identity. In Morocco, you only have to go to a wedding to see that two men or two women dancing together is by no means out of the ordinary.

About two o’clock in the morning and the nightclub is not yet beginning to empty. On the dance-floor, two young men wearing tight tee-shirts and trousers are wiggling their hips at each other to the sound of some oriental music. At one of the tables a man discreetly strokes his neighbour’s neck and then his waist. Two Asians and a young Moroccan are heading for the exit. Yassir tells me: ‘I’m sure I could quite safely pick up one of those men standing at the bar.’

We leave the nightclub. Friendly bouncers wish Yassir goodnight. Their job is to keep an eye on security and ensure that nobody comes and upsets their customers. ‘Homosexuals are protected here. The club can’t do without them because they’ll buy more and come back more often than heterosexuals.’ I look round and a uniformed policeman has closed the door behind us.

LOVE, SEX AND THE INTERNET

MARIA DAI¨F

BECAUSE IT GUARANTEES ANONYMITY, THE INTERNET IS THE ONLY PLACE WHERE GAYS CAN EXPRESS THEIR SEXUALITY FREE OF ALL TABOOS

‘Imagine a young boy, living in a small town or a village, finding out that he’s gay. He can’t tell anyone about it, he keeps it hidden away inside himself, thinks there’s something wrong with him and that he’s the only one in the world. There’s where the Internet has brought about a revolution. For five dirhams, a boy like that can now log on, discuss things, make friends or even meet other boys.’

It’s indisputable that the Internet has changed the lives of a good number of Moroccan homosexuals. It gives them anonymity and it is the only place where they can claim the right to express themselves, the only place where their sexual orientation is not a taboo. Hassan is proof of this: ‘It’s thanks to the Internet that I met 90 per cent of the best friends I’ve got today.’ Whilst there isn’t yet an exclusively Moroccan website for chatting or dating, there is no shortage of French or international sites open to all nationalities. Small ad columns, discussion forums, chatrooms: all it takes is a click of a mouse for ‘handsome, friendly young guy from Agadir’ to have a virtual meeting with ‘black diamond from Oujda’ and to trust him without breaking any taboos. Once you get that far, everything becomes possible from swapping phone numbers to dating ‘or more if it works out’.

THE SECOND SEX

LAETITITA GROTTI

RELIGION AND THE LAW ARE UNITED AGAINST THEM BUT HOMOSEXUALS ARE NOT EQUAL IN THE EYES OF EITHER

There’s no point in beating about the bush, says Jamal: ‘Moroccan society is for the most part homophobic.’ Admittedly, it can be tolerant about relationships between men but only at certain ages or in certain closed circles – boarding schools, the army, prison – when there are ‘extenuating circumstances’. As long as it is just a ‘sexual experiment’, especially for a boy, it is put down to a childish mistake, the kind of silly thing you might do when you’re growing up. ‘It would be just the same if it was with a goat,’ says Jamal. However, the so-called ‘tolerance’ on the part of Moroccan society soon disappears and is replaced by condemnation without appeal if a man loves another man (or a woman loves another woman). There are no ‘extenuating circumstances’ then.

According to Assia Mseffer, a Casablanca psychologist, there are two main reasons for this homophobia. The first, more obvious one, is directly related to Islam, the state religion, which condemns homosexuality unconditionally on the same basis as any other form of ‘affective relationship’ based on love or sex. The second is to do with the fact that homosexuality is an offence under the law. Article 489 of the penal code punishes homosexuality with terms of imprisonment ranging from six months to three years or fines of 120-1,200 dirhams (cUS$12–US$132). The two main bastions of society, religion and the law, present homosexuality as perverse sexual deviancy; it’s not easy to face up to such unconditional opposition.

The fact remains that if you are going to discuss homosexuality at all in an Arab-Muslim context, you have to raise the whole problem of sexuality in a country where a patriarchal society and Islamic values have, for generations, imposed an oppressive silence on the question of human relationships. The outcome is inescapable: for homosexuality, as for sexuality in general, Moroccan society has evolved a system of loopholes. One, in particular, depends on the very clear cultural distinction between active and passive participation; on the ‘creation of a hierarchy within the homosexual world’, as Mseffer puts it. As far as Habib is concerned, ‘This distinction between the one who plays the virile (active) role and the one who ‘plays the woman’ (the passive role) is a reality that all Moroccan homosexuals experience.’ Jamal reckons it goes further than that: ‘It’s all right for the person who is seen as active to have sex with men as long as he retains all the attributes of virility. He’s a man; he continues to play his part as a man. It’s the one who chooses to play the woman’s part who is despised socially. All the expressions used to denote homosexuality refer only to these people and they are considered to be sick or ‘‘abnormal’’.’ And that’s also the reason why gays who assume an extremely effeminate, even degrading role are tolerated. In Morocco, there must be nothing that detracts from the real man’s thrusting, virile image; no attacks on the fundamentals, a posteriori!

It’s quite another problem if you don’t fit the conventional stereotype when you decide to accept your homosexuality and to make it obvious. ‘In such cases the hostile reactions are more violent. A person who, somehow or other, accepts his effeminate nature, that is, his real nature, and the social role that goes along with it is more easily accepted than one who is virile and masculine but goes against his ‘‘natural condition’’,’ says Jamal.

Society finds homosexuals problematic once they begin to upset the established order. They are all the more problematic in that ‘declared’ homosexuals, those who actually practise it, are much smaller in number than ‘latent’ homosexuals, those who will never or rarely actually practise homosexuality. The main factor that holds them back is guilt in the eyes of God. ‘Some of my patients recognise that, for them, it is impossible to be a Muslim and a homosexual,’ says Assia Mseffer. This leads many people nowadays to claim that it is only when a complete separation of religion and politics is achieved that a guarantee of the right to be a fully fledged citizen can be given to every individual, whatever his particular characteristics might be. While we await the (hypothetical?) establishment of a secular state in Morocco, progress in attitudes concerning affirmation and acceptance of the individual’s sexuality obviously depends on the emergence of the individual in relation to the group. Things are beginning to move.

Laetitia Grotti & Maria Daı¨f prepared this report for Tel Quel Reproduced courtesy Tel Quel Translated by MR

DEPRAVITY, DEVIANCE AND DEBAUCHERY

DRISS BENNANI

FORTY-THREE PEOPLE IN TETUAN WERE ARRESTED AND THEN RELEASED WITHOUT EXPLANATION. WHAT WAS IT ALL ABOUT?

The town of Tetuan is smartening itself up. The summer holiday rush is almost here. It looks as if it’s going to be a good season. The King is expected to arrive at any moment. He will stay in the north for a few weeks as has been his custom for a few years now. The old town is still attracting anybody who’s anybody in the late afternoons and evenings.

But something has changed. At the beginning of June 2004, the police rounded up about 40 people, most of them fairly young, for ‘incitement to depravity and unauthorised assembly’. Later, it would be revealed that several of them were accused of ‘sexual deviance’. The affair was soon all over the front pages of the national dailies. All through Morocco, from Tetuan to Tangier, people were expecting to hear about summer 2004’s new suspense story. They were not slow to draw the parallel with the story of the Egyptian homosexuals and the Queen Boat affair. Tetuan was on the boil.

Two days later, adrenalin levels suddenly dropped when everyone was released without charge. ‘They were not caught in the act; the enquiry failed to come up with anything,’ said a Tetuan appeals court judge. Here’s what actually seems to have happened.

It’s 1 June and there’s going to be a bit of a birthday party for Hicham in an old room in the medina. The guests begin to arrive in some numbers at the beginning of the afternoon. The room in question is at one end of a pedestrian street leading into the square that holds Tetuan’s royal palace. The 40 or so guests are unusual, first and foremost because of the way they are dressed – bodyhugging leotards and tight trousers – and most of them are boys. They are already exciting plenty of comment even before the party proper begins.

Since there isn’t much room inside, guests come out from time to time to take the air. There are three minarets around the party venue whose calls to prayer punctuate the day for those few dozen retired men sitting at the tables and carefully watching every last action or movement of anyone passing by. Soon, round about five o’clock, the dekka merrakchia (festive music) starts up. ‘Who’s getting married?’ A few curious bystanders step inside to have a look.

The sight that greets them is unusual, to say the least: young men gyrating and shaking their hips at each other; one is wearing a burnous. Later, some claim he was actually dressed as a woman. At 7.15pm, the fuzz arrive. Everyone is dragged out and carried off to the police station. The preliminary interrogations, which are on the tough side, soon make clear what this is all about: the detainees’ homosexuality. Tetuan’s leading citizens, from the wali (city govenor) to the prefect of police, are all there.

The 43 detainees spend the next day quietly. Nothing to report – except maybe those blood tests they all had to undergo. ‘If one of you is infected with HIV, then it’s Oukacha prison for the lot of you,’ a policeman allegedly told them. On the evening of the following day, everyone was released in small groups, apparently on the orders of the king’s public prosecutor at the court of appeal, himself acting on instructions from the justice minister in Rabat.

Why create all that fuss only to cave in two days later? ‘The state cannot face an affair as big as this: 40 homosexuals arrested and then condemned in Morocco? That would hit the international headlines,’ says a Tetuan lawyer. With the summer season approaching, triggering an affair like that would have seriously damaged the country’s image. ‘Many tourists nowadays are concerned about respect for the freedom of the individual in the countries they visit. They pay special attention to how laws concerning morals are applied, especially in Arab countries,’ claims a leading hotel owner. In the opinion of many observers this affair would also have been a wonderful pretext for the Islamists to mount another crusade against beaches and ‘places of debauchery’. A journalist adds: ‘Just imagine if the party had developed to the point where it might have been possible to catch someone in the act; imagine if there had been even more people there. The affair might have had an even more worrying outcome.’

Like the sword of Damocles, morality laws can fall on you at any moment. It wasn’t so much the party itself but the arrest of 43 people that caused all the astonishment. Anyone in Tetuan or Tangier can cite the most recent parties in some of the private villas in these two towns over recent months. Several members of the gay community in these towns claim they can live their ‘exceptional sexual lives’ unmolested. That has all changed today: the gay community is becoming ever more discreet, their advice: ‘Stay away from Tetuan for the next few days.’

By a strange coincidence, five people were arrested for the same crime of ‘sexual deviance’ in Sidi Yahya on the day the detainees in Tetuan were set free. They all lived with their families, had children and were in a stable family situation. A small fight broke out in front of a hotel in the town. Since then the hotel has been nicknamed Abu-Ghraib after the infamous Iraqi prison where prisoners were abused by US soldiers.

Driss Bennani is a writer for TelQuel

Translated by MR

Source : Sage journals

#Morocco #Sex #Homosexuality #Gay