I was also given to think about those Northern European gentlemen of wealth and leisure who were of the disposition who in the C18th and C19th would journey to the shores of the Mediterranean for sun, sites of antiquarian interest, and hott youths prepared to be obliging for reasonable remuneration... when reading this:
'We live here': fears tourist tweets on gay lifestyle may backfire on Bali's LGBT community.
Gray and her girlfriend had travelled to Bali for six months but, when the pandemic hit, decided to wait it out on the island. The move had transformed their lifestyles, she wrote, allowing them to enjoy an “elevated lifestyle at a much lower cost of living”. Her business, which she ran as a digital nomad, had started to take shape, and the island had offered a much-needed respite from the political turmoil in the US. It was also, she said, a safe place for the black and queer community..... Her comments, her critics felt, summed up the privileged attitude of foreign tourists who ignore local rules. They pointed out that she showed little awareness of huge economic inequality on the island, or of the impact of the pandemic on local people. Within days, authorities announced that she would was deported.
For the queer community in Bali, the episode has been especially fraught....LGBT residents on the island, however, do not enjoy the same privileges as visitors, said Arya, a program manager at Gaya Dewata Foundation, an NGO that provides health and educational services for LGBT people. “It is friendly here for LGBT tourists because they are here as tourists. The people in the tourism business will accept them whatever their sexuality is, they will be served well,” Arya said.
This also resonated with my musings over certain things that struck me in the de Beauvoir book I was recently reading: that for all the reputation that the French - and particularly Gay Paree - have in other countries for oolala etc, there was clearly a huge outrage that Simone had violated understood taboos concerning pudeur - decency, decorum, propriety - by talking explicitly about female sexuality, lesbianism, abortion, etc, in The Second Sex. And presumably part of that was the difference between the culture for the tourist/visitor (possibly also from other parts of France? - see also London, at least, certain areas of it, as haunt of vice and iniquity for provincials) and the people who live their ordinary quotidien lives there.
(I'm vaguely remembering a novel by Francois Mauriac, who was a bitter, vicious critic of de Beauvoir, in which a provincial businessman takes his new wife to a Parisian nightclub and is thoroughly shocked - what will foreigners think?)
This brought to you by one who was brought up in a rather boring seaside town which, however, had a reputation in much of Europe as an alluring Babylon due to the foreign language students attending the various summer schools intended to improve their English.
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