Remembrances of Gay Paris

The title of Régis Revenin's book may confuse some potential readers, as the volume is a monographic study of male homosexuality in Paris from 1870 to 1918; it does treat male prostitution, and indeed a considerable number of homosexual encounters involved some monetary payment, but the focus is not on prostitution per se. That said, this is an excellent work, using, in particular, primary materials in the archives of the Paris Prefecture of Police, as well as many contemporary medical, legal, psychological, and creative publications. In a book based on a 2004 master's thesis at the University of Paris (and still bearing some of the traits of a university thesis), Revenin demonstrates an impressive familiarity with both French- and English-language sources in constructing a social history of male homosexuality in the French capital.

Revenin engages with George Chauncey's theses about late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New York and, like Chauncey, argues that homosexuals were neither isolated nor invisible and that they did not necessarily internalize homophobia. Revenin identifies a vibrant and open homosexual subculture in Paris, complete with bars, bathhouses, and cruising areas. Homosexuality was far from limited to the well-known elite circles of men such as Proust and Gide, and it was not (contrary to some views at the time) a "foreign" vice. Men from all walks of life—native Parisians as well as provincial and overseas migrants, workers and bourgeois, effeminate and masculine homosexuals, those searching for brief sexual encounters and others for longer-lasting companionship—took advantage of the public nature of the subculture: homosexualities, rather than homosexuality in the singular. Though wider society disapproved of pédérastie—numerous sociolegal and medical works are cited in evidence—homosexual acts had not been criminalized in France since the Revolution, and the moral sway of the Catholic Church had been much attenuated by anticlericalism, secularism, and ultimately the separation of church and state in 1905. Therefore, especially by the Belle Epoque, the population of Paris viewed homosexuality, Revenin suggests, with indifference and even tolerance.

The homosexual subculture was extraordinarily dense in Paris in the last decades of the 1800s and the early 1900s. The Champs-Elysées was not only the city's great boulevard, it was a popular place for men to make pickups. Public gardens, such as those of the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, were also popular cruising grounds. The four thousand open-air urinals in Paris at the turn of the century were prime meeting places. As for commercial premises, Revenin inventories no fewer than 110 establishments especially frequented by homosexuals, including forty-odd bars, cafés, tea rooms, and restaurants with a largely homosexual clientele, and twelve specifically homosexual public baths and a similar number of homosexual dance parlors. Homosexual gentlemen gathered in fine drawing rooms, but also met soldiers, sailors, and workers in public places.

Revenin's book is divided into three sections. The first, including useful maps that illustrate the author's calculations from the police records, examines the geography and sociology of male homosexuality, the places where homosexuals lived, socialized, and had sex. The second section looks at how homosexuals transgressed social hierarchies and norms, and contains fascinating explorations of how homosexuals crossed class boundaries, and what links existed between homosexuals and the church, the army, the twilight world of prostitution, and the underworld of crime. There is also a chapter on lesbian Paris. After this inquiry into the lived experiences of homosexuals, the third section turns to social control and repression, and the medical, legal, and police discourses of homosexuality. The volume is agreeably written, free of jargon and unsubstantiated theorizing, and nicely illustrated by photographs and reproductions of original documents.

Revenin's conclusions concord with most of those in William A. Peniston's recent book on nineteenth-century Paris, though the former's book extends to a later period of the Third Republic than Peniston's and their approach is somewhat different—Peniston, for instance, begins with social attitudes and then moves...