In short, families had never felt with as much acuteness as in those postwar decades the duty to make their progeny heterosexual. The neurotic character of this obsession was reinforced in the middle class by the presence of a relatively strong Puritanism. Homophobia was so fertile, it bloomed in the most unexpected places. For example, Simone de Beauvoir’s courageous campaign against sexist prejudices did not preclude her from writing in 1949 in
Le Deuxième sexe
(
The Second Sex
) on lesbians: “Nothing gives a worse impression of parochial approach and mutilation than those (lesbians) clans of liberated women.”
In 1960, a political apogee was reached with the Mirguet amendment that made homosexuality a “social scourge” which public authority must control. In a surprise vote in a night session, Gaullist member Paul Mirguet (who pretended to want to save civilization and in a context of postcolonial doubt, resumed the anti-Gide theme of the protection of children) included homosexuality with prostitution and alcoholism. Through the Mirguet amendment, homophobia was from now on offensive: the act went beyond the repressive framework intended to organize prophylaxis; by any means, public authority had to prevent the development of sexuality, considered as scourge, but even more, to keep it invisible. The symbolic violence of the Mirguet amendment was so strong that according to Frédéric Martel, many French gays were thinking of leaving the country. The 60s were years of generalized homophobia in France: do-gooder homophobia was perfectly embodied by the presidential couple (the very prudish Yvonne de Gaulle was said to be particularly hostile to “special behavior”); and popular homophobia like songwriter George Brassens (“Les Copains d’abord
,
” 1964). The era also saw an intensification of homophobic
insults
: queer, poof, fag, bugger, sod, fairy, and nancy-boy, were heard all day long in the streets, school yards, cafés, stadiums, barrack rooms, and commissaries; in variety theater television, like the kind found in Pigalle’s cabarets of “cross dressers”; in Roger Pierre and Jean-Marc Thibault’s sketches; and in the never-ending jokes in works Jean Cocteau, Jean Marais, Jean-Louis Bory, and Jacques Chazot. France’s accelerated urbanization of the time increased the visibility of homophobia: if gays were mostly an urbanite population, homophobia also grew mainly in the city, on the street, and in public places, providing infinite occasions for verbal aggression. Homophobic themes also fed generational conflict, very acute in the second part of the 60s (the fathers’ generation, who had known the war, confronted the sons’ generation born in the baby boom era): the elders found that the youth did not know hardships, lacked virility, and believed in collective depravation by overconsumption and democratization of Hedonism, and saw in hippie singer Antoine’s long hair and the high-pitched voices of yé-yé singers the signs of sexual confusion.
But protesters themselves were not protected from prejudice. There was an extreme left-wing homophobia: in May 1968, in the occupied Sorbonne, eight posters were taken down that had been put up by the mysterious Comité d’action pédérastique révolutionnaire (Committee of Revolutionary Pederastic Action) that was denouncing social and police repression that gays were suffering; and there was the homophobia of the psychoanalytic avant-garde: Jacques Lacan, very well known in Paris intelligentsia, exclaimed, “Do not tell us that under the pretext that it was a received, approved, even celebrated perversion, that it was not a perversion; homosexuality remains nevertheless what it is: a perversion.” It is not surprising under these conditions, that the first surveys on the subject in 1968 show a massive hostile opinion: homosexuality was perceived as “either a disease to cure, or a perversion to fight,” as Christine Bard said.
There remained self hatred: the embryo of the gay movement that was known in France in the 50s and 60s was the one that was constituted around the magazine
Arcadie
, created in 1954 by André Baudry, which had thousands of subscribers.
Arcadie
had almost no proper distribution, as proven by barriers put up by public authority to selling of the magazine; from which was born a strategy for respectability that led Baudry to continually sit in judgment of other “homophiles” and to have, in his own way, a homophobic discourse (particularly on cruising for prostitutes, in the name of love), transforming
Arcadie
meetings into slightly ridiculous preaching. This strategy was completely empty: it had no effect on public opinion, did not neutralize any prejudice, and even contributed to the reinforcement of the negative gay self image.
Since 1971: Resistances to Emancipation
Well behind the Anglo-Saxon countries, the gay and lesbian revolution established itself in France in 1971. Gay visibility increased and homosexuals started to make demands. Chiefly, they took advantage of the new vision of the global society on sexuality and pleasure. On all fronts, homophobia was losing ground. It crystallized itself, however, around four themes that also corresponded to three moments: the refusal of decriminalization, the fears rising around
AIDS
, and the hostility to gay marriage and gay
parenting
.
The desire to maintain the legal stigmatization of homosexuality was first and foremost the domain of the
Catholic Church
(and particularly of Pope John Paul II, elected in 1978 and one of the most violently homophobic voices of his time): for the Roman master, homosexuality remained a depravity. In April 1982 Léon-Arthur Elchinger, Bishop of Strasbourg, shockingly declared: “I respect homosexuals as I respect disabled people. But if they want to convert their infirmity in health, I must say that I do not agree.” And the last version of the Roman catechism prescribed: “Based on the Holy Scriptures … tradition has always proclaimed that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered’; they are contrary to natural law; they close the sexual act to the gift of life; they do not proceed from a real sexual and affective complementarity; they can’t in any case receive approbation.” The pope himself approved in 1992 certain specific discriminations on homosexual hiring, lodging, and social protection, going as far as limiting AIDS sufferers’ rights (
Osservatore Romano,
August 4, 1992); he tried by all means to stop decriminalization of homosexuality in Eastern European countries; finally, he condemned the “judicial approbation” of homosexuality by European Parliament (1994).
For the right and far right, of which a part is sensitive to the Vatican discourse, gays were always sick people (lesbians are often perceived, at least in private, as “missed loved”). The 1970s sexual revolution, the growing visibility of gays, the high level of sexual consumption by certain gays, the arrival of backrooms in gay bars
,
the leather look, and S/M trends were perceived as a threat to civilization, the sign of a real decadence; thus causing the refusal of decriminalization, specifically the repealing of Sections 331-32. Between 1980 and 1982, the business of the day was the question of whether the legal age for gay sex (eighteen years old since 1974) should be aligned with the heterosexual legal age of fifteen years old. For the members of parliament of the right wing of 1981, homosexuality remained a social scourge and a danger to the family: it was against nature, it should not be trivialized; a normally constituted head of a family would not support the idea of a lecherous old man sodomizing his fifteen-year-old son (to which Minister of Justice Robert Badinter responded very to the point: “But sir, what head of the family could support the same vision of a lecherous old man sodomizing a fifteen-year-old girl?”).
We clearly see here the two concepts of liberty that so often oppose themselves in French political life: one extensive concept, rather left wing (liberty must encompass the most possible differences), and one normative concept, rather right wing (liberty must be inscribed in a frame of social interdictions). Once homosexuality was decriminalized, the right wing didn’t hesitate to make use of bad faith arguments, often maintaining confusion between homosexuality and pedophilia, which helped to infuriate public opinion. In March 1987, Charles Pasqua tried (in vain) to use the act of 1949 on publications aimed at youth to eradicate France’s most prominent gay magazine of the time,
Gai-Pied
. It is clear that, for the far right of the era, gays, being not numerous and voting mostly for the left, seemed to be an ideal scapegoat: the rub is that many heterosexuals now feel a lot more supportive of gays than of moral order promoters, and that these anti-gay operations were completely counterproductive to gaining votes from the center.
If homophobia was most often found in the right wing, it also concerned a part of the left, particularly in the 1970s. The Communists, very family-oriented since the influence of Stalin, were often hostile to the first aspirations of the gay movement. Communist Party leader Jacques Duclos insulted Front homosexual d’action (FHAR; Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front) militants in 1971, remarking, “A bunch of pederasts, go get yourselves treated!”; in 1972, Roland Leroy called the movement “the decay of capitalism in its decline”; and highly homophobic texts appeared in the French communist daily newspaper
L’Humanité
, 1975–76. A part of the extreme left was not much more favorable to gays; the splinter group Vive la révolution, where Guy Hocquenghem was a member, self-destructed in the spring of 1971 on the gay question and its pro-worker elements split off. During the same period, the French Communist Union, or Lutte ouvrière (Worker’s struggle), critiqued the petit-bourgeois individualism of gays, saying that the content of the special gay edition of the Maoist newspaper
Tout!
“is at the level of street urinal graffiti.” As for the Revolutionary Communist League, it only agreed to create a Gay National Commission in 1977. There are finally isolated cases of homophobia among the moderate left: the populist homophobia of Prime Minister Edith Cresson, said in 1987 that homosexuality was a “sort of disease,” and talked about Anglo-Saxon countries where, according to her, one-quarter of men are homosexual, and again in 1991, claimed that “heterosexuality is better.” The pathological homophobia of François Abadie, the Left Radical Party senator for the Pyrenees region, declared to the
Observateur
, in June 2000: “I cannot be in favor of those that I call the gravediggers of humanity, those that do not assure the future, homosexuals.” He was later excluded from his own Party after having made incredible insults against Sébastien Chenu, National Counselor of the Liberal Democracy.
French mainstream
media
, with the exception of leftist newspaper
Libération
, were in the 1970s very timid toward the demands of the growing gay movement. The most notable example is Menie Grégoire’s radio program on RTL, March 10, 1971, “Homosexuality, this painful problem,” on which the host stated: “It is a fact that it is not good to be gay!” Further, between 1973 and 1975, the television network ORTF refused to deal with the issue of homosexuality on its news program
Dossiers de l’écran
. As for the first gay or gay-friendly media, they were charged in 1971 for “offence against good morals” and “pornography” by Raymond Marcellin, the unremitting Minister of the Interior: luckily, Jean-Paul Sartre, editor of
Tout!
protested and justice gave him reason (a judgment of the Constitutional Council, dated July 16, 1971, declared the infringements on free expression and association were unconstitutional). Finally, even if gay visibility had made progress in French
cinema
in the 70s, it is most revealing that films for the general public of the same period still offered unbelievable examples of caricatures, like Jean Yanne’s film
Moi y’en a vo
u
loir des sous
(1973) and Edouard Molinaro’s
La Cage aux folles
series (1978–85).
The AIDS crises revived, in certain parts of the culture, some forms of homophobia during the 1980s. Because in France, as elsewhere, “the degree of social acceptance of homosexuality is very important to understand the fear of AIDS” (Michael Pollak). One part of the right wing thought that it finally held a key to the end of the gay movement. As early as February 15, 1982, a member of parliament for Rally for the Republic (RPR) from Aveyron, Jacques Godfrain, drew the attention of the Health Minister on the rapidly increasing number of Kaposi’s Sarcoma cases and suggested a campaign of information aimed at youth on “the dangers of homosexuality” (this was at the origin of more euphemistic notions of “risk groups” or “high risk sexuality”). At the beginning of the epidemic, the windfall seemed real: the disease affected particularly those whose sexuality challenged the familial Catholic conservative norms; even if the theme of AIDS as God’s punishment did not have much success in France, it showed up here and there, even among certain doctors. While the moderate right held its tongue somewhat, the far right tried, albeit without much success, to bring back the fear of the plague: in early 1987, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen announced that the situation was extremely serious and that France had to create “AIDS centers” in order to quarantine “AIDS victims.” This
rhetoric
, however, did not take root, even in the National Front, as homophobia was much less prevalentin the 80s than xenophobia or racism. This being said, one noted that the Association des polytransfusés (Association of Multiple Blood Transfusion Recipients) believed in 1995 that it had to denounce “the freedom of the gay way of life which by spreading AIDS caused the death of so many hemophiliacs and recipients of transfusions,” thus underlining and constructing a model of opposition between “innocent” victims and “guilty” patients. Nevertheless, at the end of the 90s, the conservatives were foiled: the epidemic greatly increased the integration of gays into French society, allowing middle-class France to discover that gay love could have the strength of heterosexual love and that parental homophobia, even inherited from a Christian prejudice, was sometimes monstrous.
Even if it escaped the conservatives’ delusions about a plague, the left-wing government was not always comfortable in managing its public handling of AIDS. Certainly, at the beginning of the epidemic, it did not see it as a strictly homosexual disease, but when in 1985 the all new association Aides (Association for the Fight Against HIV, AIDS, and Hepatitis) requested funds from public authorities, Matignon (the prime minister’s official residence) refused, in order to, according to a counselor, “not give the impression that we are helping the fags.” The same uneasiness explained why the same Fabius government decided not to authorize publicity on condoms in 1985–86. As for Pierre Bérégovoy, (prime minister under President Mitterand) easily intimidated by the Catholic family lobby, he prohibited on his sole authority a televised campaign of the French Association against AIDS in May 1992.