Sotadic zone

Burton's Sotadic Zone encompassed only small areas of Europe and North Africa, larger areas of Asia, and all of North and South America.

The existence of a Sotadic zone was a hypothesis of Richard Francis Burton. It asserted that there existed a geographic zone in which homosexuality was particularly prevalent and tolerated.

Burton first proposed this hypothesis in the Terminal Essay contained in Volume 10 of his translation of The Arabian Nights in 1886 . The name Sotadic derives from Sotades, a Greek Hellenistic poet whose homoerotic verses are preserved in the Greek Anthology. According to Burton's description, the Sotadic zone is:

1. bounded westward by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43 °) and by the southern (N. Lat. 30°). Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Morocco to Egypt;
2. Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sindh, the Punjab and Kashmir.
3. In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan.
4. It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial institution.
5. "Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practise it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust."