The tradition of white, Euro-American gay men exoticizing the cultures and people of the global south and east is almost as old as the tradition of haiku and haibun. Scholar Hiram Perez, in his essay “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” examines the beginnings of the tourism industry, and the role that gay white men played in it. Perez uses the word "cosmopolitan" to describe “a subject position originating with a white, urban, leisure-class gay male whose desire is cast materially onto the globe at the close of the nineteenth century.” For Merrill, it is both his sexual desire and his desire for life that is cast onto the nation and people of Japan.
