People often ask if they, as gay travelers, will be safe in Morocco. Morocco is, of course, an Islamic country, and homosexuality is illegal. However, while the situation is difficult for Moroccans, the law is not really enforced against visiting foreigners, so in fact American gay travelers don’t need to worry about it. All the gay tour companies do tours of Morocco and have done so for years.
In fact, Morocco has a quite active, if discreet, gay scene—just with welcoming bars instead of gay bars. And not too long ago, it was actually a place where LGBTQ+ Westerners went to be safer and freer than they could in the USA or Europe.
This was particularly true in Tangier, which from the 1920s until Moroccan independence in 1956 was a special international zone, where Islamic law only applied to Muslims. Tangier after World War II attracted a lot of Americans looking for freedom—or at least for sex and drugs.
Paul and Jane Bowles, an American literary couple of bisexuals with an open marriage, lived in Tangier from 1947 on, and Paul wrote The Sheltering Sky in Morocco. Tennesee Williams came. Truman Capote came and wrote about Tangier in Vanity Fair. William S Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch in Tangier; it is in Tangier that Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped him put the manuscript together.
British LGBTQ+ people were also part of the scene. Cecil Beaton photographed Jane Bowles and Truman Capote in Tangier. Later, in the 60s, Joe Orton spent time there with his lover Kenneth Halliwell just before Halliwell murdered Orton and committed suicide back in London.
Yves Saint Laurent (who was originally from Algeria) and his partner Pierre Bergé also had a house in Tangier. But they are much more closely associated with Marrakesh, where they spent large parts of the year starting in 1966, and which inspired many of Saint Laurent’s collections. Ultimately, they bought the beautiful Jardin Majorelle—a tropical botanical garden developed by the French architect Jacques Majorelle—and turned Majorelle’s art deco studio building into a museum of Moroccan art.
The Jardin Majorelle remains stunning today, and since 2017 there has been a Saint Laurent museum 2 minutes away. More surprisingly, many of the places the LGBTQ+ hipsters hung out in Tangier are still there, including the hotel where Burroughs stayed, the Gran Café de Paris, and the bookstore of they all frequented, the Librairie des Colonnes, which Saint Laurent and Bergé helped to save. And there are Paul Bowles rooms at the charming American Legation Museum.
Want to learn more? Come on Oscar Wilde Tours’ Morocco tour, to see this amazing country, from Tangier to Marrakesh, to Casablanca, with souks, casbahs, many different artisan workshops, the dessert, the mountains, the coast, the beautiful historic riads with their tilework and carvings—plus the LGBTQ+ history that no-one else will tell you about. Oh, and of course with Morocco’s fabulous cuisine—tagines, couscous, and much more!
