However, without refuting the principle itself of a right to “privacy,” one is forced to observe that homosexuality does not belong solely in this domain, particularly and mainly due to the social construction from which it results and, more precisely, due to the homophobic logic that submits gays (or at least part of them) to discrimination and regulates them to an inferior social category. For some, the argument of “respect of privacy” opposed to outing, because it is applied to gays only (who would contest that the President or Prime Minister’s heterosexuality be made public?), translates and maintains the unequal and demeaning treatment reserved for them. And it is with the only intention of reestablishing an equality of treatment that journalist Gabriel Rotello, for example, defends outing, which he has unsuccessfully tried to rename “equalizing.”
So, must any journalist evoking the homosexuality of a public figure be considered to be practicing outing, independently of the way he delivers information? A recent media event suggests that we should answer this question in the affirmative. The publicity surrounding the proffered threat by ACT UP-Paris in 1999 offers a new visibility to the method of outing in France and seems to have inspired a representative of Rassemblement pour la République (Rally for the Republic, a right-wing political party), Jean-Luc Romero, who claims to be the victim of it and decided to alert the media to protest against the mention of his homosexuality in a gay magazine. As a matter of fact, in an article published in October 2000 on the next municipal elections in Paris, a journalist mentioned the decision of Philippe Séguin to choose a candidate who had a chance of winning the gay vote for the right-wing list presented in the Marais (the gay area of Paris). He added: “This is the common point of all those whose names are circulated. Roselyne Bachelot, appreciated by gays, or Romero, gay himself.” The ramifications of this incident in the media were out of proportion with the intention of the journalist. Romero recounted the incident one year later when he wrote a book on what he described as the “first outing of a French politician,” in which the information that was judged objective and neutral by the journalist took on a negative and vicious tone that made the journalist come across as homophobic. However, a few months later, Romero apparently made an outing similar to the one he complained of having been subjected to, in an interview published on August 1, 2002 in
Actions-Gay
(a free local gay paper, altogether similar to the one that Romero had accused). Asked about the fact that Renaud Donnedieu, a UDF member and then minister in the first Raffarin government (2002–04), had not been recalled to his job, Romero answered that it was all the same to him and, anyway, he preferred “people like Aillagon,” who “assume,” which apparently suggested that Donnedieu was a gay man himself. But this interpretation was later denied by Romero himself, his discourse containing, according to him, “manifestly no evidence” on Donnedieu’s sexuality. In the end, according to Romero, there had not been any outing. These examples illustrate the ambivalence that characterizes the definition of outing (whether it is seen as a means of freedom or a weapon of oppression) and the different ways in which this ambivalence is manifested.
—Christophe Broqua
ACT UP-Paris.
Le Sida
. Paris: Ed. Dagorno, 1994.
Fassin, Eric. “Le
Outing
de l’homophobie est-il de bonne politique? Définition et denunciation.” In
L’Homophobie, comment la définir, comment la combattre?
Edited by Daniel Borrillo and Pierre Lascoumes. Paris: Prochoix, 1999.
———. “‘Out’: la métaphore paradoxale.” In
Homosexualités: expression/répression
Edited by Louis-Georges Tin. Paris: Stock, 2000.
Gross, Larry P.
Contested Closets:The Politics and Ethics of Outing
. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapolis Press, 1993.
Johansson, Warren, and William A. Percy.
Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence
. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1994.
Lestrade, Didier.
ACT UP: une histoire
. Paris: Ed. Denoël, 2000.
Mohr, Richard.
Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Murphy, Timothy F., ed.
Gay Ethics: Controversies in Outing, Civil Rights, and Sexual Science
. New York: Haworth Press, 1994.
Romero, Jean-Luc.
On m’a volé ma vérité: histoire du premier outing d’un homme politique français
. Paris: Le Seuil, 2001.
Signorile, Michelangelo.
Queer in America: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power
. New York: Random House, 1993.
Tamagne, Florence.
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe, Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–
1939. Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. [Published in the US as
A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
. New York: Algora, 2004.]
—Associations; Closet, the; Discrimination; Media; Politics; Privacy; Scandal.
PaCS.
See
Anti-PaCS
PARENTING
At a time when attitudes are evolving and homosexuality is increasingly perceived as just one sexuality among many, an indisputable discomfort still remains around the topic of same-sex parents. Denmark was the first country to acknowledge gay couples; in 1989, it approved its Registered Partnership Act that granted the same rights to gay couples as heterosexual ones, with the exception of
adoption
. Norway adopted similar legislation in 1993, followed by Sweden in 1995 and Iceland in 1996, but all of them also excluded adoption rights. (Iceland does, however, allow the adoption of a same-sex partner’s existing children.) In 1995, the Constitutional Court of Hungary granted gay common-law spouses the same rights as heterosexual ones, but once more excluded the right to adopt. In 1999, France jumped on the bandwagon with the PaCS civil union legislation that acknowledged gay common-law marriage. The pattern was clear: while great progress was made by Western countries to recognize same-sex couples, legislation consistently refused to include their right to adopt children.
Things started to change, however. In 2002, the provincial parliament of Quebec, Canada unanimously approved a law granting gay couples the right to adopt. In Canada, adoption by same-sex couples is now legal in the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. It is illegal in New Brunswick and only stepchild adoption is legal in Alberta; the law is ambiguous in the Yukon. Across the national border, the US states of Vermont and New Jersey also legalized adoption by same-sex couples. In 2000, the Spanish region of Navarre passed legislation acknowledging the legal equality of common-law couples, whether gay or straight; such couples enjoyed the same rights and privileges as those who were married, including the right to adopt. Gay adoption was legalized throughout Spain in 2005 when same-sex marriage was legalized. In the Netherlands, same-sex couples have had access to civil marriage and could adopt since 2002. Sweden approved in 2002 an act allowing gays to adopt children. (Gay marriage is not yet legal in Sweden, although registered partnerships have been legal since 1995. The Swedish Church permitted the blessing of same-sex marriages in 2007, but a law has not yet been passed.)
England
followed suit in 2005, and Belgium in 2006.
Despite these advancements, however, a report by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission in 2000 outlined the many difficulties encountered by gays and lesbians on the issue of parenting. These can range from custody problems after a divorce when one partner reveals that he or she is gay, to the systemic exclusion of gays and lesbians from reproductive techniques available, to the outright illegality of adoption by homosexuals. In France, progressive thinkers believe that one’s sexuality has no bearing on their competency as a parent, but most political parties are united in refusing to contemplate legal changes that would grant children raised by same-sex parents the same protections as others, with the remarkable exception of the Green Party, which in 2001 adopted a motion recommending the “reform of family law, excluding all discriminations.”
Words
If we speak of homophobia, we cannot overlook the historic homophobic attitudes relating to homosexuals and children. For many, gay parenting is the line that should not be crossed, a horror that will ultimately lead to the entrenchment of the gay couple. There have been several types of arguments against the right of gays and lesbians to adopt:
1. The desire of homosexuals to have children is innately suspicious.
In the French debates over the controversial PaCS proposal, the following pronouncements were made: “[Homosexuals] only want children because it is fashionable; for them, children are consumption objects, and they want them in the same way we keep a cat or a dog” (Charles Melman); “They want children to satisfy their perverse and fetishist needs” (Jean-Pierre Winter); “Gay couples try to normalize their relationships through adoption” (Nazir Hamad). Another psychoanalyst, Daniel Sibony, wrote: “The principle of pleasure will crush the symbolic.… To have a good self-image—an open, liberal self without prejudice— must we create situations where kids are sacrificed? When adults get drunk on their image, children take the rap.”
2. It is not in the child’s best interest.
The welfare of children is a fundamental in French law (Civil Code, Article 287) and it is regularly set in opposition to homosexuality. According to many, the legal recognition of gay couples and their right to adopt would be to the detriment of the child; there are numerous legal scholars and psychoanalysts who still agree on this point. The child needs both a father and a mother, nothing more, nothing less. Some go so far as to predict a dire future for children raised by same-sex couples. On the subject of the “symbolic wound” of the child with gay parents, Jean-Pierre Winter writes: “We fear that it translates, from the first generation to the second, even the third generation, into an arrest of the transmission of life: by dementia, death or
sterility
.” Nothing less. Dozens of long-term studies conducted with a certain historical perspective (because children studied are now adults, even parents themselves) show that children raised by gay and lesbian parents do not develop any more developmental troubles than children raised in more “traditional” families. That said, these studies, nevertheless done according to rigorous protocols and published in specialist, professional, and family magazines, are regularly denigrated. Every time a study reveals that the children of gay parents are healthy and happy, the study is dismissed as militant and thus invalid. On the other hand, purely rhetorical texts, unfounded on any clinical experience and not based on any field study or samples, which affirm that children raised by same-sex parents are in danger, are not, for their part, ever suspected of militancy. Such being the case, to be in the majority, authors of these texts are nonetheless militants: militants of the established norm.
Certain psychoanalysts in France were concerned that the model proposed by PaCS would render Freud’s theory of the universality of the Oedipus complex obsolete. Psychoanalyst Simone Korff-Sausse wrote: “With PaCS, the gay couple becomes a model. That said, this model makes the classic model of identity construction, that is Oedipus, obsolete.
Psychoanalysis
demonstrated that the Oedipus structure is a universal principle that set everyone’s relation to the two
differences
that constitute identity, that is, the difference between the sexes and the difference between the generations.” One can wonder here if the point is directed to the child’s interest or the theory’s. More generally, most arguments, when they acknowledge that parenting abilities may have nothing to do with one’s sexuality, no longer refer to the “child’s best interest,” which—they finally admit—is not threatened; rather, it is all of society that is. Approving gay parenting would put society at
peril
and undermine its foundations.
3. It is not in society’s best interest.
A recurring theme raised by those opposed to gay parenting equates homosexuality with the negation of the difference of the sexes; a negation of
otherness
, even a denial of the other sex. These ideas regularly appear in the writing of Tony Anatrella, who claims: “In the first case (heterosexuality), society’s interests are healthy, while they are nonexistent in the second (homosexuality).… Society cannot be anything other than heterosexual.… This is the only way that society can organize itself and survive throughout history.” For Anatrella, heterosexuality is an adult sexuality and is synonymous with the “difference between the sexes.” He denies gays, reduced to their sexual behavior, access to this difference.
With this accusation of denying the difference between the sexes, one can see the rise of another fear, that of a world where sexual reproduction is no longer essential. The impossibility of thinking about the disjunction between procreation, sexuality, and lineage leads to the projection of fearful representations on gay parents. Gay parenting is thus perceived as a first step toward a world definitely split between the masculine and the feminine, with no possibility of the two ever meeting. Fears expressed by anthropologist Françoise Héritier on reproductive cloning seem to echo the same sentiment: “Appeal to the other sex wouldn’t be essential anymore to reproduce, which would lead to the loss of the social link of man and woman via sexual encounter…. It is to prevent this drift that governments have forbidden reproductive cloning.” Talking about PaCS, Korff-Sausse wrote: “Why risk otherness when one can revel in the comfort of the same?” Here, gay parenting and cloning are introduced with the same fright: “The family institution defines, on the social plane, this organizing principle by regulating the working between the two couples of fundamental opposition: man-woman, child-adult. The new model, that is, of PaCS as well as cloning, advocates the union of two fellow creatures or the creation of same by same, and abandons the necessity of the association of two who are dissimilar.… PaCS and cloning obey the same principles.” As well in these discourses, the concept of parenting is interchangeable with fertility, and homosexuality is equated with sterility; thus, the reasoning goes: “Nature does not allow a gay couple to reproduce, so they cannot be parents.”