Abdellah Taïa is one of the most interesting writers to emerge from Morocco in the twenty-first century, and he is quickly becoming the best known in the United States. This is so not only because he is the first Moroccan public figure to identify himself as homosexual, nor because he has become something of a media celebrity, nor even because he has inspired a generation of still younger Moroccan writers to find their voice. But his work and the discussion of his career in Moroccan media helps elaborate what it means to consider contemporary Moroccan writing and cultural production in a transatlantic frame. I argue that Abdellah Taïa--as both author, public figure, and literary character in his own writings--makes vivid the circulation of Western models and ideas about sexuality inside Morocco, as well as their limits. Taïa’s career is intertwined with TelQuel--where he has been championed, and which he has himself used to further his literary career—and the way both have leveraged Western models of sexual identity in the effort of opening up Moroccan discussions of personal freedom is crucial. The way Taïa engages Western models of sexuality ultimately detaches those models from the source, even though some of his most ardent Moroccan champions (and certainly his Western ones) have consistently tried to keep him within the discourse of the homosexual, which he selectively adopts as well. Here, Western constructs of homosexual identity jump publics as Taïa both participates in this discourse and then refuses it. This paper emerges from the last chapter of my forthcoming book on the ways in which American literary and cultural forms circulate into Moroccan, Egyptian and Iranian cultural production