Government neglect and endemic poverty means that, aside…

““Government neglect and endemic poverty means that, aside from the constant hassle tourists must suffer from the legion of touts, many of the city’s young men become prostitutes as the only hope of earning a living. In the 1990s, Luxor became the center of male prostitution in the Middle East. The studs sold themselves to older foreigners (the john’s gender made no difference), who arrived throughout the year for unabashed, but for the most part locally denied, sex tourism.1 Luxor’s mayor, Samir Farag, was arrested after Mubarak’s ouster on charges of rampant corruption, as were many other mayors up and down the country; but a few years earlier he had told an Arabic-language newspaper that as many as 30 percent of Luxor’s young men had married an older foreign woman, and in most cases this was covert prostitution2—the latter being both illegal and shameful for the conservative locals to openly acknowledge. I was loath to return to Luxor because even if as a single Westerner you are not on the lookout for street meat, you are still solicited by the city’s rent boys and pestered for cash by the tourist hustlers. Not, of course, that the two groups are mutually exclusive.””

— John R. Bradley