Sex in the sand dunes happened when Gide was twenty-three and he lost his virginity to a fourteen-year-old Arab boy named Ali in Tunisia.

Having lost his virginity, at the age of twenty-three, to a fourteen-year-old Arab youth in Tunisia, he later fell in love with a fifteen-year-old servant boy in Algeria. Gide longed to take the boy back with him to France, but Gide's mother opposed the idea: she couldn't stand the idea of a "Negro," as she called him, living .With them in Paris. When he was forty-seven, Gide fell in love and had an affair with sixteen-year-old Marc Allegret.