The Sotadic Zone

The Sotadic Zone is theorized in Burton's "Terminal Essay" to The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (1885). For Burton, pederasty and homosexuality were "geographical and climatic, not racial," meaning it could be found in all the red bits in the map below.

"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 practice 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."

After finding pederasty throughout The Sotadic Zone, he turns his attentions to northern Europe...

"Outside the Sotadic Zone, I have said, Le Vice is sporadic, not endemic: yet the physical and moral effect of great cities where puberty, they say, is induced earlier than in country sites, has been the same in most lands, causing modesty to decay and pederasty to flourish."

"In our modern capitals, London, Berlin and Paris for instance, the Vice seems subject to periodical outbreaks. For many years, also, England sent her pederasts to Italy, and especially to Naples whence originated the term 'Il vizio Inglese.' It would be invidious to detail the scandals which of late years have startled the public in London and Dublin: for these the curious will consult the police reports. Berlin, despite her strong flavour of Phariseeism, Puritanism and Chauvinism in religion, manners and morals, is not a whit better than her neighbours."