A paradise is promised to men when they fly to these countries as gentlemen traveling alone [alleinreisende Herren] with the intention of buying sexual satisfaction, a paradise is promised to them by companies that make a lot of money from prostitution tourism.Footnote 2
Introduction
By the end of the 1980s, the idea that tourist destinations in the Global South offered veritable paradises of sexual freedom had gained salience in German political and popular culture. In the aftermath of commercial and technological developments that made international travel increasingly more accessible to West German consumers, travel promotion capitalized on the language of sex, while guides and publications offered practical advice on how their readership—often understood as white men—could access a variety of sexual services and spaces while abroad. Mainstream media outlets published lurid stories of transactional sex in the Global South. Films like Emmanuelle (France, 1974), Hot Sex in Bangkok (Switzerland, 1976), and Three Bavarians in Bangkok (West Germany, 1976) had ensconced Thailand as an exotic site of sexual adventure in an international media market.Footnote 3 The highly commercialized promise of a sexual paradise abroad, also attracted growing political criticism through the 1980s. Feminist critics argued that sex tourism was inherently exploitative of women, and politicians across the political spectrum grappled with questions of sexual tourism, trafficking, and exploitation in the context of a global epidemic. As strident as the cultural debate on sex tourism had become, it hinged on an underlying consensus: not only did popular travel destinations function as idealized paradises, but they could, for better or worse, ameliorate the frustrations of sexual life in West Germany.
This consensus stretched also to include same-sex desiring men, who were simultaneously in the process of developing more visible scenes after the end of the 1960s, scenes which included expanding circuits of travel. Discussion about sexual liberation, possibilities for intimacy, and racialized desire crystalized around transactional sex in tourist contexts. Same-sex desiring men—like their heterosexual counterparts—often disavowed or recast the transactional nature of sexual encounters. However, they simultaneously developed extensive networks of travel and communication to facilitate encounters with men, particularly men of color, in increasingly accessible travel destinations. Feminist activists rarely subjected the ostensibly separate category of “gay tourism” to the same critique until the early 1990s.Footnote 4 Across the board, however, tourist discourses evolved around ideas that travel destinations promised opportunities for sexual encounters and experiences of sexual lust that were different from sex at home, a notion that often condensed into the image of these destinations as sexual paradises.
By examining some of these projections, this article argues that sex tourism became an important site for white, West German men to navigate the felt ambivalences or even frustrations of sex in the Federal Republic. Although in part divided into “gay” and “straight” tourist spaces—a dichotomy that was never completely borne out—discourses about sex tourism, specifically as produced by West German, cisgender, white men, carried marked overlaps and parallels that did not easily cleave to assumed bounds of sexual identity. Certainly, important differences, such as legal persecution of homosexuality, structured how same-sex desiring men understood sexualized travel.Footnote 5 However, categories of gay and straight were and are not so separate. Not only did some men, bisexual and not, move between these scenes, but gay discourses were simultaneously enmeshed in the same context as their heterosexual peers.Footnote 6 In order to ameliorate dissatisfaction with sex in the Federal Republic during the 1970s and 1980s, many white, West German men regardless of sexual identity looked abroad to what they imagined as sexual paradises. In so doing, they deployed the logics of race, which depended on long-standing albeit shifting colonial tropes of white, masculine access to sexual adventure with exoticized “others” in ways that were fully commensurate with left-wing political commitments.
Such commensurablity requires us to think critically about the notion of “sexual revolution” in reference to a publicly visible proliferation and pluralization of sexual practices and norms that intensified from the late 1960s onwards.Footnote 7 This development was intimately connected to social movements that gained traction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the student movement, the women's movement, and the gay liberation movement. As an analytic term, however, the concept is dubious at best as it suggests a sudden and fundamental upheaval, aspects that have been questioned in their suitability to characterize complicated processes.Footnote 8 Elizabeth Heineman in particular notes the entanglement of the West German sexual revolution with commercialization, allowing for the proliferation of erotic material and open discussions about sex while also providing a source of deep ambivalence for many on the left.Footnote 9 While recent historiography has thoroughly complicated the analytic utility of the term, there has been little attention to the importance of sexual racism to the commercialization of sex.Footnote 10 In this article, we show that not only does a focus on race and racism contribute to a critical reading of the “sexual revolution,” but situating the sexual revolution within the context of global power relations and transnational travel further reveals the ways in which West German discussions and even feelings about sex were enmeshed in dynamics of sexual racism that spilled over the borders of the Federal Republic.
We therefore use the term sexual revolution only as a pragmatic label to name a complex set of processes of liberalization, politicization, pluralization and proliferation of sexual practices, norms and discourses that at least gained momentum and visibility by the late 1960s, were often closely linked to commercialization, and do not adhere to easy dichotomies of liberation and repression.Footnote 11 Finally, in order to investigate the full imbrication of politics, desire, and racialization, we deliberately eschew a framework of the sexual revolution that circumscribes straight and queer sexualities into separate studies, or positions gay liberation and lesbian feminism as subplots in a wider story. Instead, we center the specific interrelation of gay and straight discourses of the sexual revolution.
“Sex tourism” is a similarly muddy category of analysis. Scholars have, for example, demonstrated how sexualized and gendered power unfolds in tourist settings.Footnote 12 With regard to sex tourism in a narrower sense, scholars argue that it should not be restricted to formalized settings of transactional sex but seen as part of a broader continuum of sexual activity in tourist contexts.Footnote 13 Forms of gay tourism, for instance, can intermingle cultural pursuits, identity formation, and sexual desire, and these seemingly disparate motivations often reinforce each other.Footnote 14 The connection between sex and tourism furthermore unfolds in a wide range of media that sexualizes destinations and their inhabitants to promote travel to these regions, often catering to male heterosexual desires.Footnote 15 While a vast body of literature has explored this phenomenon, gay tourist experiences, and how the various overlaps of sex, sex work, and tourism play out in sex worker practices and their expectations and aspirations, few offer an integrated approach of gay and straight men in context.Footnote 16 In adopting a unified focus on racial discourses that could be categorized as gay and straight, our analysis draws on this literature to uncover the commonalities across sexual identity categories while setting aside the rigidity of assumed identity as a useful analytic tool. Overtly organized forms of sex tourism were and are incorporated into mass tourism and its promotion, sexual encounters were central to the tourist experience in particular destinations, and the boundaries between sex work, intimacy and romance proved to be fluid in tourist contexts. Our work lays bare the overflows of sex into tourism and vice versa, limiting such messiness to neither gay nor straight men alone.
We mainly work with material from the media—such as Der Spiegel and the gay magazine du&ich, as well as travel guides, promotional material, and activist publications. We are interested in how travel destinations were “sexoticized” as sex paradises and what kinds of promises and expectations regarding sex and lust travel agencies and media evoked.Footnote 17 Importantly, these media forms hardly ever positioned women as consumers and almost never as politically scandalous “sex tourists.” Instead, women interested in sexualized forms of travel were viewed as a different reading public and a separate market. Women who sought men abroad were largely understood as “romance tourists,” an at best problematic category that has since seeped into academic analysis.Footnote 18 Women searching for women, often excluded from gay tourist networks until the 1990s or issuing lesbian feminist critiques of gay sexual practices, relied on guidebooks, companies, and publications catering to same-sex desiring women.Footnote 19 White, West German women could and did seek sex abroad, meriting further study and analysis integrated with men's sexual practices. However, the ways in which they used their experiences to make political claims, how media outlets positioned them as mobile consumers, and what critics of “sex tourism” did with both avoid clear parallels with men, gay and straight alike, escaping the purview of this article.
In examining travel literature and criticism, we can pull out three main interrelated themes that undergirded the sexoticization of these destinations. First, claims of civilizational and even evolutionary difference were often articulated through discontent with Western, capitalist modernity, which further located travel destinations in a nebulous and nostalgic pre-modern past. Second, perceived racial difference proved an important contributor to exotic fantasies, as travel literature sexoticized the bodies of people of color for primarily white, West German consumption. Third, imaginaries of exotic space, marked by palm trees, beaches, tropical vegetation, and wilderness intertwined with heightened expectations for sexual pleasure abroad in a way that stamped destinations as undeniably foreign. The sexoticization of travel destinations and their inhabitants was sustained by a general criticism of Western culture as being anti-pleasure, suffering from restrictive sexual morals, and producing inhibited attitudes towards sex.Footnote 20 In many ways this framing echoed assertions that capitalist society or commercial transaction inhibited possibilities for emotional intimacy, although here articulated explicitly in terms of sexual desire and pleasure. The sexoticization of spaces, people, and cultures in the Global South undergirded these claims, drawing on multiple and sometimes contradictory explanations. Together, and through the reformulation of this dichotomy, they constituted a broader nexus that was consequential for liberatory politics. Both pursuit of sexual opportunities through travel and its multifaceted condemnations were part of larger domestic and international negotiations about sex in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. Attention to these contradictory dynamics reveals how across the board, sexual racism was a crucial part of the history of the West German sexual revolution.
Civilizational Difference
Sexoticization of travel destinations in the Global South rested on older stereotypes that opposed Western civilization to non-civilization along the lines of sex. Whereas Western civilization was conceived as anti-pleasure and repressed, societies differently understood as non-western were constructed as uncivilized cultures in which people had a natural relation to their bodies and their sexuality and a greater ability to feel (and provide) pleasure. In the context of the sexual revolution, however, the perceived sexualization of West German society could also stand in the way of pleasure through new problems ranging from overstimulation to commercialization to unattainable expectations, even if commercialization was simultaneously instrumental to the so-called sexual revolution and increasingly disquieting, as Dagmar Herzog points out.Footnote 21 Racial exoticization provided the fantasy of sexual pleasure contingent on assumed simplicity in contrast, offering outlets for frustrated West Germans.Footnote 22 Many of these ambivalences were present in travel literature already at the start of the 1970s, however, revealing the durability of appeals to racial and civilizational difference, now used here to make sense of the specific historical context of post-1960s West Germany.
Guidebooks, quotes of tourists, and even assumptions about tourists’ motivations in the press constructed travel destinations as sexual paradises that could overcome these contradictory sexual frustrations at home. As the author of the guide Die Freuden von Bangkok und Singapore (The Pleasures of Bangkok and Singapore) assures his readers: “Everything is totally uncomplicated. If in Central Europe ‘sin’ plops to the floor like a thick telephone book for all involved, in the Far East it has become a petal. Sex is the simplest thing in the world. No more difficult than going to the cinema or a football match.”Footnote 23 Sin and pleasure were framed here as opposites, geographically located in Central Europe and the “Far East” respectively. Non-western cultures were depicted as open to sex and pleasure, offering an exotic and racialized counterpoint to domestic frustrations. Thus, potential sexual partners, including sex workers, were described as having a natural, uncomplicated, and relaxed attitude to sex.
Important to note is that media approaches to sex tourism happened in conversation with material changes in West German tourist markets from the mid-1960s. Technical innovations, such as the introduction of the jet engine for commercial flights, reduced the time and thus the cost of traveling.Footnote 24 Large tour operators that relied on small profit margins on package deals benefited from the absence of ticket regulation in charter flights and the 1980s deregulation in the air travel ticket market. Operators initially marketed tours to holiday resorts in the Mediterranean, but began to offer long-distance package deals to places like Kenya, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India from the mid-1960s.Footnote 25 Package tours made international tourism affordable for larger sections of the population. Changes in the products travel agencies offered to tourists were tied into international developments, in which international organizations such as the United Nations, industrial countries’ developmental policies, and national governments in the Global South promoted tourism as a strategy for development.Footnote 26 Mass sex tourism developed in line with the increase in international tourism. While many of the racialized tropes that tourists deployed bore continuities with the past, they were rearticulated for a rapidly changing context.
Claims that used West German metrics of sexual liberation were entangled in the broader framework of Orientalism that shaped expectations of sex abroad, while also taking on local particularities. Thailand held a place of prominence, in large part due to the development of Thai tourist industries during and after the Vietnam war. In the West German pop cultural imaginary of the 1970s and early 1980s, Thailand was consistently promoted as a setting for Western sexual transgression. The style-defining 1974 French soft porn Emmanuelle formed an initial crystallization point for these imaginaries and, through its international popularity, triggered various follow-up film projects that took up the same motif of Thailand as a place of sexual experimentation.Footnote 27 Though the media and political landscape in which these fantasies were located was specific to the 1970s and 1980s, they built on a much longer tradition of projecting expectations of sexual liberalism onto Thailand.Footnote 28 Here, images of sexual permissiveness unhampered by bourgeois morality overlapped with images of a sensual East and Far Eastern art of love.Footnote 29
These images resonated with the assumption that sex abroad could be better, precisely because of exoticizing difference generally and local possibilities. Sexual experiences could be understood as both qualitatively better, based on the often-localized assumption that men and women alike in destination countries knew how to have more pleasurable sex, as well as quantitatively better, as many described how tourists would be inundated with offers upon arrival, often regardless of destination. Even as gay travel writers became increasingly concerned with the narrowing possibilities for sex with Arab men during the 1970s and 1980s due to accounts of legal repression, assumptions of sexual availability were markedly durable.Footnote 30 One report in him by Horst J. Andel on Yemen in 1980 asked readers, “Do Arabs love better?” While many were starting to worry that Arab men were in fact not inclined to gay sex, Andel nevertheless detailed sexual pleasure and emotional intimacy that the author had felt with a (married) Yemeni man.Footnote 31 Similarly, in a 1978 report, du&ich wrote that Cairo remained appealing because of “Oriental nights, luxury, cultural sights [Sehenswürdigkeiten], day trip possibilities, and the fulfillment of the most unusual sex wishes.”Footnote 32 In so doing, du&ich positioned sex as an important tourist experience, on par with seeing cultural sights and taking day trips. Travel bureaus catering to gay men capitalized on this expectation by advertising fantastical trips to Sri Lanka, Thailand, and the Philippines, promising “Boys, boys, boys,” referencing the supposed abundance of sex.Footnote 33 Similarly, travel guides, which were primarily aimed at a heterosexual readership, promised that “pay-whores in division strength” waited for them, for example in Bangkok, and women in general were available for sexual activities there.Footnote 34
Sexual availability and the imbrication of sex, culture, and scenery also appeared in straight markets and even tourist markets not generally understood as exclusively sexual in nature. Baedeker for Bangkok, the Bangkok edition of one of the most popular guides for cultural tourism published in West Germany, positioned sexual opportunities as one of the many experiences that tourists could pursue in the city. Included among the architectural sites and cultural opportunities was also explicit information on how to access sex work. “Massages for tourists” indicated the possibility for sex, according to the guide, some clubs offered additional services after hours, and there were certain coffee shops where men could find a “regular cadre of beautiful and well-groomed young ‘ladies’” ready to be taken to potential clients’ hotel rooms.Footnote 35 The guide followed with tips on how to secure a room in a hotel amenable to guests' local companions.Footnote 36
Racialized ideas that sex was better in tourist spaces seeped into other parts of West German society and could even be generative of new anxieties about pleasure. In 1971, a woman wrote to the resident psychologist of the men's magazine Praline, worried that after her fiancé had spent a year in Asia, he had gotten used to “a different sexual taste” and she could no longer satisfy him.Footnote 37 The psychologist tried to assuage her fears, but still deployed the sexualized language of racialized difference to concede that, “nevertheless, the sexual activity of the Asian woman is infinitely strong. The main difference is that she does not know the usual back and forth movements during intercourse. Instead, she moves during intercourse by rotating her abdomen in a circle, which greatly multiplies the stimulus to the penis.” The woman's concern and the psychologist's advice evoked widespread notions of a special Asian sex technique as well as fantasies of a more pleasurable and satisfying Asian sexuality. Even as the vocabulary shifted in the wake of the sexual revolution—here towards pop psychology in men's magazines—pre-existing interpretations of sexual possibility within the larger framework of tourist pleasures proved difficult to dislodge.
Similarly, ideas that capitalist modernity were antithetical to pleasure and intimacy had a history that well preceded the 1970s yet continued to inform discussions about travel to supposedly pre-modern spaces. As Hasso Spode argues, European tourists described perceived cultural differences as indicative of freer, healthier, more natural, and more authentic societies.Footnote 38 Sex guides to Southeast Asia opposed a natural attitude towards sex they argued to have found there with artificial morality, encrusted ideology, and patronizing, sexphobic, lust-killing prejudices that ostensibly dominated the attitude towards sex in Germany as part of the industrialized and Christian world.Footnote 39 Even though morals seemed to be loose in Southeast Asia, this easy and natural access to sexuality was in fact thought to enable a true morality that was not built on the unnatural restrictions Western sexual morality entailed. Erich Schief made this point explicit in his 1983 “Plädoyer für die Prostituierten (am Fall Thailand),” (Plea for the Prostitutes [the Case of Thailand]), a chapter in the collection Prostitution für Touristen (Prostitution for Tourists) making a plea to destigmatize sex work while justifying tourist practices. Schief wrote that “a superficial immorality [Sittenlosigkeit] such as prevails in Thailand brings about a much deeper morality—namely, the absence of the grand delusion of life [Lebenslüge] about partnership that is common in strictly moral countries without prostitution: the delusion that sexual desire [sexuelles Wollen] is oriented towards monogamy from the outset.”Footnote 40 Many guides often used the term “petty-bourgeois” (spießbürgerlich) to mark the attitude as narrow-minded, which they found typically German and in opposition to what they claimed to find in Southeast Asia.Footnote 41
The racialization of gender, which cast white women as frigid in contrast to sexually available women of color, was replicated in specific discussions of sex work. This was clear as feminist criticisms of sexual exploitation were ramping up in the 1980s. Michael Terzieff, for example, tried to delegitimize feminist detractors in his 1984 Sex in Fernost (Sex in the Far East), a book-length discussion that sat between the genres of anecdotal report on his sexual experiences, travel guide, popular ethnography and sexual-political pamphlet. Pushing back against growing feminist criticisms, Terzieff suggested that “so-called” women's liberation groups were reducible to lesbian desires.Footnote 42 By arguing that any domestic criticism of sex tourist projects was part of a radical project, made even more radical and desexualized by its association with lesbian activism, Terzieff could more easily dismiss such critiques to justify exploitative practices.
Restrictive Western morality apparently even affected West German prostitutes in contrast to their Thai colleagues, who were supposedly more in sync with nature. As Michael Terzieff continued, “while Western prostitutes are anxious to suppress sexual excitement in their work and therefore constantly urge their clients to hurry up and call such excitement, if it should occur, a “technical mishap” [Betriebsunfall], which understandably must sooner or later lead to a schizophrenic attitude towards sexuality in general and thus to the petty-bourgeois [spießbürgerlich] clichés often observed among prostitutes … Thai prostitutes remain at one with themselves in what they do, for they do not repress their own sexuality, but behave in accordance with nature [naturgemäß].”Footnote 43 Transnational networks of sex worker activism were simultaneously beginning to develop new articulations of sex work, and only five years after Terzieff's writing Than-Dam Truong elaborated one of the first theoretical conceptions of the relationship between work, sexual subjectivity, and bodily pleasure in the specific context of Southeast Asia.Footnote 44 Nevertheless, Terzieff was able to position sex workers in Thailand as at once sexually liberated and racially other. By glossing over new forms of feminist debate and shoring up constructions of racialized femininity, these guides justified German men's demand for sex work abroad as being in line with liberalizing trends in the Federal Republic and even morally superior to restrictive Western attitudes toward sex.
In the connected contexts of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, guidebooks became a platform through which some men could advance dissatisfaction at both. In arguments for the normalization and destigmatization of prostitution, sex tourism guides sometimes evoked explicit reference to the self-named “Whores’ Movement” in Germany.Footnote 45 Developed in West Germany during the 1980s in concordance with international sex worker activism, which often ran counter to strands of feminist activism that explicitly criticized sex tourism as linked to exploitation allegedly inherent to prostitution, the movement sought to decriminalize and destigmatize sex work while improving working conditions for sex workers.Footnote 46 The 1983 collection, Prostitution for Tourists, quoted Pieke Biermann—a leading activist within the movement—in conjunction with a number of theoretical texts to use sex workers’ calls for the destigmatization of prostitution as a simultaneous call to destigmatize sex tourists and undermine feminist critiques of sexual exploitation. Since the movement also fought for fair working conditions, this convergence of sex tourist and sex worker rights activists looks more like discursive instrumentalization than solidarity. However, regarding its historical context, it is significant that some sex tourists were able to and did articulate new justifications for their sexual activity abroad using decontextualized reference to progressive sexual politics.
At the same time, the opposition between “schizophrenic” German prostitutes and Thai prostitutes operated in tandem with a wider recasting of the supposedly pre-modern as a sexualized draw to certain travel destinations. Sexual possibility and exotic setting could themselves become markers of a pre-modern, erotic past located in destinations on the fringes of Europe.Footnote 47 In reporting on Gran Canaria, a popular gay tourist destination, in 1971 du&ich projected the past onto the island's landscape, writing, “little villages, whose houses one could only describe as huts and whose African/Arabic character cannot be denied.”Footnote 48 However, the magazine advised readers that “you will quickly forget this first almost romantic impression, because you have now arrived in Las Palmas and that means that you are in the middle of modernity.”Footnote 49 Located at the crossroads of both time and space, the African/Arabic huts of the countryside were rendered romantic by the modernity of the big city, which offered possibilities to relax with access to both modern comforts and pre-modern landscapes.Footnote 50 In Gran Canaria, West German, white gay tourists imagined a combination of European modernity and African primitivity as creating an enticing tourist space, which was only constrained by Franco-era laws.Footnote 51
The discontent with the constraints of modern society also cropped up in more concrete terms in gay discussions of sex tourism. According to Georg U., a 43-year-old decorator from Munich, vacation gave him the opportunity “to gather strength for work and job-related stress.” Georg U. explained that “I only get this through sex. On vacation I can be intimate with a partner ten times a day.” Concluding his report in no uncertain terms, Georg U. argued that “Sex is just part of vacation. Whoever says the opposite is either uptight [verklemmt] or a hypocrite.”Footnote 52 In coupling the need for release from “job-related stress” with the claim that those who criticized his sexual behavior were “uptight,” Georg U. positioned capitalist modernity and bourgeois moralism as interrelated limitations to sexual pleasure at home, which could be remedied through liberation of sexuality abroad. When read even more capaciously, sex on vacation was necessary for the maintenance of modernity.
Some guides also marketed authentic and natural pre-modern societies as creating freedom and eroticism for tourists through abjection. Florian Rosenstiehl's 1983 guide, Herzbergführer Philippinen (Herzberg Guide to the Philippines), related the sexual titillation of this place to the lack of regulation, the “uncivilized” chaos and the “dirt” there, which enabled endless opportunities and a wide spectrum of sexual experiences, forbidden by the standards of Western morality. Opposing the “countries in the Third World” to Switzerland, understood as the epitome of cleanliness and thus boringness, the guide stated, “we are drawn there [to the Third World] because where there is dirt, there are possibilities, there is eroticism to the point of perversion, there are opportunities to the point of criminality. Where there is filth, there is power outside legality, there is life outside morality.”Footnote 53 The reference to sexual experiences that broke the boundaries of Western sexual morality in the inclusion of the perverse was here directly related to the social context, which was characterized with stereotypes of a backward vivaciousness. At the same time, the location of perversion, dirt, and erotic outside the confines of morality and legality clarified the boundary between backward yet exciting uncivilization and modern yet inhibited Western civilization. Florian Rosenstiehl, the author of the guide, characterized West German society as obsessed with order [Ordnungs-Gesellschaft] and therefore boring and neglecting the desire for adventure [Abenteuerlust].Footnote 54 References to the excitement that tourist spaces cast as primitive offered in contrast to the “civilization” of Europe permeated publications, from Praline to literature to individual guides.Footnote 55 The exciting life outside of morality was made possible by the—here also symbolically charged—dirt and the freedom from the constraints of modern society.Footnote 56
Capitalist modernity, job stress, alienated prostitutes, bourgeois sexual morality, and lesbian feminists all functioned as points of criticism and discontent for this spectrum of guides, ads, and tourists. Similarly, there was a very wide range of ways in which these same actors identified the possibilities abroad to remedy these frustrations. Across the board however, we see a maintenance of a racialized hierarchy through the construction of separate temporalities. By casting destinations as unchanging, primordial paradises, and locating exoticized racial difference within the context of pre-modernity, white, West German tourists, commentators, and guides, gay and straight, issued criticism at modernity, while simultaneously locating that modernity in Western Europe. The proliferation of sexual discourses in the aftermath of the 1960s did little to challenge this much longer-term construction. On the contrary, it was precisely through the varied forms of media and discontent with new social and political formulations that many men could reclaim the temporal logics of racialized desire.
Sexoticization of Bodies
The sexotic was not just located in tourist spaces, but also on racialized bodies. Editors and travel writers alike used publications through the 1970s and 1980s to make sense of perceived sexual freedom through the language of race. Their assumptions resonated with long-standing cultural images that linked sexual attraction to racialized bodies by which ethnosexual encounters enhanced erotic desire and pleasure.Footnote 57 What was particular here, however, were the ways in which this process also became a means through which white, West German men articulated discontent with post-1960s German society. The sexual repression of the metropole here was filtered through the language of European sexual liberation. In short: the construction of racialized bodies was now also about the failures of West Germany's sexual revolution.
In many instances, white writers and travelers linked sexual freedom to Blackness, as several successive du&ich articles in the late 1970s show. Advertising Haiti as a “vacation paradise for homosexuals,” du&ich explained in June 1977 that in addition to no age of consent laws and year-round summer weather, what made Haiti particularly appealing was that “the natives know no sexual taboos,” which probably alluded to an allegedly general openness concerning sex.Footnote 58 Columnist Valentino Rhonheimer confirmed this assessment in the next issue, writing that “there are absolutely no sexual taboos there.”Footnote 59 In its spread on Haiti in March of the following year, du&ich linked sexual possibility even more explicitly to racial otherness, reporting that “the Black erotic is understood as something natural.”Footnote 60 The association between abundant, uncomplicated sex and Blackness was further clarified in du&ich's discussion of possible vacation spots in January 1978, which described Senegal as “a paradise for lovers of young little N* [N*lein], who are scarcely to be surpassed in their sexual experience and attachment.”Footnote 61 Sexualization here was inextricably connected to deeply racist categories.
Evading sexual taboos for white, West German men involved the simultaneous transgression of racial hierarchies and their re-enactment. These descriptions reveal that not only did tourists imagine that Haitians knew no taboos and that taboos still existed in the minds of white tourists and the society from which they came, but also that there was a connected racial taboo transgressed in these encounters. The taboos that still structured sex between men (and with boys across the age of consent) at home could therefore be evaded through the disruption of the related but separate taboo of interracial sex. That this racial taboo was deeply charged with sexual meaning can be read in tabloid papers and men's magazines during the 1970s, which explicitly addressed the sexual quality and sexual attractiveness of “dark skin.”Footnote 62 As Linda Williams argues in her study of US-American pornography, the transgression of the separate taboo of crossing racial boundaries in sex—mainly by acts between white women and Black men—used to invoke fear or images of power-ridden sexual abuse in the context of the racial slavery of the US South.Footnote 63 Although German sex tourists did not act in the same historical context, their sexoticization of the encounters similarly also built on a transgressive moment, which in its latent breaking of the taboo of interracial sex potentially increased the excitement of the sexual experience, while at the same time potentially also eroticizing racialized hierarchies for white, West German men. “Many tourists do not seek white sand, but black sex at the beach of the Indian Ocean, above all the Germans,” claimed the news magazine Der Spiegel in an article about the Kenyan government's attempts to fight sex tourism.Footnote 64 Access to the “Black erotic” that was associated with increased pleasure of sex abroad was at the core of tourist motivations to seek sexual encounters on vacation.Footnote 65
Further troubling the sexoticization of Blackness was the reference to the eroticization of youth, here distinctly racialized. In their discussion of Senegal, the editors of du&ich placed young boys (whose ages are not disclosed) as overly experienced. As Estelle Freedman describes in her careful study of the conceptual construction of rape in the United States, oversexualization of young, Black girls helped to exclude them from the legal and social category of who could be raped.Footnote 66 Here, a similar dynamic is at play. The eroticization of youthfulness, as described in the Senegalese context and visually depicted through photography in the Haitian context, is implicitly justified by the framing of young, Black boys as both naively enthusiastic and experienced beyond their years. The alleged taboolessness of Haitian or Senegalese society hinged on reducing young boys to racialized tropes of hypersexual partners, erasing for white, West German men the possibility of overlapping forms of exploitation. Finally, the appeal of no age of consent laws became important to men who, after the decriminalization of sex between men in West German in 1969, desired boys under the new legal age of consent, set at 21 in 1969 for same-sex desiring men and lowered to 18 in 1973. Travel to Haiti or Senegal could both offer racialized pleasures and provide a means for some men to skirt new, domestic laws.Footnote 67
Across the board, age and, specifically, references to sex with underage boys and girls, remained an important part of sexoticization, even if sexoticization and “sex tourism” also exceeded questions of child sexual abuse. During the 1970s and 1980s, child sexuality became a central object of leftist and alternative attempts to transform and liberate society.Footnote 68 In this context, it was possible to include references to sex with children as part of wider conversations about liberating sexuality, beyond the narrow networks of pedophile organizing.Footnote 69 In referring to the exoticism of Thai and Filipina women, media coverage and guides aimed at heterosexual men described physical features such as almond eyes, brown velvet skin, petite, slender bodies with slender legs and black hair to prove (exotic) attractiveness as a bodily feature.Footnote 70 In some ways, sexoticization actually made the boundaries of age less clear. Age was a crucial component of sexoticization. At a 1974 conference on the economic impacts of tourism, one of the presenters, a travel journalist, claimed that “certainly, sex with dark-skinned girls plays a considerable role in the decision for an exotic destination.”Footnote 71 The use of the term “girls” [Mädchen] was widely used in reference to Southeast Asian women, regardless of age. While the infantilization of women is observable in other geographic contexts, including in the Global North, the use of the term “girls” paralleled the infantilization of Asian men using the term “boys” [Knaben, Jungen, or even Boys] and here also fed into other rhetorical strategies that dehumanized Asian women as flowers, orchids, monkeys, cats, or dolls or diminished Asian women as females [Weiberchen].Footnote 72 These ambiguities around age were not limited to descriptions of travel to East Asia. As continuous references to “girls,” “boys,” and “youths,” together with warnings about age of consent laws made clear, West German eroticization of youth could intersect with and enhance racialized fantasies.
Although often riddled with ambiguity and innuendo, the eroticization of underage boys and girls was also made explicit. Gay guides and publications, like in decades prior, walked a line between the eroticization of youth and legal standards, yet took advantage of the openings of 1970s debates about child sexuality to reference explicitly sex with boys under the age of eighteen or offer information on local school vacations.Footnote 73 However, the eroticization of youth was never the sole purview of same-sex desiring men. On the contrary, guides for heterosexual men also made explicit references to sex with underage girls. The author of Sex in Fernost, who claimed to have had sex with 500 Asian sex workers, for example, clearly stated that he had had sex with girls as young as eleven years old.Footnote 74 In a pseudoscientific reflection about Asian women's capability to orgasm (Orgasmusfähigkeit), he stated that young girls around the age of eleven or twelve were particularly capable of orgasm, even more so than older girls around the age of fourteen to fifteen. Resonating notions about civilizational difference and repressive Western sexual morality, he even claimed that this difference was the result of Western influence that had brought a sexual oppression of children that the younger girls had not yet experienced.Footnote 75 This argument did not only inject age into the sexoticization of Thai women. It also linked pedosexual desire and civilizational critique and fed them into a rhetoric of sexual liberation.
Some white, West German tourists also connected the erotic appeal of pre-modernity more specifically to biological essentialism. In addition to appeals to the “natural” Black erotic that could be found from West Africa to Haiti, which implicitly located the eroticism of Black men as separate from Western civilization, a 1978 du&ich report made a similar claim about Sri Lankan men placed more explicitly in evolutionary terms. The report explained that “the Sinhalese make up the majority of the inhabitants of Sri Lanka and have unending charm. They are Indo-Germans and emigrated from Pakistan in the pre-Christian period.” While, according to this report, they may share common linguistic origins to German readers, du&ich emphasized their apparent biological-racial difference that made them particularly appealing sexual partners. du&ich clarified that “the blood of the original inhabitants [Ureinwohner], called Weddas, flows through their veins. The skin color varies from light brown to black. The body shape is thin and even small.” This link to a pre-Christian past, and paradoxically also to Germans, nevertheless biologically rooted them in this temporality, marking them as pre-modern and racially exotic.Footnote 76
This sexoticization did not just exist in the imaginations of tourists and authors but took on a concrete, visual element. The sexoticization and objectification of Asian women's bodies was replicated in the photos, included in guidebooks, press articles, and travel brochures that viewed (half-)naked women or sexualized images of Asian women with flowers in their hair, lascivious and sexualized gestures such as sucking on a straw, and a promising smile.Footnote 77 Images of half-naked women in sexually charged poses or clear reference to the sex industry often accompanied press articles on sex tourism to Thailand and the Philippines or guidebook sections on nightlife facilities. However, even imagery which was not directly linked to the sex industry, visually communicated a notion of sexual availability and servitude of Asian women to Western tourists. The cover of the guidebook Was, Wie, Wo. Ein Handbuch, das Beste aus einem Thailand-Aufenthalt zu machen (What, How, Where: A Guide to Making the Most of a Stay in Thailand), that appeared in several editions during the 1970s, assembled a square collage of three-by-three photos.Footnote 78 The images seemingly formed a fragmented triptych of Thai “essence” and tourist “musts” through the visual representation of men and women who, for a white, German audience, were supposed to be perceived as Thai. The nine images were arranged around a heavily made-up, smiling woman in the center, whose unclothed body was hinted at in the cut, implicitly lying outside of the frame. Of the remaining eight images, four showed no people, but typical souvenirs for sale, such as jewelry set with precious stones and a piece of silk, or means of transport, such as a sailing ship (also alluding to the natural, tourist amenities of beach and sea) and a tuk-tuk. The remaining motifs showed a man in a market scene, a scantily-clad woman with diving equipment, presumably a diving instructor, a woman smiling while holding a basket of buns and bread for the camera, and a woman presumably in a bar scene, who stood on a dance floor in a fringed bikini while the surrounding mirrors reflected her from different perspectives. The selection of images thus not only gathered a disproportionate number of motifs of women, but also depicted them exclusively in sexualized poses and service work.
The photographic depiction of young, Southeast Asian men and boys in tourist literature marketed to gay men adopted markedly similar visual motifs. du&ich during the 1970s and 1980s was equally replete with images of men and boys that deployed similar visual aesthetics to emphasize supposed subservience. In 1982, travel guide Peter Voigt placed an ad in du&ich, offering readers private tours and “Asian dreams in the paradise of the Philippines and Thailand.”Footnote 79 The ad featured a young model, slightly bent over with his back turned, but looking over his shoulder and smiling at the camera. In 1987, the agency Thailand-Travel, an affiliate of the Berlin-based Horizont-Reisen, advertised “tropical experiences in winter” in Thailand, where “dreams come true” using the exact same photo that appeared in Peter Voigt's ad five years earlier. Thailand-Travel paired this image with a collection of photos of Thai youths in varying states of undress, backed by palm trees and the beach.Footnote 80 The language of paradise and dreams helped to underscore the exoticism present in the imagery, which hinged on racialized notions of Asian sexual receptiveness through the positioning of the models. The models were depicted either bent over or looking over their shoulder at the viewer, referencing their imagined roles as the receptive sexual partners for implicitly white men. As Nguyen Tan Hoang reminds us, representations of Asian men as receptive partners in sex with other men—or “bottomhood”—cannot be simply conflated with Oriental passivity or effeminization.Footnote 81 Certainly, the reference to Asian bottoms alone is not evidence enough of this sort of conflation, nor can the implied availability of the models be confused with passivity. In many ways, the opposite is the case when paired with references to Asian men and boys as the active initiators of sexual contact. However, just as the guidebook What, Where, How, drew on a visual repertoire of Asian sexual availability and subservience to entice readers to Bangkok, so too did Horizont-Reisen use visual references to bottomhood and exotic settings to advertise its services to an implicitly white audience. Long-standing tropes of youthful, Asian subservience, here located on the body, operated as useful tools to market Thailand and the Philippines as eroticized spaces to West German travelers.
Oscillation between ambiguity and explicit reference to age both intersected with and mirrored the murkiness of sexoticization. Visual and literary depictions of people of color were presented in a wide range of travel literature for white, West Germans to consume. These depictions often drew on civilizational discourses to enhance the racial alterity of possible sexual partners for white tourists, and the sexoticization of bodies cannot be fully extracted from other modes of sexoticization. Instead, it provided an additional means for white, West German men to negotiate the ambivalences of the sexual revolution. Societies without taboos and sexually experienced youth, who simultaneously were made to represent exotic, sometimes-illicit fantasies of racial crossing, offered an alternative to the constraints of everyday life. However, construction of space was crucial to this process, providing a fantastical location to live out sexual desires in ways that reinforced exoticization.
Sexoticization of Space
The sexoticization of bodies was intertwined with and even dependent on the sexoticization of space, which drew on long-standing associations between hot climates, increased lust, and racialized sexuality.Footnote 82 “Sun, sex, and sand” continued to appeal to white, West Germans after the 1960s, even as they made new sense out of this trifecta. Tropical vegetation, sandy beaches, and sunsets often served as the backdrop to images of happy couples or (hopeful) singles, with half-naked women or men smiling auspiciously, emphasizing their exotic difference while also creating an imagined space into which the tourist could enter in order to experience heightened pleasure.Footnote 83 German travel agencies in their promotional material and catalogs enticed potential customers with images of women at the beach or outdoor pools or created collages in which beach scenes and bar scenes were arranged next to each other, conveying the implicit promise that women's bodies were present and sexually available as part of the holiday experience.Footnote 84 In the 1970s, the catalogs also included explicit images of services in the context of tourism sex work.Footnote 85 Captions alluded to sexual opportunities for (implicitly-)white men to be found in these spaces, promising that nobody had to stay alone: “If you want a charming companion, you never search in vain,” assured the Neckermann long-distance travel catalog from 1974/75.Footnote 86 The proximity and sometimes interwovenness of gay and straight tourist spaces reflected not only discursive but also spatial entanglement. Civilizational othering and the sexoticization of bodies were closely connected to tourism's spatial dimensions as well.
Beyond just evoking abstract images of romance and sex, travel guides offered a remarkably unified way for German travelers, gay and straight, to navigate and consume spaces in unfamiliar locations.Footnote 87 Guided by maps, recommendations, and long-form descriptions from Spartacus, Sexparadies für Männer (Sex Paradise for Men), Südostasien selbst entdecken (Discover Southeast Asia for Yourself) and other serial guides, men explored predominantly urban areas.Footnote 88 Bangkok and Manila were important to straight and gay men alike for overlapping reasons. Stadtplan für Männer (City Map for Men), a guide that mapped out these spaces in Bangkok, combined businesses that catered to gay and straight men alike in one singular guide. This overlap was not an exception, but reflected a wider range of guidebooks during this period that were targeted primarily at heterosexual men yet also provided information for male tourists seeking other men.Footnote 89 The expansion of tourist infrastructures in Bangkok and Manila during the 1970s converged with their framings as exoticized spaces. Editors of guidebooks marketed to both gay and straight audiences chose the same spaces to promise their readers sexual freedom and racialized pleasure.
Guides for Southeast Asia conflated sexualized bodies and geographies and played on sexualized cultural stereotypes to promote sex as a tourist attraction. The cover of the travel guide Sexparadies für Männer—Manila, is emblematic of the equation of the geographical space with its sexualized women and the prospect of sexual encounters with them. The name of the capital of the Philippines and one center of the Philippine sex industry Manila is placed just below the words “sex paradise for men.” The title ends in a colon, followed by images, indicating that the images are representative of Manila. However, these images did not depict geographic space but rather bikini-clad women in presumably bar contexts. The guide elaborated, “Manila is not a city, for which you have to travel around half the world, because you need to see it. What you need to see are the ‘dolls’ of Ermita, the ‘sinful quarter’ of Manila.”Footnote 90 Hence, Manila is here visually and verbally reduced to the bodies of Filipina women and the sex industry established as, in the similar words of Rudy Koshar, “what ought to be seen.”Footnote 91
Although urban spaces were popular, many men also wanted to experience the spatial possibilities of the tropics, which could contribute to the pleasures of sexualized travel. Images in particular worked to catalyze pleasure by locating sexual opportunities in settings like the beach or among tropical vegetation. In March 1978, du&ich advertised its “Grand Travel Report: Haiti Intimate” with a photo of two naked, young men reclining on the beach with only a soccer ball pointedly covering and emphasizing their genitalia.Footnote 92 In the report itself, du&ich paired an image of one of the young men featured on the cover, here similarly reclining on the beach but now wearing shorts, with the tip that “young people possess plenty of time but little money.”Footnote 93 The next page contained two images of the other young man from the cover, again relaxing on the beach and wearing shorts in one image and no clothes in the other, with the caption “students gladly earn pocket money.”Footnote 94 The Haitian beach became a contradictory site for relaxation and sexual labor, with the implication that German men could easily access both.
At once exotic and phallic, the palm tree was a particularly prevalent trope around which fantasies crystalized. It was a common attribute adorning hotel complexes and beaches in travel catalogs. In the promotional material, palm leaves often formed the picture's foreground, through which one could peer at the beach action and the half-naked bodies in the middle ground against the background of sand or sea. The travel catalog of the Touropa Scharnow company from summer 1973, for example, used such a photo motif for its travel offers to Togo.Footnote 95 The image formed the background of a two-page spread that listed travel offers to Togo as well as informative texts on this newly-added destination. A palm leaf in the foreground showed the reader a view of a white and a Black woman lying on the beach in bikinis. The color value of the latter's skin in the photo almost matched the color black, thus underlining the racialized view of the women. The copy inserted next to the women praised the “permissiveness of the interpersonal relationships” in Togo, among other things. Here the palm tree served as the frame and central icon of racialized and sexoticized sexual opportunities.
The prevalence of the palm tree was as a visual guarantor of the exotic atmosphere, the warm tropical climate, and a symbol of increased sexual opportunity is also illustrated in the neologism “Palmensexer,”Footnote 96 which one sex guide from 1973, Die Freuden von Bangkok und Singapore, created for people who had sex under or around palm trees. The guide, otherwise aimed at a heterosexual male audience, went on to interlock the sexoticization of bodies and spaces in a tongue-in-cheek chapter focusing on gay tourism, explaining that “dozens of transvestites and lanky, overly slim, soft-skinned Thai rascals [Thaibürschchen] walk around the beach area and are happy about every interested person who asks them for a closer look under the next palm tree.”Footnote 97 For the author, these opportunities were indicative of a “soft Orient” where gender roles were blurred, advising readers that often one did not know if the object of their attraction was a young boy or a “short-haired, flat-chested girl.”Footnote 98 However, once the tourist came into contact with a potential sex partner, according to the guide, “then the Gulf of Siam roars.”Footnote 99 Sexual opportunity and gender transgression were therefore not limited to racialized bodies alone, but were enabled by and represented in specific references to space.
Moreover, sexoticized spaces were understood to have a disinhibiting effect. By entering these spaces, tourists did not only hope to leave behind an anti-pleasure, German culture and uptight, disinterested, or closeted German partners but overcome their own inhibitions. Even as some travel guides and the press explicitly argued that ideas of Asian sexual permissiveness were mostly (sexual) wishful fantasies and pointed out the strict sexual morality in the travel destinations, they indicated just how common these fantasies were.Footnote 100 The sexoticized space and the sexual ability of the inhabitants was even said to have rubbed off on the tourists and improved their own sexual skills. As Sexparadies für Männer promised, “the provocative beauty of the girls, the cheerful atmosphere and the informality of being together can awaken a ‘potency potential’ that ‘men’ in Germany did not know or thought they had already lost.”Footnote 101 This atmosphere was even said to cure impotence: “No one should declare himself impotent until he has tested the girls of Manila,” warned the guide, which prescribed a cure in Manila for those whose lust had died in the “tristesse of German bedrooms.”Footnote 102
The physical landscape of tourist destinations could also serve a practical purpose, as beaches could be a potential meeting spot for sexual partners. Gay magazines from the 1970s and 1980s in particular reported on beaches that were congregating spots for sex workers. One unnamed contributor reported in du&ich in 1974 that after spending only ten or fifteen minutes on a beach in Senegal, he and his friend were approached by boys, “all very talkative and eager to make contact.”Footnote 103 Nearby dunes could also offer privacy for an immediate encounter. As du&ich contributor Joachim Winter described in 1983, he was approached by a Tunisian youth who “saw exactly that the shrubbery began behind the dunes, thick and without a view from outside.”Footnote 104 The dunes and beaches therefore merged imagined exoticism with practical opportunities to construct a landscape flush with erotic possibilities.
The construction of space was necessary for these tourist encounters. Not only was it understood as abstractly linked to sexual pleasure and racialized bodies, but it provided new, practical opportunities, even if some of those opportunities only existed in the minds of tourists. Sex under the palms, the proliferation of bars and saunas, the hidden quality of dunes, and the relaxed dress code of the beach that offered a chance to show and gaze at (half-)naked bodies were all generative of sexual pleasures that could not be found at home. Coupled with the idea that tropical destinations could have a disinhibiting effect for both tourists and locals alike, space operated in tandem with bodily fantasies and civilizational frameworks. All three could, for white, West German tourists, offer new remedies for the frustrations of sex at home, expressed for a post-1960s context through the re-articulation of overlapping colonial tropes.
Conclusion
When we take an integrated approach to the history of tourism, three significant points of convergence come into view. The material context in which West German travel was situated structured the experiences of men regardless of sexual identity. The expansion of package tours offered by major tourist companies like TUI and NUR both provided new opportunities for West German men as well as new points of discontent. Men participating in overlapping gay and straight networks of travel sought to ameliorate these discontents in connected, parallel, and sometimes separate ways; however, the shared travel worlds that these men inhabited generated experiences that cannot be easily disentangled along the lines of sexual identity or separately-understood markets. Similarly, the proliferation of publication and information networks, specifically but not exclusively guidebooks, provided similar points of access, blurring lines between gay and straight. Even more so, some guidebooks attempted to cater to both groups, or offered visions of heterosexuality that were unstable or even, uneasily, queer(ed). The often-erased yet occasionally referenced possibility of bisexual experiences, and the certainty that bisexual men were also participating in sexualized travel, further troubles stable categories of gay and straight and the assumed division between them. Finally, and perhaps most importantly to our analysis of sex tourism, agencies and publications both bartered in the language of racialized desire, which their customers rearticulated and repurposed, sometimes in contradictory ways, placing them in a much longer history of sex and (post-)colonial travel. Although racialized desire was often deeply gendered, gay and straight men, as well as bisexual men and men whose desires eschewed categorization, drew on shared cultural languages to describe and market the appeal of travel to spaces marked by what they believed to be racial or civilizational difference. In highlighting how similarly they sexualized these spaces and how their projections often paralleled each other, we can interrogate how overlapping fantasies were embedded in a common cultural framework (especially in relation to race and exoticism), but also in their negotiations of the sexual revolution.
In view of these connections, breaking down analyses of sex tourism along the lines of rigid categories makes little sense, or, at the very least, cannot be universally applied. Histories of sexuality often still cleave to a hetero/homosexual binary, and there are good reasons to chart such a division. However, even if sources often reify this essentializing, dichotomous separation, we should not uncritically replicate it in our analytical frameworks. Furthermore, even when adhering exclusively to categories as they were used in historical context, straight and gay men did not desire in completely separated contexts, nor does “gay” function as an easy umbrella category for the multiplicity of non-normative desires and identities in the 1970s. Our analysis has shown how fruitful it is to ask to what extent desires and sexual acts were shaped by a common cultural context, made all the more pressing by an attention to race.
The Federal Republic of Germany provides a particularly rich case in which to conduct this analysis. West German markets were deeply important for both tourism and sex work. Scholars of both sex work and tourism, including Truong, have pointed to the high rates of German international travelers, while West German companies such as Neckermann and TUI operated networks that well exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic.Footnote 105 In the twin aftermaths of the rapid expansion of the West German postwar economy and the sexual revolution, the growing tourism industry provided a useful way for West German travelers to navigate their discontent with societal change on the terrain of racialized desire. The shared set of cultural language through which men regardless of sexual orientation articulated desire for men and women of color furthermore entrenches late twentieth-century West Germany within a longer history of colonialism. In studying the specificities of West German tourism and taking together gay and straight travel in all their divides and interconnections, it becomes clear that the history of the sexual revolution cannot be disentangled from histories of racism.
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