Building a More Stately Closet: French Gay Movements since the Early 1980s

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Chambered Nautilus"

In their mythes fondateurs most contemporary gay organizations in France have sought to portray themselves as heirs of the revolutionary ideas introduced by the gay political groups that were formed in the aftermath of the events of 1968. However, this teleological interpretation of the period since 1968 is misleading in at least two respects: it does not recognize the magnitude of the disruption to French gay organizations that occurred in the early 1980s, and it fails to account for the ethos of assimilation that now prevails in many of France's active gay groups. In the early 1980s the French government eliminated any explicit legal distinction between heterosexual and homosexual acts through the repeal of two laws: the first law, promulgated in 1942 and repealed in 1982, had established a higher age of sexual majority for homosexuals than for heterosexuals; the second, dating from 1960 and annulled in 1980, had doubled the penalty for public indecency when the people involved were of the same sex. Immediately following the repeal of these two laws the political and cultural arenas of French homosexuality changed markedly. As figure 1 indicates, virtually all of the then extant French gay cultural and political organizations were abruptly dissolved, and new groups were formed.¹ Moreover, as representations of homosexuals fell into alignment with society's longstanding and unwavering requirements for assimilation and acceptance, the legal and public constraints of the earlier period were replaced with internalized, private self-controls.

In place of the prevailing myth noted above, I would like to propose a more nuanced and more accurate, albeit decidedly less fashionable and less politically appealing, interpretation of recent French gay political history. It is one of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For nearly two decades after its founding in the mid-1950s the dominant political and social organization for French homosexuals was Club Arcadie. The aim of its founder, André Baudry, was to present homosexuals as respectable, cultured, and dignified individuals deserving of greater social tolerance. Through social activities and a publication, Revue Arcadie, Baudry hoped to "educate adult homophiles, who, too weak and lacking knowledge, could not on their own live with dignity."²

In the early 1970s this thesis of homosexual respectability was challenged by an antithesis. Newly formed groups, Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) and Groupes de libération homosexuelle (GLH), sought to replace assimilationist strategies with confrontation.³ According to these "in-your-face" radicals, gay people were no longer supposed to