Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex Since the Grand Tour
Ian Littlewood
248pp, John Murray, £17.99
The literature of the 18th-century grand tour divided, Ian Littlewood found, between public work on arty culture and private writing on sexual adventures. This division - between what they saw and who they shagged - is at the heart of his lively book, which is as much a celebration as an examination of 200 years of sex tourism.
His contention is that far from being marginal to tourism, the sexual element is vital. Today's tourists seeking sun, sand and sex follow the same route of reeking breeches and dripping gleets traced by Byron, Boswell and generations of young men who "travelled a whole month together to Venice for a night's lodging with an impudent woman" while supposedly soaking up the glories of ancient civilisations.
The attractions of Italy, "the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy", nourished British homosexuals in particular during the late-Victorian period, allowing the Renaissance scholar John Addington Symonds to wax lyrical on the "rosy nipples . . . marble man-spheres . . . lustrous gland" of some peasant boy. Symonds found his Arcadia among the gondoliers of Venice. "They think little of gratifying the caprice of ephemeral loves," he approved.
Tourists continued to be well served on the Mediterranean, with Cole Porter in the 1920s and Truman Capote in the 1950s taking advantage of the tradition whereby gondoliers accommodated their cargoes. As Italy became more wealthy, however, homosexual sex tourism switched to north Africa, where Joe Orton was able to have sex with a boy for the price of a meal back home and to muse: "Having had a boy of his age in England I'd spend the rest of my time in terror of his parents or the police."
When the imperial advance made the world safe for tourism in the 19th century, pleasures were sought further afield. As Tennyson wrote of summer isles: "There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space; / I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race." A racial assumption that black women had "a degree of lascivity unknown in our climate" was heightened by the supposed fact that a lack of sexual restraint was evidence of a lack of civilisation. "The primitive woman . . . was always a prostitute," wrote the influential criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Going among savages was therefore the same as going among prostitutes, with Europeans feeling free to indulge themselves without restraint.
There is always the question of how much one believes of travellers' tales. Gauguin had to leave Tahiti because his syphilis sores made him unacceptable to the women, so he moved to the nearby islands where greater poverty rendered people more easily bought. Still, his letters continued to boast of high jinks with "skittish young girls" (wish you were here, running sores and all). Littlewood notes that the tourist's preference, Gauguin's included, was for mulatto women, as if what was being sought was a version of the exotic that had already been half-colonised.
There is a persistent assumption in these reports that the only way truly to know a country is to have sex with its inhabitants. Anthony Burgess, arriving in the east for the first time, remarked: "I wandered Singapore and was enchanted. I picked up a Chinese prostitute on Bugis Street . . . I entered her and entered the territory."
The very mechanics of travel itself stimulate the sexual impulse. Littlewood quotes approvingly Freud's comment on the compulsive link between railway travel and sexuality, but expands to include Byron's claim to have "tooled in a post-chaise", John Updike patiently masturbating the woman beside him on a long car journey, and the backpacking aspirants to the mile-high club queuing for the tiny loos on overnight flights to Australia.
In recent years professional women have had both the money and the confidence to travel to faraway, sunlit places, meet the locals and shag them. As one woman said of her sex holiday in the Gambia, "It was very empowering as a woman to be able to have my pick of a bunch of beautiful men." Such is liberation.
Littlewood attempts to categorise the sex traveller as the connoisseur of foreign culture, the pilgrim who wants a deeper understanding of self, and the rebel who finds in other countries a freedom denied at home. However, many of the travellers whose accounts are recorded here fall into two or more categories. The book's deficiencies are an overcomplex system of notes; an over-reliance on already known texts, with the absence of new material; and the omission of testimony from the providers of sexual services themselves.
That said, Littlewood has produced a good read, a thoughtful book and a welcome reminder that our sense of the glamour and thrill of travel is not part of some sleazy postwar boom but a facet of our common humanity, for the tide washes both ways. When former colonial men started travelling to European nations, one impetus was the hope of connection with " des femmes blanches ". Today it is not surprising to find African businessmen in gay bars in London, seeking a more enlightened attitude to sexual difference than they find in their own countries. The logic of Sultry Climates points to a time when dark-skinned rich women from hot countries will come seeking the exotic experience of sex with muscular white boys from Britain's housing estates. Happy holidays.
