ABSTRACT
In many Arab and Asian countries where homosexual practices are commonplace, and regarded by most people with easy-going indifference, no great trouble arises. But the situation is changing rapidly as American influence spreads over the globe. In the developing countries persons of advanced ideas are becoming sensitive about behaviour that might be stigmatized as primitive. This may partly account for the presence of anti-homosexual legislation in the modern penal codes of places like Lebanon and Morocco, at a time when the trend among American intellectuals is towards liberalizing the law. It may also account for the curious contradiction that travellers in the past have commented on the homosexual vice of the Orient, and homosexual tourists today return home with tales of sex adventures in an atmosphere of comparative freedom, whereas officials in the developing countries tend to blame visiting Europeans or American troops for introducing a homosexual problem. Perhaps a more accurate version would be that homosexual behaviour has always been prevalent, but that the social problems began when people started to think about it along Western lines.
