Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 by Todd Shepard (review)

Todd Shepard begins in 1962 with the formal end of the Algerian War and ends in 1979 with the recognized failure of the “Arab Revolution” and the birth of the Islamic one, a period during which he devotes his attention to “two conversations . . . which too often ignore each other: histories of empire [in Algeria] and histories of sex” (4). After Algerian independence in 1962, the rhetoric of the “humiliated” French Far Right reduced “‘Arab’ masculinity to ‘hypervirility’” (24). During the long sixties militant French homosexuals claimed that gay sex between Europeans and North Africans was revolutionary. Shepard also notes that “anticolonial movements and colonized peoples of color” in France played “the central role . . . in making the sexual revolution” (69). He criticizes radical homosexuals who identified themselves as victims of sexual “racism,” an overused term in France that, as Shepard recognizes, has come to describe “any form of oppression” (71). Revolutionary gays lamented “the sexual misery from which we all suffer, homos, women, blacks, Indians, immigrants, proles, high schoolers, youth, the insane” (74). These “Erect Revolutionaries,” as the leftist journal Politique Hebdo dubbed them, composed avant la lettre a kind of anti–Me Too of men who wanted to be molested. Sex radicals continued the Third Worldism of the 1960s Left, which replaced the proletariat with the colonized and criticized “Judeo-Christian civilization” (88) in favor of its supposedly less repressive (at least for European gays) Maghrebi counterpart. The moderate homophile organization, Arcadie, praised Tunisia and Morocco as “the last homosexual paradises” (120). Instead of rejecting Orientalist stereotypes as perverse, revolutionary homosexuals lauded them as emancipatory. Sodomy and anal sex solidified their sexual coalition with North African immigrants.

Shepard praises “queer theorists and revisionist historians . . . who have worked to recover the vibrant multiplicity that gay liberation [in its concern for the hetero/homo binary] helped to push to the side” (100). He argues that the history of sex acts should replace or accompany the search for sexual identities, and he challenges “gay liberationists’ story of progress, of an escape from ‘the closet’” (100). Personal advertisements in newspapers, especially those in the legendary supplement to Libération, “played with French fantasies of Arab sexual openness concerning the gender of possible partners” and “manipulated codes that, precisely because of the ways in which they invoked Arab masculinities, were markedly French” (123). The author points out that after 1968, people of various political and sexual persuasions seemed incapable of “taking the subjectivity of so-called Arabs seriously—that is [of recognizing] that factors beyond the sociological (‘the Arab man in France’) shaped individual sexual choices” (124). Using police and other statistics, Shepard rebuts French accusations that blamed immigrants for sexual crimes (229). He fails to note that police and other official statistics count only first-generation immigrants, while the French public tends to include several generations of the offspring in their definition of “immigrant.”

This well-written book is often creative in combining two major themes of the long sixties: multiculturalism and the sexual revolution. Nonetheless, it contains some questionable judgments. Shepard emphasizes French racism, especially the influence of Far Right activists, but his description of how leftist Christians allegedly contributed to the “post-1946 explosion of anti–North African racism” (144) explains neither the desire of hundreds of thousands of North and sub-Saharan Africans to leave their native lands nor their admission to France during this period. Shepard is rightly tough on what he calls “vanilla” histories that erase people of color from their analyses, but he states without elaboration that Europeans and Jews “left their native Algeria after independence” and thus sanitizes the ethnic/religious cleansing of approximately one million “whites” by violent Algerian independence movements. Likewise, the author recounts the story of the murder of the well-known leftist cartoonist, Georges Wolinski, in the Charlie Hebdo massacre (103), but he omits any mention of the Islamist terrorists—misogynist enemies of sexual liberation—who murdered him. He strongly disagrees with those...