The Orient granted Western men license for sexual adventures shameful at home

Evidence

Although some among the Haredim simply dismiss the homosexual dimension of De Haan’s persona as vicious lies, his more sophisticated admirers have no problem in seeing his homoerotic writing as a noble attribute. The genre itself was certainly not unique, as sex travel to the Muslim world by both heterosexual and homosexual men—such as Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, and Sir Richard Francis Burton—was and remains quite well known and not unequivocally condemned. Because this particular transgression of bourgeois respectability occurred beyond Europe and the West, and was thought to be confined to occasions when these men were away from their homes, families, and normal milieu, otherwise shameful relations were accepted as eccentric or exotic. Unlike these men, however, De Haan was not traveling away from his home, but a returnee to his primordial home. Still, the fact that De Haan was a denizen of the Orient seemed to grant him a kind of license for sexual adventure that would have been more difficult to justify in Europe. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis about the Orient as a site of Western projection and license — this is the sexual dimension of the same projection.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘sex travel’ genre (Flaubert, Gide, Burton) as a concrete case study of how Orientalist geography literally licensed what bourgeois morality forbade at home.
• DEFINE: Illustrates the concept of Orientalist sexual license — how geography, not just morality, governed what transgression was permissible.