All of this evidence reveals that the far right has no use for trying to understand homosexuality other than to use it for its own ends, and sometimes seeks to destroy it. Homosexuality provokes an immediate reaction in those on the far right in large part because of what it represents: the rejection of the traditional, familial, national, and collectivistic values that they take great pains to maintain in a world of change and progress.
—Michael Sibalis
Algazy, Jean.
L’Extrême droite en France de 1965 à 1984
. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
Aron, Jean-Paul, and Roger Kempf.
Le Pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident
. Paris: Grasset, 1978. New edition: Le Livre de Poche, 1999.
Chebel D’Appollonia, Ariane.
L’Extrême droite en France de Maurras à Le Pen
. Brussels: Complexe, 1996.
Fourest, Caroline.
Foi contre Choix. La droite religieuse et le mouvement “prolife” aux Etats-Unis
. Paris: Ed. Golias, 2001.
Hewitt, Andrew.
Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imag
i
nary
. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996.
Le Bitoux, Jean.
Les Oubliés de la mémoire
. Paris: Hachette, 2002.
Petitfils, Jean-Christian.
L’Extrême droite en France
. Third edition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, “Que sais-je?,” 1995.
Ras l’Front website for network against fascism.
http://www.raslfront.org/index.php
(accessed February 11, 2008).
—Anti-PaCS; Bible, the; Caricature; Communism; Contagion; Decadence; Deportation; Fascism; France; Germany; Himmler, Heinrich; Italy; McCarthy, Joseph; North America; Peril; Pétain, Philippe; Proselytism; Rhetoric; Scandal; Spain; Sterility; Theology; Violence.
FASCISM
The term “Fascism” has its origin in the Latin fasces (a bundle of elm or birch rods); this name and symbol became the foundation of Benito Mussolini’s political party in Italy in 1919. By extension, the designation “fascist” was applied to other movements and parties that developed in Europe between 1919 and 1945 that shared certain characteristics such as nationalism, militarism, single-party dictatorship or corporatism, and, the “Cult of the Leader.” The German national-socialism (i.e. Nazism) was a form of Fascism, but with essential differences; the most important being its emphasis on racial theory, which justified eugenistic actions and the conquest of a “vital space” necessary for the domination of the “master race.”
During this period, fascist regimes did not grant equal importance to the question of homosexuality. Only Nazi
Germany
put in place a thorough system of surveillance and repression of homosexuals. However, these conclusions must be addressed with prudence, due to the lack of extensive research on the subject. Only the fate of gays under Nazism is well documented today.
In analyzing the turbulent relationship between Fascism and homosexuality, one must start with its legal and historical framework. In the Mediterranean countries in the late nineteenth century, masculine and feminine homosexuality enjoyed relative
tolerance
, fostered by the strict separation of men and women in their daily lives. Certainly, the
Catholic
tradition condemned sodomy, and the passive and effeminate “pervert” was the object of ridicule and slight because he challenged gender-based hierarchies. Gay practices, however, were not generally seen as constitutive of a specific identity; and bisexuality was relatively popular: in this way, soldiers and sailors that prostituted themselves did not consider themselves to be gay. The absence of anti-homosexual legislation explains how these countries, particularly
Italy
, attracted numerous gay foreigners wishing to escape the monitoring in place in their own countries. After Oscar
Wilde
’s trial, in 1895, the Italian island of Capri became a particularly appreciated resort: Baron Adelswärd-Fersen, Somerset Maugham, E. F. Benson, Norman Douglas, Natalie Barney, and Romaine Brooks met there. The situation was very different in Germany where, since the Unification of 1871, Article 175 punished male homosexuality with imprisonment. Although 1920s Berlin attracted many gay foreigners, due to its bohemian culture, tolerance of homosexuals was merely superficial, and homophobic prejudices, exacerbated by churches, conservative political parties and the press, were still deeply ingrained in German public opinion.
Nazi homophobia thus found a relatively favorable breeding ground in which to foment its own argument: homosexuality became a “crime against race,” a sign of
degeneracy
that threatened the vitality of the German nation. Heinrich
Himmler
, second in command to Hitler, engaged in popularizing this interpretation in his speeches, and organized the national repression of “
vice against nature
.” Popularized when the Nazis took power in 1933, it was reinforced starting in 1935, following the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” when Hitler ordered the purge of his rivals and opponents (including SA leader Ernst Röhm, who was a known homosexual). The idea of “curing” homosexuality, however, was no stranger to Nazi thinking, because it allowed for the reintegration of “seduced” men in the national body, particularly in the
army
. Nonetheless, the shipment of homosexuals to concentration
camps
, thought of in terms of “rehabilitation,” included hazardous “medical” experiments and
treatments
that went as far as castration. The accusation of homosexuality was also not devoid of political motives; it was used many times against the Nazi regime’s enemies.
In Italy, the ascension to power by the Fascists, in 1922, did not result in any immediate changes to the fate of gays. In 1930, during a discussion on the new Italian penal code, Mussolini even opposed the introduction of homophobic legislation, under the pretense that Italians were too virile to be gay. Besides, it seemed that economic interests overrode moral interpretations: gay tourism, a source of foreign currency, was not to be upset. Finally, militant movements such as those known in Germany were not found in Italy, and any danger posed by an organized gay community seemed non-existent. Gays in Italy were nonetheless the object of new
discriminations
: a number of bars were raided and certain homosexuals judged too public were exiled. Starting in 1938 however, likely the result of the Nazi regime’s influence, new legal edicts were approved, aimed this time directly at gays. As revealed in Ettore Scola’s 1977 film,
Una Giornata particolare
(
A Special Day
), gays were now considered “political”
criminals
and risked
prison
and exile. Homosexual members of the Fascist party were forced to resign, while in Germany, SS members known for being gay were condemned to death. However, while life for many homosexuals in fascist states meant fear, suffering, and humiliation, others survived this period unscathed.
Similarly in
Spain
during this time, it appears that the repression of homosexuality was never contemplated on a general scale. Certainly, homophobic violence increased, as evidenced by the execution, in 1936, of gay republican poet Federico García Lorca. However, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco did not give in to Hitlerian pressures on this subject, and in the last years of the regime, he permitted the rebirth of a gay subculture.
At the same time, even if fascist regimes did not necessarily develop common arguments and practices, they were nonetheless hostile to homosexuality. And so the Russian Communist Party’s 1934 assertion that homosexuality was a “fascist perversion,” for instance, is unfounded. Although it is possible to see a strong homoerotic component in certain Nazi groups, such as Ernst Röhm’s SA (the storm-trooper division) and although certain gay personalities may have been sensitive to the fascist ideology (as well as the many heterosexual personalities), this does not detract from the persecutions and discriminations suffered by tens of thousands of gays under different fascist regimes.
—
Florence Tamagne
Haeberle, Erwin J. “Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany.” In
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
. New York: Penguin, 1990.
Hewitt, Andrew.
Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary
. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996.
Le Bitoux, Jean.
Les Oubliés de la mémoire
. Paris: Hachette, 2002.
Leroy-Forgeot, Flora.
Histoire juridique de l’homosexualité en Europe
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.
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.]
—Armed Forces; Communism; Decadence; Deportation; Far Right, the; Germany; Gulag; Himmler, Heinrich; Hirschfeld, Magnus; Italy; Pétain, Philippe; Police; Treatment; Violence.
FAVORITES
The French public referred to the entourage of
Henri
III
(who reigned over France from 1574 to 1589) as the “favorites” or “dainties,” with their extravagant attire, trivial occupations, and unbalanced behavior; one might add “sodomites.” Thomas Artus, Sieur d’Embry (Lord of Embry), in his 1605 political satire
L’Isle des hermaphrodites
, tried to caricature the sophistication of members of the last Valois court, whose suspected sexual deviance was sufficient to discredit them and judge them as unworthy and degenerate. Thomas Artus also reported on accusations made in the 1580s by René de Lucinge, Savoy’s ambassador to France who denounced the king’s cabinet as “a true harem of lustfulness and bawdiness, a school of sodomy.”
Who were these dainties so vilified by the nation? The term itself did not have the current connotation that is often associated with it, but was commonly used as a synonym of “favorite.” Henri IV, strong heterosexual that he was, had his dainties, so named, without being suspected of sodomy, while Henri III’s favorites were unique compared to both their predecessors and successors in that the king transformed them into a political weapon. Coming from the middle nobility, the favorites were positioned to counterbalance the influence of those more powerful (and thus threatening) and, as well, to act as a screen between them and their sovereign. Dainties did not often possess the physical features of what one might consider an effeminate man. If there was “daintiness” in their behavior, it was found in their readiness to draw swords for the most laughable of reasons, exemplified by the famous duel of dainties on April 27, 1578, which left four of the six antagonists dead in the field. Moreover, it was often the disputed favors of a woman that was at the origin of these bloody quarrels. There is almost no trace of homosexual behavior among Henri III’s favorites, even if the poet Marc de Papillon de Lasphrise identified Louis de Maugiron, a favorite and a victim of the 1578 duel, as one of his sexual partners in a work published in 1597; however, it must be noted that this was an era of intolerance toward homosexuals, whereby those caught were subject to being burned at the stake. Only Hercule François, also known as the Duke of Alençon or simply as
Monsieur
, protected by his stature as brother to the king, was able to show himself in public with his male lover d’Avrilly without being vilified in the publications of the time, unlike his older brother, the supposed “bugger” king. In such criticisms, homophobia appears as a form of political disparagement aimed at a king intent on changing the rules of government by surrounding himself with a group of young men who were elegant and well built (conforming to a Platonic ideal of beauty and good) but above all devoted, to the great dismay of nobility and religious factions. The nobility’s disdain toward the dainties on moral grounds was a means to bring about their political marginalization.
—Laurent Avezou
Boucher, Jacqueline.
La Cour de Henri III
. Rennes: Ouest-France, 1986.
Le Roux, Nicolas.
La Faveur du roi. Mignons et courtisans au temps des derniers Valois (vers 1547–vers 1589)
. Seyssel: Champs Vallon, 2001.
—Decadence; France; Henri III; Monsieur; Rhetoric.
FEMINISM (France)
“There is no lesbian problem, there is only a heterosexual problem”: this could have been the slogan summing up the position of Mouvement de liberation des femmes (MLF; Women’s Liberation Movement, a collective of varied groups who rejected the oppression of women) during debates in
France
on homosexuality, at the beginning of the 1970s. Such was, in 1971, the
raison d’être
for the collective’s movement, and the explosive exit of a large number of lesbian militants (and a few others) from a meeting that was focused in particular on the “problems of gay women,” organized by those who would become the group known as “Psychanalyse et politique” (Psychoanalysis and Politic). This was also the reason for the disruption of Ménie Grégoire’s radio broadcast “
l’homosexualité, ce douloureux problème
,” by the MLF and FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire) on March 10, 1971. And the reason for the creation, as early as spring of 1971, of the group provocatively named “Gouines rouges” (Red Dykes).
This radical or “revolutionary” position was common to many social movements of the time. The feminists’ objective was not so much to improve the situation of women in existing society—even less to “reform” it—but to analyze, expose, subvert, and, in time, destroy the constraints, domination, and power structures that existed between sexes: specifically the “patriarchy,” and notably, sexual domination. One has to remember that while the focus of the feminist movement (in relation to those that preceded it) was really to emphasize questions about the body and sexuality, these questions were never separated from the analysis of all other places and modalities of oppression. This is why feminists were at the same time contesting in-vogue ideologies of “sexual liberation.”