The Dictionary of Homophobia (28 page)

L’Assiette au beurre
: “
P’tits jeun’hommes
”

At the end of the nineteeth century, women were muscling their way in, earning their turn: the illustrator Steinlen drew these women as “rivals” to heterosexual men in the February 22, 1896, issue of
Le Rire
; wherein they were portrayed as originating from a homeland to which they would sometimes return, alone (caption to Pourriol’s drawing
Cruise through the Archipelago
: “Lesbos? Don’t bother, Captain. We’re better off visiting that island on our own!”). In France in 1902, the lesbian was quite fashionable and featured in the February 1902 issue of
Les Articles de Paris
: two pairs of women dancing together, as drawn by Minartz in
L’Assiette au beurre
, proclaim, “
Dire que les gommeux / S’imaginent, les malheureux / Qu’on ne peut pas se passer d’eux!”
(“Just think that those dandies / Believe, the poor souls / That we can’t live without them!”).

This same publication devoted its entire March 2, 1912, issue to artist Jils Garrine depicting these “
mesdam’messieurs
,” at the same time as the
P’tits Jeun’hommes
issue. From the first page, these women are portrayed as being nothing more than a harmless distraction. In a drawing entitled “Honor Intact!,” an elderly woman says to a man in a smoking jacket: “And you allow your wife … with her friend …,” to which he responds, “Bah! It’s just how I keep from being cuckolded.”

But after World War I, boyish women became rivals, at least according to the caricatures. In the February 1, 1927, issue of
Fantasio
, “A New Time, Another Danger,” such women play up the confusion between the sexes to escape their conjugal duties. In the May 7th, 1931, issue of
Le Sourire du jeudi
, under the brush of J. Leclerc, a woman talks on the telephone while sitting next to a boyish girl: “Alas, my dear, I can’t today, I’m seeing my aunt.…” However, a May 21, 1932, issue of
Le Rire
devoted exclusively to
Dames seules
(Solitary ladies), written by Maryse Ghoisy (who would often dress as a man while reporting) and drawn by Vertès, portrays lesbians as well-adjusted people. Astonishingly, the issue begins and concludes with examples of what would today be called gay
parenting
. On the front cover, a childless couple has reached their quarter century together in “Silver anniversary”:“To think that we would have a twenty-five-year-old son by now.” And on the back cover, while sitting together, a woman breaks into tears upon discovering the pregnancy of her friend, who replies: “Now my dear, please don’t cry; the child is yours.”

This type of drawing in France was not restricted to humor magazines; it could also be found on the covers and in the illustrations of popular novels with extravagant storylines:
Amour inverti
(Inverted love)
,
by Dr J. de Cherveix, 1907;
Féminisé
(Feminized), by Jacques de Bandol, 1922;
Léon dit Léonie
(Léon, a.k.a Léonie), by Charles-Etienne, 1922;
Messieurs ces dames
(Ladies these gentlemen), by Paul André et Henri Sébille;
Billy, by
Jean d’Essac, 1937;
Frédi s’amuse
(Fredi at play)
, Frédi en ménage
(Fredi at home); and
Fredi à l’école
(Fredi at school), by Max des Vignons, 1929. Postcards also provided a venue for this type of caricature.

Le Rire
:
“Voilà un garçon qui a bien mauvais genre
.
”
“C’est vrai : il a le genre féminin!
”
(“There goes a boy who looks like trouble.”
“Yes, trouble with her gender.”)

After the end of the golden age of caricature in France (and particularly homophobic caricature), the genre began to fade away, replaced by a preference for simple humorous drawings in publications like
Le Canard enchaîné, Libération
, or
Le Monde
(though the valiant satirical weekly
Charlie Hebdo
is still publishing, despite years of interruption).

Contemporary caricature is rare, but is nonetheless important. Edith Cresson, who became France’s first female prime minister in 1991, once rather tempestuously declared that one in four Britons were homosexual. The cartoonist from
Canard enchaîné
responded by illustrating, in the issue of June 19, 1991, three kilted Britons in a row, followed by a fourth in nylons, garters, and feathers (“Great Britain According to Cresson”). A Wiaz caricature in the
Nouvel observateur
(August 8–14, 1991) shows a gay man in a baseball cap and muscle shirt, ultra virile and tough, complete with a tattoo of a heart dedicated to his mother on his left arm. More in tune with the gay world, the artist Cunéo depicted the prime minister as “Edith the Terrible,” armed with a whip and dressed in leather, catching a colleague’s son naked with another man. The two are terrified; two condoms and a bottle of petroleum jelly lay next to the mattress on the floor.

Be that as it may, the days of exclusively portraying gays and lesbians as a systematic inversion of the heterosexual world have passed. Gay and lesbian culture is capable of representing itself (with artists such as Ralf König in Germany, or Copi and Cunéo in France) complete with its own brand of gender inversion, free from any heterosexism. While efforts to force the mainstream press to acknowledge its homophobia have not yet fully succeeded, the pressure has resulted in fewer instances of homophobic caricature, even if jests like those of Philippe Bouvard still echo the homophobic past.
—
Patrick Cardon

Baecque, Antoine de.
La Caricature révolutionnaire.
Paris: Presses du CNRS, 1988.

Cameron,Vivian. “Political Exposures: Sexuality and Caricature in the French Revolution.” In
Eroticism and the Body Politic
. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991.

Collwill, Elizabeth. “Les Crimes de Marie-Antoinette: images d’une femme mutine dans le discours révolutionnaire.” In
Les Femmes et la Révolution
. Edited by Marie-France Brive. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1990.

Choisy, Maryse.
Dames seules
. Illustrations by Vertès and preface by Nicole Alber. New edition. Lille: Question de Genre/GayKitschCamp, 1995.

Grand-Carteret, John.
Derrière “Lui”: L’homosexualité en Allemagne
. 1906. Followed by
Iconographie d’un scandale, les caricatures politiques et l’affaire Eulenburg
. By James Steakley. Lille: Cahiers GayKitschCamp, 1992.

Hirschfeld, Magnus.
Les Homosexuels de Berlin
. Lille: Cahiers GayKitschCamp, 1992.

Roellig, Ruth Margarete.
Les Lesbiennes de Berlin, 1928
. New edition. Lille: Question de genre/GayKitschCamp, 2000.

—Art; Comic Books; Decadence; France; Germany; Humor; Literature; Publicity; Rhetoric; Song.

CATHOLIC CHURCH, the

The position of the Catholic Church with regard to morality hasn’t changed much since it became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, or even before that, since the
Bible
, as reflected in the writings of
Paul
in particular. Over the centuries, and despite being increasingly confronted by the contemporary world, the moral imperative of the ecclesiastic hierarchy has remained steadfast and absolute, and the theologians who dared to offer different interpretations of holy texts (or an
aggiornamento,
a theological “updating” in the spirit of change, open-mindedness, and modernity, a term used during the second Vatican Council) were summarily punished and thus silenced. On “moral” issues such as abortion, sex, the role of women, and the
family
, not to mention homosexuality, the Church’s position never varied—not that this institution could be expected to demonstrate any propensity to change or reform itself. The election of Pope John Paul II in 1978 did, however, bring about some significant changes in the Church’s administration (the Curia, the State of the Vatican) as well as in pastoral life (such as the Pope’s highly visible and frequent travels abroad); as well, exegetical reflection and theological research were taking place in all reaches of the world. At the same time, however, the Catholic Church remained unrelentingly conservative and repressive in its attitudes and positions on moral issues both old and new. Further, the Vatican did not hesitate to interfere politically, in
Italy
and elsewhere, when it felt that its views and its leadership were being contested.

In this context, the Church’s frequent references to a so-called gay
lobby
, whose sole aim apparently was to persecute the Church and the “traditional family,” are evidence of the paranoid mentality of the Church, as well as that of its official representatives, toward its “opponents.” Recent events reveal the scope of this paranoia: for one, the legislated approval of same-sex unions and gay rights in general in numerous countries provoked outrageous and violently homophobic statements by Vatican representatives and Pope John Paul II himself. For example, in the weeks preceding the World Pride 2000 gay rights march in Rome
,
the bishop of Genoa condemned rights given to homosexuals; Georges Cottier, one of the Pope’s advisors, shared this view, referring to the “problems and human dramas” that homosexuality engendered. Despite scientific views to the contrary, the Church’s highest hierarchy still considers homosexuality to be a sort of debilitative illness. The latest version of Roman Catholic Catechism formalizes its position: “Basing itself on the Holy Scriptures …, the Tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically reckless,’ they go against natural order; they close off the sexual act from the gift of life; they do not stem from a true affective and sexual complementarity; under no circumstances would they be approved.” On the opposite side, more liberal Catholic figures, such as French Bishop Jacques Gaillot, were firmly asked by the Vatican to remain silent on the issue. Even the usually pro-Catholic Italian press expressed its misgivings with regard to these demonstrations of intolerance (notably
Repubblica
and
Corriere della sera
).

By 1992, John Paul II had condemned homosexuals on numerous occasions, even justifying
discrimination
against them in areas such as employment and housing. He also did not hesitate to publish, along with Cardinal Josef Alois Ratzinger (who later succeeded John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005), a paper entitled “Some Considerations on the Response to Private Bills on the Non-Discrimination of the Homosexual People,” in which he asserted, without flinching, “In certain areas, taking sexual orientation into account is not unjust discrimination, for example in the adoption of children or placing in foster care, in the hiring of teachers and sports coaches and in military recruiting.” Going even further, John Paul II was staunchly against the decriminalization of homosexuality in his homeland of Poland, his home country, and in Eastern European countries in general, without ever giving consideration to the physical, moral, and symbolic homophobic
violence
that could be legally inflicted if
criminalization
were maintained in these countries.

Most recently, however, it is the institutionalization of same-sex civil unions, in Europe and elsewhere, that has provoked the Catholic hierarchy’s most virulent homophobia. On November 21, 2000, the Vatican demanded that such unions not be officially recognized, as they would have grave consequences on the family and on the common good of society in general. In Madrid that same year, the Socialist opposition (unsuccessfully) presented a “bill on civil unions” that the Spanish episcopate’s spokesperson condemned as “an assault against the family and
marriage
”
(El Pais,
September 20, 2000). He did note that homosexuals must be treated with
tolerance
, but asserted that the Church and notions of the family must be preserved. In Quebec, Canada, the Catholic Church led a crusade against the provincial law that would recognize same-sex unions and give gay couples the right to
adopt
. These efforts, however, did not stop the bill from being unanimously approved by Quebec’s parliament. As stated by Paul Bégin, Quebec’s Minister of Justice: “What was at the center of the debate was love, and the priests never spoke of love.” In France, the Conference of Bishops regarded the
PaCS
law (Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil Solidarity Pact), as being “useless and dangerous.” Without any originality, the bishops cited the Church’s homophobic
theology
and concluded that a law such as PaCS was prejudicial against the Church and to families, who were severely threatened as a result. They also used a hitherto unheard-of financial argument: how much will it cost society? In these and other ways, the Catholic Church hierarchy continues to reinforce the most homophobic positions of its historic past.
—Thierry Revol