Olivier Jablonski. Journal of Homosexuality. Volume 41, Issue 3-4. 2002.
The 1950s saw the appearance of a significant number of homosexual periodicals in France. This was all the more remarkable in light of the conservative social and political forces that created an unfavorable climate for such ventures. Postwar France had embarked on a process of economic and social modernization and the development of a consumer society. Cultural life was also changing, as evidenced by the intellectual ferment centered on Saint-Germaindes-Prés. Sexuality and contraception were subjects of heated debate. Opposition to sexual freedom was embodied in the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), a political party of Christian democratic tendency that had emerged from the wartime Resistance. The MRP was the party of Catholic morality and family values. It tried to control sexuality and morals, notably by regulating literature and the cinema. It also objected to the increasingly obvious presence of homosexuality in the public space, whether in the form of novels, scandals in the press, or street cruising and prostitution. This presence aroused public concern, sometimes a puritanical reaction or even a “moral panic,” a fear of the social dangers of homosexuality, and an intensified combat against its practice. This context explains why public offenses against decency would be more firmly repressed in cases involving homosexuals than in those involving heterosexuals under Article 330, Line 2, of the Penal Code (as amended by the Ordinance of 25 November 1960). The ordinance was a reaction to almost ten years of effort by French homosexuals to change social conditions.
The attitude of the authorities at the time was best expressed by the director of criminal investigations for Paris in a speech to the general assembly of Interpol in 1958: “What … leads us to believe in an increase in homosexuality in France is that for several years, it has been more conspicuous.” The director pointed to the presence of “adepts” of homosexuality in certain public places, to homosexual soliciting, and to the existence of several private clubs, reviews, and newspapers. Indeed, he found it outrageous that “the editor of a newspaper for homosexuals” (he was referring to Jean Thibault, who edited Futur) had claimed “that this category of persons has the same right as anyone else to express their opinion.” It is true that for the last several years France had seen dynamic homosexual groups and an active homosexual press.
Developments in France must be understood within a broader international context, in which the German experience was particularly important. Germany’s actively militant groups during the first part of the twentieth century, most notably Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee and the diversified homosexual press that existed under the Weimar Republic, had served as models for similar initiatives elsewhere in Europe. The coming to power of the Nazis dramatically put an end to the struggle for homosexual emancipation and the social integration of homosexuals. The rebirth of the homosexual movement across Europe after 1945 was facilitated by two factors. First of all, Swiss neutrality had permitted the survival of a link between the prewar and postwar movements in the form of a German-language review, the Swiss Friendship Banner, better known by the name that it took later, Der Kreis. Heir to the German experience and published in a bilingual French and German edition from December 1941, Der Kreis provided essential encouragement in the early stages of the French postwar homosexual movement. Secondly, the International Committee for Sexual Equality, founded in Amsterdam following a meeting of European homosexual groups in 1951, resurrected the idea of a general struggle for homosexual emancipation. Inspired by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the International Committee worked mainly with German groups for the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which outlawed homosexual acts in that country.
But the European context should not obscure French distinctiveness. First of all, the practice of homosexuality in France was strongly influenced by “sensual individualism” (to use Florence Tamagne’s expression). She means that the French homosexual has always been fiercely individualistic as the result of both a more favorable social situation than in other countries (homosexuality has not been criminalized in France since 1791) and a certain political immaturity. At the same time, militant activity has been difficult, as demonstrated by the experience of Inversions in 1924. When this homosexual review was condemned for offending morals in March 1926, homosexual intellectuals failed to rally to its defense.
The French homosexual movement of the 1950s has been little studied, in large part because of the widely held opinion that the homophile militancy of the period was not radical enough and, therefore, not worth a detailed examination. This attitude has been due largely to the influence of the revolutionary homosexual groups that developed in France after May 1968, which had nothing but contempt for their predecessors. Another reason is the relative lack of source material. Little is now remembered of the 1950s except for the association and periodical Arcadie, and, unfortunately, Arcadie had little to say about militant homosexual activities that it did not initiate. While it claimed to represent all homosexuals, it in fact represented only those who were loyal to it. Moreover, the dominant actor in its story, André Baudry, who is still alive, refuses to give interviews and continues to block access to his archives.
But Arcadie was only one of several periodicals intended primarily for male homosexuals to be published in the 1950s, although most of the others did not survive very long. These periodicals were the product of a new generation that knew little of the prewar period. Jean Thibault was not quite twenty-three when he founded Futur in 1952; André Baudry, the future director of Arcadie, was thirty in that same year when he wrote his first articles for Der Kreis. Like their European counterparts, the French periodicals adopted very different styles. They were sometimes apolitical, like Der Kreis in Switzerland, sometimes more dynamic and militant, like the gay movement COC and its journal Vriendschap in the Netherlands. They usually took the form of what might be called a “group/review,” which is to say that they were simultaneously both periodicals and social groupings of militants. The periodical sought to spread its progressive ideas on homosexuality while entertaining its readers and encouraging encounters through personal advertisements; the social group held regular meetings and occasional dances to encourage socializing and to raise money. Almost all the periodicals included inserts with photographs of nearly naked men (in order to increase sales and because readers demanded them).
Futur, which first came out in October 1952, was sold openly on newsstands. Its four folio pages resembled those of any other newspaper of the period, although it seemed inspired by one in particular: the weekly satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, which had made it its mission to unmask hypocrisy in society and government. Futur was a political newspaper with a virulently anticlerical tone that preached sexual equality and repeatedly attacked those whom it called “puritans” (advocates of family values and of the strict moral regulation of youth). But it also printed international news (the activities of foreign homosexual groups, the repression of homosexuals and racial injustice in the United States, homosexual scandals in Great Britain), as well as reviews of books and films, personal advertisements (for example, by people looking for work), and letters from its readers. From the very first, Futur’s main target was the MRP, which it dubbed the Movement of Repressed Churchgoers. In an article entitled “Termite Teitgen,” Futur took on the party’s president, Pierre-Henri Teitgen, a former lawyer and member of the Resistance, who, as Minister of Justice from May 1945 to December 1946, had supervised the reform of the Penal Code and maintained, as Article 331, Line 3, the ordinance issued by Marshal Pétain on 6 August 1942 that criminalized “unnatural” sexual acts with minors under twenty-one, whereas the heterosexual age of consent was fixed at fifteen.
This newspaper is interesting primarily for the uninhibited tone of its words and images. Its pages included photographs of beautiful young (sometimes extremely young) men in languorous poses, and its language was too free and provocative to remain unanswered by the government. The moral climate of the period caught up with Futur, and, after the very first issue, it could not be publicly displayed on the newsstands that sold it or be sold to minors. Official intimidation and harassment, the ban on public display, and the prosecution of Thibault on a morals charge in July 1953 (he and a friend were found guilty of sexual relations with several teenage boys) meant that the journal appeared only very irregularly. A total of nineteen known numbers came out between October 1952 and April 1956. A first series sold on newsstands until March 1953; a second series, with a considerably reduced press run, sold by subscription and at a single place in Paris from June to November 1954; then a third series was available at newsstands in the Paris region from February to November 1955. A final issue appeared in April 1956, just before the publishers were finally condemned on a charge of offending morals by publishing their newspaper. The authorities had launched an earlier prosecution against Thibault in April 1955 but dropped the charges “based essentially on the pledge that he made before the examining magistrate that his review would not reappear,” a pledge that he failed to honor. The court’s judgment in 1956 repeated the arguments already developed in a similar trial of the homosexual review Inversions. The periodical offended morals by its systematic justification of homosexuality, by its encouragement of homosexual relations, in particular by means of personal advertisements, and by the “unacceptable character” of its “virulent criticisms . . . of the ordinance of 8 February 1945 [which later became Article 331, Line 3 of the Penal Code] and the restrictions that it imposes on the free expression of homosexuality” and of the other laws intended to protect youth against sexual perversions. “Futur constitutes a danger to public morality and an offense against morals,” the judges concluded. Thibault reportedly left France to live in the colonies (and immediately vanished from public view). This was the end of the first postwar French newspaper with a marked homosexual content.
The content of Futur’s nineteen issues was repetitive, as if most of the articles were written by the same person, but readers appreciated it as a breath of freedom. The circulation was not negligible if one can believe the director, who claimed “several thousand readers.” Robert Lagarde, a young homosexual and founder of the homosexual group Le Verseau in 1953, who met the staff of Futur, recently recalled them this way: “Extremely nice people … they had a rather political approach. It did not displease me. But I think that this was what caused them the most difficulty … I have the impression that they were two or three who put out this newspaper.” And Lagarde added:
It must have been for the French the first time that such a journal appeared. [The readers] had the craziest ideas [to explain its existence]. People wondered how such a thing could exist. It was really a revolution. It was something extraordinary for France … At the time, I had the impression that it was very difficult to change things. One had to blow things up! … That was the tragic side of this period. In the sense that there was a kind of blocked society.
Another reader, Marcel P., has very similar memories of how he and other homosexuals reacted to Futur:
I bought the first issue at a newsstand in Lyon, at the train station. Someone had told me of its existence. In the provinces [outside of Paris], it caused a stir in the homosexual world … It’s great, we have a newspaper! I went several times to several bookstores that answered that they did not know it. They wondered, because of the title, if it discussed industry! I took a lot of precautions! It was crazy!
Arcadie, whose first issue came out in January 1954, a little more than one year after Futur began publication, was very different in style and content. These differences were due to the personality of its founder, André Baudry. An amazing man who left nobody indifferent, he could be courageous and tenacious, but also arrogant and ambitious. Some remained steadfastly loyal to him over the years, while others were put off by his difficult personality, his domineering will, and his endless moralizing. He was so deeply impregnated with Roman Catholicism that he was soon nicknamed “the Pope.” Born in 1922 and educated at a Jesuit college, Baudry owed his entry into the homosexual milieu of Paris to count Jacques de Ricaumont, who had collaborated with several German homosexual reviews. Ricaumont introduced Baudry to Der Kreis and encouraged him to submit articles, which he did beginning in 1952 under the pen name André Romane. From the start, his writings promoted his personal ideas about what the ideal homosexual should be: “Every homosexual must resolve to present a perfect and irreproachable image of homosexuality every time that he has the great joy of meeting a young man,” a typically homophile position. He was particularly interested in the relationship between religion and homosexuality.
Ricaumont also put Baudry in touch with the International Committee for Sexual Equality. He became a member of its executive committee in 1953. Now part of an international movement that advocated improved conditions for homosexuals, Baudry thought of creating a movement and a press in France in the image of what already existed abroad. He took charge of the meetings of the French subscribers to Der Kreis, a group of about forty people called Circle of France, which grew to two hundred members by 1953. With this as his base of action, Baudry summoned French homosexuals to participate in an ambitious project: to facilitate the acceptance of homosexuality by the political and intellectual leaders of the country by improving the behavior of homosexuals themselves. This was the height of the international “homophile” movement with its notions of friendship, respectability, discretion, and dignity. For Baudry, dignity implied controlling sexual desire.
Believing that it was necessary to reach out to the general public, Baudry contributed to the third issue of Futur a review of Father Marc Oraison’s Christian Life and Sexual Problems but very quickly relations between Futur and Baudry deteriorated. He reproached the newspaper for its virulent and political tone and judged its articles to be “too thin, too sectarian.” “They [the staff of Futur] pursue their ridiculous goal, which will not advance our cause in the least. This mixture of politics and these sterile and violent criticisms only irritate people,” he declared. In January 1954 he launched his own monthly review, whose name, Arcadie, was proposed by the novelist Roger Peyrefitte. It appeared without interruption until the summer of 1982. In announcing the new review to the world, Baudry publicly distanced himself from Futur: “But at no price will we use the [same] terms as a journal that appeared last year and believed that it was defending us.” He preferred to seek inspiration from the very conventional but more literary and artistic (and more commercial) Der Kreis, a review with which he had not quarreled!
With the support of Peyrefitte and Jean Cocteau, Baudry did everything possible to publicize Arcadie, to get press and radio coverage, and to win the support of writers and intellectuals. The homosexual writer Marcel Jouhandeau, in charge of the Nouvelle Revue française (founded by André Gide) not only refused his help but also openly attacked Arcadie, declaring that the review was “preparing the way for a terrible persecution that will soon strike [sexual] nonconformists” and expressing the hope that this “ridiculous boutique” would be shut down by the authorities.
Comprising sixty pages, austere in tone, reflecting Baudry’s desire for homosexual integrity and respectability, Arcadie showed all the characteristics common to homophile reviews in other countries, such as The Mattachine Review, Vriendschap, or Vennen. Like them, it offered readers articles about homosexuality and information on the situation for homosexuals in foreign countries, as well as poetry, short stories, reviews of films and plays, and even some advertisements. Its organizational structure was typical of most French literary reviews: closely identified with its director to the point that it would be unlikely to survive his departure and supported by a core group of individuals united in close friendship. Arcadie was in fact more than a periodical or even an association; it was a micro-society.
To encourage the emergence of a homophile community while rejecting homosexual separatism and the formation of a ghetto, to bring about the social integration of homosexuals without their having to give up their differences (“Beside others, with others,” was Baudry’s motto), to educate homosexuals so that they would accept themselves and get others to accept them better, these were Arcadie’s goals. The homophile would be a new kind of homosexual, courageous, temperate, and perseverant. His morality would be based on respect, solidarity, and moderation. It was a profoundly Catholic morality that Baudry expected of the homophile (who was in practice more likely to be a male homosexual than a lesbian), which was not true for other homophile groups in France and abroad. But the common denominator of all the movements of this period was their stress on respectability in order to curry favor with the authorities. Arcadie added dignity; for Baudry, it was essentially the comportment of homophiles themselves that explained the hostility and social exclusion of which they were the victims. Baudry’s ultimately restrictive and reactionary morality was not accepted by everybody, and it caused conflict between him and other French homosexual groups, like Le Verseau, and other newspapers, like Futur and Juventus.
Arcadie, according to the wishes of its director, was not sold on newsstands but was available at a few sales points in France and abroad and distributed to subscribers by mail. It was very careful about what it published. The tone of its articles was serious and restrained, and its short stories were only discreetly erotic. Yet this did not protect it from a government ban on sale to minors and on public display, imposed on 26 May 1954 (and abrogated only on 22 May 1975), the same sentence already imposed on Futur. Although Baudry has always explicitly denied the fact (but public records belie his statements), the courts condemned him, like the publishers of Futur, for offending morals by means of the press. The judges ruled that Arcadie represented a “danger to youth” and singled out the review’s alleged “proselytism.” They ordered “the confiscation and the destruction of the seized proofs and of all objects that have served to commit the crime” and fined Baudry forty thousand francs. The French authorities obviously did not want a homosexual press to exist in France. Because of the ban on its sale to minors, Arcadie was automatically denied the reduced postal rate given to most periodicals, and a few years later it also lost the right to be distributed by the national press distribution services. As for the number of its subscribers, the information provided by Arcadie is subject to caution. We can estimate the print run at about three thousand copies in the 1950s, and it probably never exceeded ten thousand at any time in later years, which is, nevertheless, a considerable number given the review’s limited financial resources and its austere contents.
But if Arcadie wanted to present a respectable face to the world, it also had to attract readers who might be put off by its arid appearance. Subscribers who requested it also received a mimeographed circular, which provided more specific information: a letter from the director, warnings about police surveillance or gay-bashing in cruising places, announcements of the group’s cultural activities, and so on. Also, faithful to its model, Der Kreis, the review offered a monthly insert: a “special sheet” comprising personal advertisements by men seeking to meet others and mildly erotic photographs of variable (and often mediocre) quality. The insert was discontinued as a precaution after the National Assembly in July 1960 voted a law that declared homosexuality (along with prostitution and alcoholism) to be a “social scourge” and after the government in November 1960 doubled the penalty in cases of public offenses against morals when homosexuals were involved. Arcadie did maintain its mimeographed circulars, however. Parallel to the review, the social meetings of homosexuals organized by Baudry continued to take place, and in 1957 he created a commercial society under the name CLESPALA (Literary and Scientific Club of the Latin Countries), often also called Arcadie because of its ties to the review. Indeed, membership in the club was automatic with the purchase of a subscription to the review. The “diocese” (the word was André Du Dognon’s) had a cramped locale for headquarters, where members held weekend dances (under the stern surveillance of the director) and listened to his “word of the month,” a speech that some derided as “the sermon.” Baudry invited the police to attend so they could observe the exemplary behavior of the members.
Homosexuals at the time (and since) have had very different opinions of Arcadie, ranging from unconditional support to pure and simple rejection. People afraid of having their homosexuality discovered and looking for no more than brief sexual encounters had no desire or need for Arcadie. But many others found moral comfort there. “Arcadie was an institution that served on the one hand as a safeguard against possible mistakes and on the other as a moral savior,” Robert Francès, who contributed to the review, has recently remarked. René B., who belongs today to an association of gay retirees, concurs: “Me, what I would like to say about Baudry, [is that] for him it was a mission, a ministry. He wanted to free us of our guilt [about being homosexual], to make us dignified. And I believe that he succeeded, because as for me, I never suffered from neurosis in my life, my homosexual life.” The main problem, and this was true of all homosexual groups and newspapers of the period, was the prevalent fear of being noted in police files, which certainly kept some people from subscribing to Arcadie or attending club gatherings. Marcel P. remembers today: “I did not want to get mixed up in it [Arcadie], because I believed, it’s rather obvious, whatever Baudry might have said, in the risk of having my name taken down. I dreaded the police files.” He was referring here to the widespread belief that Baudry made his membership lists available to the police. Fernand P. felt much the same way: “Me, I refused to go to Arcadie until the 1980s, when I was 65-years-old and had retired. I was afraid because of the story that was circulating in Paris about the police files.” It has never been proved, however, that Baudry’s famous list was ever consulted by the police, although he certainly did maintain good, even close, relations with the Paris prefecture of police.
There was a place alongside Futur and Arcadie for other publishing initiatives, including the very sober Prétexte, which appeared in two distinct periods, in 1952 and 1958. Its directors were Jean-Jacques Thierry and Jean-Louis Ornequint. As indicated by the subtitle, André Gide Notebook, the review was almost entirely dedicated to the work of the great writer and to the pederasty that Gide promoted. It was supposed to be a trimestrial, but only two issues actually appeared in 1952, in February (one year after Gide’s death) and November. It reappeared in January 1958, apparently for only two issues, and still focused only on homosexual literature.
Prétexte was a seed-bed for two other reviews: Gioventù and Juventus. Thierry went on from Prétexte to publish Gioventù (two issues known, in September and October 1956). With the same format and appearance as Arcadie, this literary and cultural review claimed to be elitist, in contrast to Arcadie and Futur, which Thierry judged too “corporative,” too popular, and of an insufficiently high literary level: “our ambition is to show the intellectual and cerebral difference existing in our opinion between homosexuality and the uranism so dear to André Gide.” Ornequint, for his part, was soon writing for Juventus, the first new review since Arcadie to survive for more than a few issues. The first number came out on 15 May 1959, the last on 1 May 1960. Its publishers were Yves Baschey and Jean Basile (who may well have been using Ornequint as his pseudonym). “This most refreshing periodical deserves a successful future, because it presents the voice of Juventus on homophile matters in a very critical and humorous way.” So wrote (in English) the newsletter of the International Committee for Sexual Equality. Juventus was sold by subscription and was apparently not available on newsstands, but several Parisian bookstores did sell it. At first sight, it resembled Arcadie in format, pagination, and general appearance, but the publishers had a very different take on homosexuality, telling their readers in the very first issue:
If you are looking for something to excuse your errors, if you are looking for something to feed your torments, if you are looking for something to delight your senses, close these pages and do not read on. You can find all that elsewhere. If, on the contrary, you like gaiety, health, if you want to be a man with dignity, continue reading … Juventus does not want to preach; it wants to please and entertain you, perhaps to help you. Virility, health, truth are your best weapons … Turn the page, [and] you will understand that Juventus has just given its first and last sermon.
The difference with Arcadie was thus made clear (“sermon” was an obvious reference to the ritual Friday evening speeches delivered by Baudry), and people recognized this very well at the time. The newsletter of the International Committee for Sexual Equality described it this way (in its usual awkward English) in late 1960:
Juventus, as is clear from its articles, has chosen for a style of living, in which homophilism is consciously incorporated, but which never loses its respect for human dignity; all this appears to be possible without feelings of guilt or wickedness … Therefore, the contents of Juventus has revealed an autobiographical candidness and subjective honesty, which are surprising, so far.
If the above commentary was so flattering, it was because after its first issue, Juventus modernized its appearance, with a cover in two colors, a fresher and cleaner layout, high-quality paper, and photographs of beautiful men. In short, its presentation contrasted sharply with the drabness of Arcadie. There were about fifty pages in each issue, and the various rubrics were much less elitist than Arcadie’s, with little classical poetry and few scientific articles on homosexuality. Juventus felt neither shame nor guilt, and so it published instead short stories, brief news items, interviews, and book reviews, all written in a light and non-militant tone. The review’s most interesting feature was the regular inclusion of letters from readers. In this way, it did not limit itself to expressing only the publishers’ opinions, and the continual dialogue between the editors and the readers made for a livelier review.
If the outward appearance of Juventus was so modern compared to Arcadie, it had, nonetheless, not entirely broken free of the conservative attitudes of the period. It considered homosexuality a lifestyle as acceptable as any other, but it still thought that there was a homosexual problem for which homosexuals themselves were to blame, as an editorial in the second issue indicated:
You say that people reject you? Go then one evening to Saint-Germaindes-Prés and open your eyes and take a good look at your fellow creatures. Look at their bearing, their gestures, listen to their shrieks and consider their ways. If you are revolted, it’s because you have understood. You have understood that a man, a real one, cannot stand that another man caricature a woman; you have understood that whatever is not natural to your condition as a man is ridiculous … Try to appear completely dignified, to behave like a man even if you feel like a woman and you will see that you will be accepted everywhere! You will have won your battle, the battle of all of us, the day when you have understood that the ostracism of which you complain is a function of the provocation that you revel in.
Juventus thus continued to promote the homophile ideal of dignity. It may have represented a more modern phase of homophilia than Arcadie, but it still fell far short of the radical affirmations of homosexual identity that would be put forward by the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action and other gay liberation groups in the 1970s.
Juventus disappeared after one year and apparently only nine issues. The reason is unknown, but several factors suggest an explanation. First of all, there was the government ban (November 1959) on its public display and its sale to minors. Of course, Arcadie had managed to publish despite a similar ban, but even before the ban Juventus’s sales seem to have been insufficient. In a circular of 28 October 1959 addressed to subscribers, the editorial board indicated that there were only three hundred subscribers and that the review needed one thousand to survive. Juventus apparently lacked a hard core of subscribers, in part because it received no press coverage. Because the publishers did not or could not sell the review at newsstands, its distribution was limited. In addition, and this was a recurring theme in readers’ letters, there was (as in the case of Arcadie) the worry, even the fear, of the consequences of taking out subscriptions. Juventus began to print personal advertisements in its last issues, but it was too late to attract new readers. Nor did it propose other activities and services the way Arcadie did. The publisher Jean Basile left France in 1960 and emigrated to Canada, where he continued his militant career.
In all of the periodicals discussed so far photographic images were rare and usually of poor quality. This is all the more surprising in that the second half of the 1950s saw the development of homoerotic photography, under the guise of an esthetic admiration for bodybuilding, in both the United States and Europe. But France was very different and had no domestically published photographic review intended for a specifically homosexual readership. And yet the demand was there, and it was apparently a very strong one, as Baudry regularly mentioned in the circulars he sent to the readers of Arcadie (of course, he disapproved of such photographs). There was, however, a highly-developed system for selling photographs by mail order. Several French photographic studios were active in the field. The best known belonged to Jean Ferrero (in Nice) and Gregor Arax (in Paris), but for the most part they distributed their production abroad. Ferrero has said that “the reviews did not pay [for the photographs that they printed in their inserts], [but] they provided a sort of publicity by circulating the photographs and the address of the studio.” He found the sale of his photographs by mail to be a “very lucrative activity. There were as many as seven employees and a secretary who looked after distribution and shipment.”
Among the foreign bodybuilding magazines available on the newsstand, the most noteworthy was Muscles, a Belgian review sold after the Second World War, which published the famous sketches by Quintance and photographs from the Athletic Model Guild. From 1957, French readers could also find Physique Pictorial, Body Beautiful, and Tomorrow’s Man. But by a decree of 10 November 1959 (in the same month that Juventus was banned from public display and sale to minors), the government delivered a severe blow to Body Beautiful, Physique Artistry, and Physique Pictorial: they could no longer be sold on French territory. Two months later, on 16 January 1960, it was the turn of Adonis. The authorities had seen through the pretense that these were publications for bodybuilders. The ban occurred under Article 14 of the Law on the Press of 1881 (modified by the decree of 6 May 1939) relative to the regulation of the foreign press. The intent of this clause was to keep subversive foreign propaganda out of France. It made no mention of morals, and it should be noted that foreign reviews featuring naked women were not banned, but merely forbidden for public display and sale to minors (under the law of 1949). The homoerotic press was thus subject to a special control, in the same way as certain foreign political periodicals, whether communist, anti-French, or in favor of Algerian independence. If this type of publication disappeared from the newsstands, the demand remained strong enough that a discreet distribution was most likely organized. French magazines carried advertisements for ordering the banned foreign reviews directly from abroad.
There was thus a great variety in the kinds of homosexual publications available in the 1950s. From the very political Futur through the stern and communitarian Arcadie to the entertaining Juventus, each of these publications reflected both the wider context and its own vision of homosexuality. Principally concerned by the injustice that set the sexual majority for heterosexuals at fifteen and for homosexuals at twenty-one, Futur demanded emancipation in a militant and humanist tone similar to that of the press that had emerged from the French Resistance and that was shaped by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It denounced the status quo but did not propose any specific political alternative. Arcadie took a totally different position, under the influence of its founder’s Catholicism and the intellectual milieu in which he moved. Although Arcadie claimed to militate for sexual equality, the review was oriented more toward the construction and support of a homophile community. More than defending their rights, the review concerned itself with the moralization of the “homophile people.” There was also a social difference between the two publications, which was accentuated with the appearance of Juventus, an apolitical and recreational review, indicating the arrival of a mass consumer society and a new and freer homosexual man with a new spirit of health, virility, youth.
Even in French society, where homosexuality was not forbidden by law, there was strict regulation of its expression in accordance with bourgeois notions of morality. As we have seen, in the 1950s no homosexual periodical managed entirely to escape this repression, whether in the form of restrictions on its distribution or by direct censorship (as in the case of foreign reviews). The government commission that regulated publications intended for youth, instituted by the Law of 1949, had the right to ask the Minister of the Interior to forbid their public display and their sale to minors (as happened in the cases of Arcadie, Futur, and Juventus). But its role went even further, because it reported to the public prosecutor those publications that could be charged with offending morals. It most likely did so in the cases of Arcadie and Futur. Indeed, the commission went as far as to ask that “the appropriateness of a government bill repressing homosexual propaganda be examined.” Only Arcadie managed to survive for many years, probably because of its network of supporters and its discreet tone.
It is true that in this period there was increased repression of homosexual activity, but no increased repression against the homosexual press. What occurred was rather a continuation of repressive policies put in place before World War II and to which Inversions, the only homosexual review to appear in the interwar years, had already fallen victim. Of course, the degree of repression always depended on the vitality of the homosexual press, and, because this press was more dynamic in the 1950s, it consequently experienced a more intense reaction from the authorities. The public and governmental attitude toward the emergence of a homosexual press demonstrates the reluctance of French society in the 1950s and 1960s to accept the transition from a discreet homosexuality to a more conspicuous and outspoken homosexuality.