Jean Le Bitoux. Journal of Homosexuality. Volume 41, Issue 3-4. 2002.
I used to go to the famous general assemblies of the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR) at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. I was then a student at the Conservatory of Music in Nice, and I wrote from time to time for the gay press. At twenty-three, which is to say five years younger than the principal founders of FHAR, I was really just an inexperienced and dazzled observer venturing to take part in a movement that was only just getting started. In the following pages, I will rapidly sketch this homosexual revolution before going on to its sequel.
FHAR was the result of shame ripening into anger. It was able to emerge politically only in the aftermath of the student insurrection and labor strikes of May 1968. It was an unexpected and historic opportunity for the rebellious young homosexual that I then was, but it was spoiled for me when I observed that competing factions disagreed irremediably over both form and content, as much over the way we homosexuals should appear to others as over how we should express the social injustice of which we were victims. It was not surprising that once the first wave of social rebellion “against normality” had run out of steam, only the shrieks of the gazolines (a group of transvestite radicals within FHAR) could still be heard. As for the verbal injunctions in the amphitheatre at the School of Fine Arts or the strategic plans quickly forgotten amidst mocking laughter, they were soon followed by orgasms in the orgies that took place in the classrooms upstairs; the general assembly had turned into a fuckfest (baisodrome), which the police finally closed down in 1974.
These multiple expressions that emerged from the shadows certainly gave the movement a dynamism, but they also knocked the protest movement off course because of the profusion of directions. Moreover, as numerous founders of FHAR will acknowledge today, the collective leadership did not seem to care about the future, about welcoming anybody into the group, explaining anything, or even preserving traces of the movement. The archives of this period are still widely dispersed.
I participated in the events of May 1968 in Bordeaux and not on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter. I was a co-founder of FHAR, but in Nice and not in Paris. I could not hope to influence the course of this primarily Parisian history. This history was very confusing because so many different fronts, not so much ideological as strategic, were opened at the same time. I finally managed to reach Paris to live out this political and social adventure at the very moment that FHAR fell apart. I had a terrible feeling of impotence and an animosity toward the movement’s leaders that would last for a very long time.
Some members of this generation of students, who did not have the money to enjoy Paris’s homosexual nightlife, which, in any case, they denounced for being “bourgeois” and ashamed of itself, refused to accept a return to normality. As for the leaders of FHAR, almost all of them abandoned the homosexual movement, although they reemerged later, principally in the cultural, artistic, literary, and journalistic fields.
Certainly, I understand that one cannot indict an entire movement or, rather, a new socio-cultural phenomenon, even if it chose to sabotage itself in full flight. FHAR’s political program, which denounced all authorities and all “micro-fascisms,” as Félix Guattari put it, may have consisted of nothing more than declarations and denunciations. Nonetheless, FHAR existed as a movement only by its taking a position. Its collapse in 1973 left an entire generation forlorn and adrift, unable to do anything else but return to cruising in the dangerous Tuileries gardens, on the terrace of the Café de Flore, at Arcadie’s Saturday evening dances, where one had to behave respectably, or in the expensive nightclubs of the rue Sainte-Anne. Two years without militancy followed, with cruel results: a return to solitude and nocturnal clandestinity, a few suicides, a recourse to prostitution, even some psychiatric hospitalizations.
The end of FHAR was good news for Arcadie. After numerous resignations by people like Françoise d’Eaubonne, Daniel Guérin, or Pierre Hahn at the moment of FHAR’s birth, André Baudry, who ran the association, encouraged by the defeat of the May 1968 movement in France and the collapse of radicalism, thought that it was time to take back the initiative. He decided to impose his authority by expelling a group of young people who, it seemed to him, were becoming too political. He made a mistake: These exiles encountered a few survivors from FHAR.
As a result, meetings started up again in 1975 at the Jussieu campus of the University of Paris. I was pleased to observe that, thanks to a classified advertisement in the newspaper Libération, the GLH (Homosexual Liberation Group) had been founded. I was also happy to meet up again with Alain Huet, Audrey Coz, and Alain Burosse. In the days of FHAR, Audrey and I liked disrupting gay parties in the chic quarters after an evening at the cinémathèque du Trocadéro, where Hélène Hazera, a friend of its founder Henri Langlois, sold the tickets. Alain Burosse, for his part, had participated in a commando action that one night. At the entrance to the restaurant La Frégate, he emptied a garbage can over the heads of the actors Jean Poiret and Michel Serreau, who were then triumphing in the play La Cage aux Folles.
I felt more comfortable with this new wave of militancy. It was more structured because the “loudmouths” who had dominated FHAR had vanished into thin air. There was a biweekly general assembly, which alternated with a committee to welcome newcomers, and a news bulletin that communicated internal and external information, the minutes of the general assemblies, the executive board, working groups and neighborhood committees, excerpts from the press, and important translations, a valuable tool that later became Libido Hebdo, which I edited between 1976 and 1978.
I also supported from the start the plan to construct a national network by listening to and involving the provinces in this movement, something FHAR had neglected to do. Like FHAR, we recruited among university and high-school students, intellectuals, militants, teachers, and trade unionists, social groups then in ferment that were causing trouble for President Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing. It was also necessary to seek common ground among ourselves and to be less aggressive toward and communicate more openly with journalists and political parties. Finally, we had to build a strong homosexual community in Paris and in other large cities.
Alain Huet soon became president of the GLH. The former editor of FHAR’s newspaper L’Antinorm, he was one of the few who had tried to keep the homosexual movement alive after the death of FHAR, notably during the presidential elections of 1975, with Guy Chevalier, one of the authors of the revolutionary homosexual placards put up in May 1968 in the occupied Sorbonne. In the GLH, Huet at first worked closely with Michel Heim, who was more interested in the social side of our association, and with me, who remained faithful to the revolutionary principles of FHAR and advocated entering into contact with the press and the political world. But it was more and more difficult for these three tendencies to coexist within a single association, and the GLH soon found it necessary to split apart, because at the time our positions seemed irreconcilable.
A trip to Great Britain in the autumn of 1975 precipitated the break between the three group leaders. We went to a congress organized in Sheffield by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, Britain’s equivalent of Arcadie. A more radical group, the Gay Liberation Front, had not died out in Britain as FHAR had in France; in London, we saw the work of its gay and lesbian centers, like the one in Brixton. In a nightclub, I met and became involved with a young man of twenty, who was, at the time, considered a legal minor, and I caused something of a scandal by bringing him along to the congress.
As I reported in the Quotidien de Paris, there were other incidents: “The welcoming speech at City Hall by the mayor of Sheffield was interrupted by a militant of the Gay Liberation Front who asked him why the waitresses were paid less than the waiters.” Alain, Michel, and I were soon in disagreement. Michel, impressed by the delegates, who were wearing ties, wanted to integrate homosexuality into society without making any “ideological” waves, while Alain told us that he rejected this entire bourgeois ritual but thought that we had nothing in common with the women’s movement. For my part, allergic to a gathering that had no political or social program, I decided to abandon the spontanéisme (a radical Maoist tendency in France) that had killed off FHAR. I also decided to make the homosexual question the priority in my social and political activism. I decided this time to engage in praxis.
Three months later, on 14 December 1975, the GLH in Paris split into three factions. There emerged the GLH Base Groups (Groupes de Bases), led by Michel Heim and dedicated to conviviality; the GLH December 14th (14 Décembre), led by Alain Huet according to libertarian and anti-feminist principles; and the GLH Politics and Daily Life (Politique et Quotidien) or GLH-PQ, which I led for three years and which everybody agrees was the most productive of the three–and the only one to survive until 1978.
Certainly, FHAR was dead, but it was necessary to keep alive at least the best part of its political message, while adapting it to new times, which had seen not only several significant social gains, such as the right to abort and the lowering of the sexual majority from twenty-one to eighteen, but also the bloody end of extreme left-wing terrorism, from the Italian Red Brigades to the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany. The public image of the homosexual was still mainly bourgeois, most homosexuals still felt ashamed of their orientation, and French intellectuals still grandly ignored the whole question, whereas they talk endlessly of it today. Moreover, Arcadie was still around. Our first priority was therefore to contest its stuffy strategy: “Let us be dignified, and we will be respected.” We knew all too well the bankruptcy of this wait-and-see policy that had permitted the maintenance of Pétain’s anti-homosexual law of 1942 and had failed to prevent the passage of a law in July 1960 that made homosexuality a “social scourge,” along with prostitution and alcoholism that the French Republic was to fight against.
In the mid-1970s, notably through their appearance on the television program Dossiers à l’Écran in January 1975, the novelists Yves Navarre and Jean-Louis Bory had publicly criticized Arcadie at the risk of “dividing the homophile people,” as André Baudry complained. The GLH-PQ subsequently organized two attacks on Studio 101 at the Maison de la Radio (a broadcasting center in Paris) to interrupt two broadcasts on France Culture. The first, on 26 January 1976, featured two homophobic sexologists. We intervened by distributing three hundred tracts denouncing these sexologists as “dangerous charlatans,” who had already been condemned by FHAR in its day, and who had “persevered in their odious confiscation of our sexuality. Their discourse mystifies reality and serves to camouflage traditional psychiatric practices toward those who do not conform to the criteria of Normality.” The second broadcast, taped on 4 February 1976 and programmed for 6 April, was with Arcadie. Arcadie was indignant and replied to us: “Arcadie did not need FHAR and its exhibition of transvestites to promote homophile visibility … Arcadie will remain, today like yesterday, at the forefront of the combat to defend homosexuals. That is its duty. It will not fail!”
There were other “commando” operations, like the one in November 1977 in response to a homophobic incident at a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain (the owner had kicked out two men for exchanging a kiss). Several dozen of us showed up at the café after one of our general assemblies at the Jussieu campus. We ordered our drinks, then explained to the owner why we refused to pay for them. Then the windows shattered. The waiters and the guard dogs were unable to catch us. Other provocations were equally amusing. To put an end to tacky “leftist” tracts, we mimeographed ones with innovative layouts: a sketch by Tom of Finland to express our solidarity with soldiers’ committees, or another by Egon Schiele for our solidarity with lesbians. We also formed discussion groups like the one that studied the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray or Sheila Rowbotham–gays and lesbians together in an alliance that would later fall apart.
Once we had opened negotiations with journalists, we were able to place a large number of articles in French dailies and weeklies between 1976 and 1978, like those by Jacqueline Rémy in the magazine L’Express, which have chronicled twenty-five years of our chaotic history from FHAR to the PACS (the civil partnership opened to gays and lesbians by a new law in 1999). These articles were for us a proof that things were changing, in short a breath of fresh air for homosexuals everywhere.
This happened in no small part thanks to the newspaper Libération, created in 1973, which took (and maintains to this day) a position favorable to our social visibility. And for good reason: This position resulted from discussions in favor of solidarity with the homosexual movement that took place among its founders (Serge Victor, Philippe Gavi, and Jean-Paul Sartre), meetings sometimes held at Michel Foucault’s apartment with Serge July, the editor, and which have been chronicled in a book entitled We Are Right to Revolt. These historic discussions recapitulate the journalistic and political debate of the time, and the following excerpt reveals a great deal about us:
Philippe Gavi: “Everybody can use the women’s struggle, the Communist Party as much as the Socialist Party. But the homosexuals, because they are still a minority, no one will touch them.” Jean-Paul Sartre: “You are raising a tricky question. Because the homosexual movement is not popular. If we print articles on homosexuality in the newspaper, we will get numerous letters from readers completely opposed, who will tell us: ‘Homosexuality is horrible, it is contrary to the class struggle,’ and on the other side one or two letters from FHAR. How do you expect to combine the two opinions? … It is not a matter of shouting ‘Long live homosexuals.’ Personally, I would not be able to shout it, because I am not homosexual. It is a matter of showing the newspaper’s readers that homosexuals have the right to live and to be respected like anyone else.” Philippe Gavi: “I agree. It will not be easy.”
Thus, Libération, for years on end, would give national coverage to the homosexual question, especially during the dark years that we were then living through with the lack of press coverage, of social and political representation, and of night life, and thus also in terms of social and even familial relations. As for personal advertisements, after appearing in a watered-down version in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, they began to appear in large number in the Saturday supplement to Libération called Sandwich.
Other press coverage was not always as favorable. I remember, for instance, one article in a leftist newspaper entitled ironically, “Is It Enough to Be Sodomized to Be a Revolutionary?” In 1978, the Communist Revolutionary League (a Trotskyist political party) lost its homosexual commission, whose members resigned as the result of unfortunate articles in the party’s daily newspaper, Rouge, and the party’s repeated postponement of a promised debate on the homosexual question. They went on to found a homosexual cultural review, Masques. The extreme left-wing party Lutte Ouvrière in no way renounced its machismo and its homophobia and for a long time refused to accept a homosexual stand at its annual festival, although both the Socialist Party and the Communist Revolutionary League did at theirs. The League’s position was that, first of all, everybody, heterosexual and homosexual, had to work together to make the revolution, and then we would see what happened; meanwhile, during this purportedly pre-revolutionary period (which we were in fact less and less persuaded to be living in), this influential organization railed against “secondary” fronts in the class struggle that were allegedly disrupting the ongoing revolution with petty bourgeois demands for a selfish improvement in daily life. As for the Communist Party, since the day when its general secretary Jacques Duclos told homosexuals to get psychiatric treatment in the early 1970s, Pierre Juquin, the party’s spokesman, explained in the columns of Le Nouvel Observateur why homosexuals, who polluted the noble demonstrations of the Left, had nothing at all to do with the workers’ movement.
This effervescence was evidently not without consequences for our political negotiations. The Socialist Party took a long time getting off the mark. François Mitterrand, its leader (and future President of France), considered homosexuality only a secondary concern. Nonetheless, Robert Badinter, who would later become Mitterand’s Minister of Justice, made a minimal promise on behalf of the socialists in his book Liberty, Liberties: the abrogation of Article 331, Line 3, of the Penal Code, based on a decree issued by Marshal Pétain in 1942 during the German occupation, which criminalized homosexual relations with a minor less than twenty-one years old. Laurent Fabius, later Mitterrand’s Prime Minister, confirmed the Socialist Party’s position in a letter of 7 February 1978. But for promises to become acts, there had to be a veritable electric shock coming from the homosexuals themselves, mobilized by the GLH-PQ. Such was the first Gay Pride celebration in 1977. Such were the homosexual candidacies in the municipal elections at Aix-en-Provence in 1977, and especially the legislative elections in Paris in March 1978. Such, too, was the Pagoda Affair in January 1978, which involved the banning of a homosexual film festival, a fascist attack, the arrest of a delegation sent to the Ministry of Culture, petitions by prestigious personalities, and finally a riot on the rue Sainte-Anne. Within a few short weeks, a page in French homosexual history would be decisively turned.
The festival of gay and lesbian films at the Pagoda theatre had been preceded by one that we organized from 20 to 26 April 1977 with Frédéric Mitterrand, nephew of the future President, and then in charge of the Olympic movie theatre on the rue Francis-de-Pressensé. Five thousand people had attended. Along with the showings, we held debates on the ghetto, the lesbian movement, transvestism, pedophilia, or (a complex subject) latent homosexuality. For an entire week, Libération gave a page every day to the event. This cultural initiative emerged out of the GLH-PQ’s wish to rid itself of its reputation for being a radical political group obsessed only with social struggle. By calling itself “Politics and Daily Life,” this faction intended to indicate that its dynamic came not only from its ideological convictions, but also from community groups, from wherever a few dozen homosexuals lived, developed an energy, and formulated proposals that a few hundred militants would then discuss in collective meetings. The film festival was also intended to establish a link with the European-wide cultural dynamic of homosexuals, which was then extremely creative, as demonstrated especially by the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy and Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Germany.
This first Parisian festival of gay and lesbian films was followed in the summer by a series called “Fag Films, Lesbian Films, and Others” at the La Rochelle film festival, where many young homosexual directors presented their work. Heir to these cultural roots, then, the festival held at the Pagoda theatre, from 16 to 31 January 1978, took place in a relatively tense political context. The legislative elections of March 1978 were fast approaching, and the GLH-PQ had decided to run candidates in Paris. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The Minister of Culture, Michel d’Ornano, refused to authorize the showing of an important number of gay films, including Jean Genet’s Chant d’Amour. On Friday, 27 January 1978, suspecting that we would ignore the ban, out-of-uniform policemen stationed themselves in the projection booth. From there they watched passively that evening as an extreme right-wing commando group attacked the festival. Armed with iron bars, these militants of Jeune Nation, whom d’Ornano had often used as a security force at his political rallies, after robbing the cash register, surged into the darkened theater, where Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends was being shown. They released tear gas in the dark and spattered red ink, so that when the lights came on, the audience thought they were covered in blood. Panic ensued. Many people rushed out the exits and toward the gardens of the former Chinese embassy, where the commandos continued to club them. Some, like the filmmaker Guy Gilles, injured their hands climbing over the railings along the street.
A few hours later, the fascists issued a press release: it was unacceptable for homosexual candidates to run in the forthcoming legislative elections. If this happened, they would know how to take care of them. As one of the announced candidates for Paris along with Guy Hocquenghem, I got the message. I had to move secretly, indeed to give up campaigning in the last days. Already in 1975, the neo-Nazis of Ordre Nouveau had bombed the headquarters of the GLH on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. As Luc Bernard wrote in the press, “It is as if homosexuality is accepted only as long as it stays hidden, as long as one can ignore it. And on the other hand, the candidacy of homosexuals in the legislative elections is provoking some unrest.”
On the very same evening as the fascist attack, despite my hasty visit to the police station of Paris’s sixth district to report it and to ask for police protection, no additional policemen were sent to place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where a large gay and lesbian dance was being held as part of the festival. At midnight, the street lights on the square suddenly went out for a time, causing us to fear that a massacre, or at least a general gay bashing, was about to occur.
The next day, on Saturday, 28 January, I placed an anonymous announcement in the columns of Libération, the young daily newspaper where I was then working as a journalist, that there would be a protest demonstration that midnight. Remembering Christopher Street some nine years earlier, we occupied the Rue Sainte-Anne with its chic nightclubs, its hustlers, its bathhouses, and its leather bars, in brief, the falsely gay and hypocritically fashionable showcase for Parisian homosexuality. When there were a hundred of us gathered on the sidewalk, we began by interrupting the traffic. We had noticed a construction site not far away, which provided us with paving stones to begin building one or two barricades in front of two clubs, Le Sept and Le Bronx. A police van appeared at the bottom of the rue Sainte-Anne and stopped before the demonstrators who were blocking traffic by distributing tracts against homophobic violence. The police asked who was responsible. Nobody answered. Then the police grabbed our banner and began making arbitrary arrests. The police van tried to leave with many of our arrested friends. Some of us lay on the ground under its wheels.
I was hoping for–we all were hoping for–a French “Christopher Street,” but this nighttime riot could not go very far. It failed, despite the heroic gesture by the GLH-PQ militants, because for two hours, during the entire event, the security staff of all the chic nightclubs along the street prevented their customers from leaving. Those clients, who, informed by the latest arrivals of what was going on in the street, expressed solidarity with us and wanted to come out to fight by our side, were unable to join us. Conversely, certain homosexuals pursued by the police officers were kept by the doormen from taking refuge inside the establishments. The lack of solidarity was flagrant. The only thing we could do was to flee the scene, chased by the police reinforcements that arrived with sirens howling. The police van finally broke through the human chain that blocked it from advancing. One individual, who threw stones at the van, was arrested, convicted, and fined. The homosexual movement took up a collection to pay his fine. Michel Aribaud, for that was his name, would eventually become one of the biggest gay entrepreneurs of the 1980s.
The following Wednesday, 1 February, at 2 p.m., a delegation of intellectuals and journalists presented itself at the Ministry of Culture on the rue de Valois to demand an explanation for what had happened at the Pagoda. They brought a petition signed by, among others, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Elleinstein, Didier Motchane, Maurice Nadeau, and François Chatelet. The delegates were asked to wait, and then the police showed up, took everybody away (including André Glucksmann, René Schérer, the journalists from Libération and Le Monde, and even the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian) and held them for four hours for an identity check. The police simultaneously broke up a protest by GLH-PQ militants at the nearby Carrousel du Louvre. Several days later, Guy Hocquenghem and André Glucksmann signed a joint article in Le Monde, entitled “Queen Victoria Strikes Again,” which dealt, above all, with ministerial censorship.
A petition (somewhat “communitarian” in inspiration) was soon circulated, the text of which follows:
In Paris in March 1978, five candidates will run in the legislative elections. In the name of their legitimacy, they are posing the problem of the repression of homosexuals by the Penal Code and by existing police and psychiatric practices. Whether they politically agree or disagree with the homosexual candidates, the undersigned intend, by means of the present petition, to protest against any attack on the right of these homosexuals to run as such in these elections, and in addition to declare that they support the right and the principle of homosexual candidacies in the face of arbitrary governmental action which forbids a cultural festival because it is homosexual and in the face of fascist aggression and of their threats to prevent by any means the existence of such candidacies.
It was signed by many well-known intellectuals, writers, actors, and directors: Fernando Arrabal, Jean-Louis Bory, Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Cardinale, Marcel Carné, Copi, Gilles and Fanny Deleuze, Marguerite Duras, Xavière Gauthier, André Glucksmann, Félix Guattari, Jean Edern-Hallier, Christian Hennion, Alain Krivine, Georges Lapassade, Annie Leclerc, Bernard Muldworf, Maurice Nadeau, Yves Navarre, Madeleine Renaud, and Christiane Rochefort.
I had launched my political campaign in the March 1978 legislative elections with Guy Hocquenghem. It was a unique event in the history of the French homosexual movement. I had first been obliged to reconcile with Guy. Several GLH-PQ militants, like Frank Arnal and Pablo Rouy, both of whom later participated with me in the magazine Gai Pied, had withdrawn their own proposed candidacies, one of them arguing that he had not yet come out to his parents and the other that the publicity would harm working relations with his fellow nurses. I found myself absolutely alone and, therefore, had to seek the support of a former heavyweight in the homosexual movement. A mutual friend arranged a meeting at the Closerie des Lilas. I did not very much like Guy for having sought personal fame in the early 1970s, when the press spoke of him as the leader of FHAR, a movement that in fact rejected the very principle of leadership. I had more recently reacted violently against one of those provocative articles that he regularly wrote. In November 1975, when Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered, Guy actually justified the crime in an article in Libération entitled “Not everybody can die in his bed.” We answered his article with one entitled “Guy Hocquenghem confuses the taste of sperm with the taste of blood.” These disagreements had left their mark, but our meeting was polite. We reached agreement when Hocquenghem accepted the GLH-PQ’s political program, which I proposed as our platform for the electoral campaign. This program, drawn up by a homosexual movement to which Guy no longer belonged, had as its first demand the abrogation of Article 331, Line 3, of the Penal Code. The cartoonist Copi offered us a poster that was placarded on all the electoral billboards along the boulevard Saint-Germain, where I was a candidate in the sixth district, and along the boulevard Barbès, where Guy was running in the eighteenth district. Our tally was worst than mediocre, because the campaign had not even managed to raise enough money to print its ballots (in France, political parties prepare ballots with the name of their candidates, which the voters then put in the ballot box).
Astonished by our militant determination and by the support that we received from the cultural world, certain politicians decided to exploit it for themselves. In the midst of the electoral campaign, Senator Henri Caillavet, a center-left candidate, told the press that he had tabled a bill to amend Article 331. A parliamentary struggle ensued between the Senate and the National Assembly, which lasted more than four years, at the end of which, under the presidency of François Mitterrand, parliament abrogated Line 3 of the article on 4 August 1982. By putting the amendment of Article 331 on the political agenda, the GLH-PQ had achieved in three years what Arcadie had failed to do in twenty-five.
We had several other reasons to be proud of ourselves. We did not register our association at the Prefecture of Police (a requirement for getting a post office box) under a misleading name (Arcadie officially called itself “The Literary and Scientific Club of the Latin Countries” and even FHAR had disguised itself as the “Humanitarian and Anti-Racist Front”) but as the GLH, the Group for Homosexual Liberation. For the first time, an association had succeeded in using the word “homosexual” in its name, without having the police refuse to register it as “contrary to good morals.”
Despite these “reformist” gains, our ultimate objectives remained very precise, as Jacques Girard ironically described them in 1981: “GLH-PQ continues to swing like a pendulum, spouting in turn a revolutionary discourse to homosexuals and a homosexual discourse to revolutionaries.” Our discourse about the “gay ghetto” was even more precise. As Girard put it:
The GLH-PQ cannot ask homosexuals to leave the ghetto any more than one can ask a worker to leave the factory. The point is rather to analyze it: Why does it exist? What is its purpose? Strictly speaking, there is no homosexual ghetto, but rather several sorts of enclosures that are not homogenous. We can distinguish, on the one hand, the clubs, bars, and bathhouses, which are more and more expensive, and, on the other, the public parks and urinals along the streets, which are free but dangerous. The GLH-PQ believes that police repression and gay bashing by thugs is driving homosexuals out of the “wild ghetto” toward the “commercial ghetto” dominated by a bourgeois ideology.
In fact, the GLH-PQ wanted to redraw the map of homosexual Paris. The municipality’s removal of hundreds of street urinals was well underway. The clubs of rue Sainte-Anne were in decline, and the legendary bar Le Fiacre at Saint-Germain-des-Prés was dying. Fabrice Emaer, owner of the chic club Le Sept on the rue Sainte-Anne, abandoned it in March 1978 to open his huge discotheque, Le Palace, on the rue du Faubourg Montmartre. The first gay establishment in the Marais quarter was Joël Leroux’s bar, opened on the rue du Plâtre in December 1978, which sold beer at only ten francs a glass. Jean Nicolas, the theoretician of the GLH-PQ, wrote this prescient analysis of the new pseudo-popular “ghetto” that was beginning to appear parallel with and in opposition to the posh clubs of the rue Sainte-Anne:
On entering one removes anything that might recall the individual’s integration into normal social relations and keeps on only the markings that show that one is a fag. It is in this type of ghetto that the ideology of homosexual identity is most firmly rooted.
It was clear to the GLH-PQ that it was necessary to denounce the rue SaintAnne: the posh nightclub, the “understanding” hotel, male prostitution inside the clubs or on the sidewalk, the bathhouse, the leather bar, or the nearby restaurant filled with middle-class men ashamed of their homosexuality. Our attempt to spark a French Christopher Street riot on the rue Sainte-Anne at the time of the gay film festival should be understood within this context.
Christopher Street had been one of our points of reference; the American Gay Pride parade, the logical sequel to this riot, was another. Now, French homosexuals had never, even in the days of FHAR, found the courage to march alone, except for marching with the women’s movement–with which we shared several objectives, notably concerning male chauvinism–at the tail end of the annual May Day demonstration, to the great displeasure of the General Confederation of Labor, the Communist Party, and the prudish extreme left. The very first homosexual march took place on Saturday, 25 June 1977, a sort of “soft” riot, so to speak. I had announced the demonstration–what would turn out to be France’s first Gay Pride march, from the place de la République to the place des Fêtes, organized by the GLH-PQ–on the front page of Libération in an article entitled “Gay Anger.” The word “gay” was little used by French militants in those days. In another tip of the hat to our big American brothers, our march was dedicated to denouncing Anita Bryant, the heroine of American homophobes. Several hundred gays and lesbians showed up, surrounded by a hundred photographers. Le Monde chronicled this first collective coming out in an article subtitled: “I’m not ashamed, I’m afraid.”
Other of our ideas never got off the ground, such as a telephone help line, because we could not raise the necessary money, or such as a lesbian and gay center (we symbolically occupied an unused boutique near the Gaité metro station, but our efforts were insufficiently structured). But at least we launched these ideas. It might be said that everything that marks the breadth of today’s French homosexual movement was initiated between 1975 and 1978. The publicity given to our efforts by numerous newspapers, which was the result of patiently explaining ourselves, also brought fruits. Favorable articles on the homosexual question finally began to appear, and not in the extreme left-wing press. I even published a work called Press Dossier on Homosexuality, which compiled all the newspaper reports of this period.
It is perhaps surprising that the question of the martyrdom and deportation of homosexuals by the Nazis, a political subject if there ever was one, was not central to our demands. The witnesses, like Heinz Heger and Pierre Seel, had not yet spoken out, but the facts were known well enough. We began the custom of laying wreaths for deportees on the occasion of France’s annual remembrance day. On 27 April 1977, however, we were not even allowed to take part in the official ceremonies. The police stopped the homosexual delegation and confiscated the wreaths.
It was equally important to assure a visibility in the media. Certain of our courageous elders had shown us the way. After the coming out of the writer and journalist Jean-Louis Bory in his book, My Half of the Orange (1973), Dominique Fernandez followed with his, The Pink Star (1978). After I interviewed Fernandez for Libération, we became friends, and in the spring of 1978 a television network asked us to make a documentary report about the homosexual condition in France. Months of filming followed, notably in the communal apartment on the boulevard Voltaire where I was then living and where the magazine Gai Pied would be born a few months later. A number of friends from the GLH-PQ and the GLH in Marseille dared to be interviewed on camera. The program, repeatedly postponed on the orders of the French President’s office, was not broadcast until 9 November 1979, but our ratings that evening were higher than either the interview with François Mitterrand on one of the competing networks or a film starring Alain Delon on the other. In the live debate that followed our report, in which the political right had refused to participate, Senator Caillavet and the socialist deputy Raymond Forni (now speaker of the National Assembly) spoke courageously in favor of respecting differences and decriminalizing homosexuality by modifying Article 331.
After three years of intense militant activity and the impossibility of having any private life, I was totally exhausted, and I was not the only one. Moreover, within the GLH-PQ, after the successive withdrawal of integrationist reformists, misogynist anarchists, and interventionist maoists, there no longer remained anyone but spontanéiste queens and militant Trotskyites. Irreconcilable quarrels between them brought about the death of the GLH-PQ. The political candidacies in favor of homosexual identity, including Patrick Cardon’s in the municipal elections in Aix-en-Provence in 1977, caused the explosion, and the Trotskyites declared this initiative to be counterrevolutionary.
In the meantime, new volunteers were less committed to militancy than the old-timers, and for good reason. The distribution of tracts on the terrace of the Café de Flore had ceased, like the picnics on the Buttes Chaumont, at the Bois de Vincennes, or on the lawns surrounding the student residences at the Cité Universitaire. Commando actions were no more than a memory. No more graffiti in the metro or on the last of the public urinals. Our quarrels had turned our thoughts inward. Above all, we were being dominated by media stars, which was far from our initial ideas. The homosexual reality, however, was going to change very quickly as a result of our incessant agitation. The legislative elections in Paris had been only a final burst of solidarity. Meetings, sticking up posters, and interviews masked the approaching end of an exhausted group.
In the summer of 1978, I resigned from the GLH-PQ in an open letter published in Libération and entitled “On Misery in the Gay Militant Milieu,” in which I lambasted the “leftist” tics in our way of functioning as well as the sterile and provocative eccentricities of certain queens. It seemed to me that militancy of this sort had outlived its day and run out of arguments. In my resignation, which signed the death warrant of the GLH in Paris, I wished good luck to the CHA’s, the District Homosexual Committees into which the GLH-PQ had split. I hoped that these committees, closer to life at the grass roots in the various city quarters, could restart the homosexual movement, along with the surviving GLH groups outside of Paris. The GLH of Marseilles, for example, founded a year later the first Homosexual Summer University, where the Emergency Committee against the Repression of Homosexuals (CUARH) would be established as a federation of homosexual associations with a nationwide mission. CUARH would keep up the pressure on France’s elected representatives until the final amendment of Article 331 on 4 August 1982.
For my own part, confident after my two years’ experience as a reporter at Libération and exhausted after seven years of militancy at the ground level, I went on to found the magazine Gai Pied with the support of Michel Foucault, whom I met in the summer of 1978 after reading the first volume of his History of Sexuality, which drastically changed certain of our strategies and our way of looking at the homosexual question. Moreover, in the space of a few months, the right-wing government of Giscard-d’Estaing banned a dozen homosexual periodicals, and we had to restock the empty newsstands. That same summer, we met in a house in Haute-Provence, at Maazel, with a number of leaders who had resigned from the regional GLH. They became correspondents for this now famous magazine which, from the first issue in February 1979, declared itself a national periodical and not merely a Parisian one. We had embarked on a new adventure.