In the terminal essay of his 1885-86 translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night, Richard Burton says that “le vice contre nature” is popular and endemic in the “Sotadic Zone” namely the Orient – this area stretching from North Africa to the Arabic peninsula. We may want to consider, like Joseph Boone in his 1995 article “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism”, this point to be a popular stereotype of Eastern perversity firmly ensconced in Western imagery. Much has been written on Oscar Wilde, André Gide, E.M. Forster, T. E. Lawrence, Joe Orton and Paul Bowles, but much less space has been given to those “beautiful brown boys” who were the anonymous objects of their lust. Morocco, and more specifically Paul Bowles’ Tangier, served as a hotspot for gay or bisexual writers and artists in pursuit of exotic sexual gratification. Joe Orton wrote about it at length in the Tangier part of his diary, The Orton Diaries (1986), a journal à la Gide. There, he gleefully describes the bargaining that precludes sex with boy prostitutes at his Tangier apartment. These boys “represent interchangeable versions of the same commodity: (nearly) underage sex” as Joseph Boone notes, and Orton even cynically remarks that his partners are inevitably called Mohammed. This Third World Moroccan economy, as depicted by Orton, is based on the availability of casual sex with replaceable partners, who can only be distinguished by the variable quality of their sexual performance, their sizes, ages or the color of their sweaters. The white man has a face and an identity, but his paid partners don’t. When we look at this identical colonialist metaphor, Mohamed Choukri’s hero, in his 1973 novel For Bread Alone, gives a meticulous description of a purely financial transaction. The brief encounter between the teenager and an older Nazarene customer is a low point in Choukri’s autobiographical novel of sexual obsession, familial alienation and poverty. In the text, “deviant sex” is a substitute behavior, while heterosexual sex is always the hero’s desire. The European man’s behavior is incomprehensible to the young prostitute and Choukri shows a colonized subject who is naked and dignified, in control of his heterosexuality within a financial transaction that does not define him. While the young Moroccan man is clearly the hero of the text, the old European man’s sole characteristics are a beautiful car and a clammy handshake.