The Dictionary of Homophobia (131 page)

Adolescent homosexuals react to homophobia at school in several different ways. Many lie low, necessary for survival in a hostile environment; by doing so, they maintain the appearance of accepting the law of the group and thus pass unnoticed. However, some begin a process of destabilization, which can border on self-destruction (one-third of adolescent
suicides
are said to be linked to homosexuality). In 1998, Darren Steele, a young student in Burton-upon-Trent, killed himself because his love of theater and cooking led his classmates to constantly call him a “poof.” Another common response by adolescent homosexuals is to focus exclusively on the intellectual, a more discreet survival strategy and the means to begin constructing a gay identity (especially through reading), while waiting for personal emancipation later in life. Bullying is no doubt one explanation for the over representation of homosexuals among higher-achieving students; journalist Alex Taylor often stated that it was because he was gay that he set himself the goal, during his adolescence in Cornwall, of getting into Oxford.

Obviously, such positive outcomes should neither justify nor excuse bullying. On this topic, the United States has made recent progress in the wake of the Jamie Nabozny case. In 1996, this Wisconsin high school student sued his former school district for not having protected him from several years of intense homophobic harassment in school. The Nabozny case established jurisprudence at the federal level, and it is now expected that administrative heads must provide protection for their gay and lesbian students. In addition, after a series of initiatives by Massachusetts Governor William Weld, school authorities in many areas have sanctioned the creation of gay and gay-friendly student clubs. A similar phenomenon occurred in Great Britain, despite the enactment of Clause 28 (a section of the Local Government Act) in 1988, which forbade schools from teaching that homosexual relationships were equal to heterosexual relationships (it was first repealed in Scotland in 2000 and then the rest of Britain in 2003). The struggle against homophobia in British schools was dependent on the courage of individual school administrations; this courage was sometimes significant: one school director defiantly maintained during the period that Clause 28 was in effect that “(w)e shall not treat homosexual relationships like a simulacrum of familial relationships, but as real family relationships, and we will always continue to do so.” France is behind in this matter, in part because community support is less developed in schools, but also because the struggle against any form of harassment was initiated quite late. Nonetheless, universities and other higher education institutions in France are currently seeing an increase in the number of gay and lesbian student associations, such as Homonormalités, launched in 1997 by a group of students at the Ecole normale supérieure (including Louis-Georges Tin).

Another important aspect of school homophobia is the issue of how institutions treat gay and lesbian teachers. The Jesuit regents from Voltaire’s day had a reputation for buggery—from time to time, authorities would intervene (in a letter of 1702, politician Pontchartrain reminded all “how important it is to be more stern with those regents and precepts who are corrupting schoolchildren”), but most often the only action taken was to make up
songs
about it; no one was overly concerned. Things changed radically in the nineteenth century, as school personnel could no longer count on the protection of ecclesiastical robes. From then on, the discovery of a teacher’s homosexuality was an abominable
scandal
; a teacher who was a pederast was considered far more monstrous than a young female teacher who found herself pregnant. During 1807–08, Jean-Claude Alméry (headmaster of a school), was condemned to one year in
prison
for having tried to seduce his valet. In
England
, as in the United States, by the second half of the nineteenth century homosexuality was grounds for immediate and undisputable dismissal.

In France, the general inspectorate, sharing the common prejudices, were fiercely afraid of the “bad reputation” associated with homosexuality (until the period before World War II, matters of the “morality” of public servants were extremely important in the “reports to the minister”) and the consequences for it were harsh. Prior to 1914, most female teachers discovered to be lesbian were either fired or forced to resign. And one can legitimately wonder that, if the excellent professor Jean Beaufret were not openly homosexual, would he have been demoted in the same way in 1950 in spite of the role he played as an officer of the Resistance (a claim that many of his colleagues could not make)? Behind this severity was the notion that homosexual teachers were a disgrace to the educational profession as a whole; that they undermined the collective authority and posed a danger to students. Republican zeal no doubt reinforced the phenomenon: the
private
life of public school teachers had to be “spotless,” because of their schools’ competition with religious establishments. It was true, after all, that the
Catholic
right wing did not hesitate to lash out against the Ecole normale supérieure for enrolling young women after writer Gabrielle Reval made it the setting for lesbian love in her novel
Les Sévriennes
, published in 1900.The infinite cautiousness of gay writer Marcel Jouhandeau, who was a teacher at St-Jean de Passy and felt obliged to burn his manuscripts or publish them anonymously, clearly demonstrates how severely the Catholics dealt with non-conformists. But it is also interesting to see how laymen and anticlericals often displayed their own homophobia by subscribing to the concept of “
against nature
” and drawing connections between the clergy and pederasty. In France during the latter half of the Second Empire, governmental ministers often invoked morality to fight against the presence of the clergy in public education. On the other hand, although educators had a long tradition of sacerdotal celibacy, which was well regarded in the nineteenth century, the unmarried man began to appear to be a practicing pervert, or at least had the potential to become one. Homosexual teachers certainly could not count on the solidarity of their colleagues; up until the 1970s, a kind of Puritanism permeated the teaching profession, whether personal inclinations lay with the left wing (communists were often the most rigid) or the right. Teachers and administrators were usually part of the ambitious middle class, a group often inclined to uphold the concept of traditional families, and even the most liberal of teachers were not completely free of homophobic prejudice. One merely has be reminded of the outrageous personality that Jean-Paul Sartre (an instructor at Lycée Pasteur, and then Lycée Condorcet) assigned to his homosexual character Daniel Serrano in his trilogy of novels
Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom)
, who experiences an altogether physical ecstasy when the Germans arrive in Paris; or the sinister recurrence of the word
tapette
(queer) in the correspondence of Simone de Beauvoir (also a philosophy teacher) with her American lover Nelson Algren. Later, during the Fourth Republic, homosexuals teaching outside of metropolitan areas still found themselves victims of extreme solitude, such as the main character of Dominique Fernandez’s novel
L’Etoile rose
(The pink star).

It is obvious that the confusion between homosexuality and pedophilia is the largest issue, an association that has caused considerable problems. The connection is particularly common in France, thanks to the highly inadequate name assigned to homosexuals by Auguste Ambroise Tardieu and the French medical community of the Second Empire (the word “pederast” refers both culturally to the Greek love of adolescents and etymologically to childhood). To public authorities, a homosexual teacher was not simply a bad example, but also a predator in a position of power. Given that this belief was grounded in what Tardieu and his popularizers had to say about homosexuality, it then led to the thought that students subjected to a “pederast” teacher risked becoming occasional homosexuals, which would then lead them to debasement and crime. In his 1998 book
Homosexualités et droit
(Homosexualities and the law), Daniel Borrillo demonstrated that the French laws protecting minors, assembled between 1850 and 1937, were based on the fear elicited by the “shameful passions” of teachers. As late as 1973, Jean-Luc Hennig, a young and brilliant professor of grammar, was suspended for having his students read a publication issued by the gay organization Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR; Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front) entitled
Trois milliards de pervers
(Three billion perverts), as well as for providing a psychoanalytical interpretation of
Little Red Riding Hood
! The situation is even worse for homosexual teachers when a student becomes infatuated. In Austrian director Leontine Sagan’s film
Mädchen in Uniform
(Girls in uniform) from 1931, although it is Manuela who falls in love with Miss von Bernburg, the teacher is the one forced to quit the school. In fact, it was to fight against the myth of the homosexual predator that Roger Peyrefitte wrote his novel
Les Amitiés particulières
(
Special Friendships
) in 1943, which demonstrates that homosexuality in boarding schools comes about less from the influence of adults, but rather the emotional evolution between the students themselves.

Things did not begin to change until the late 1960s. In the United States, again, it was a decision of the courts that sparked the change: in 1969, in its judgment on the case of
Morrison v. the State Board of Education
, the Supreme Court of California declared that a teacher sacked for “immorality in private life outside of the
workplace
” could be reinstated, which established an important precedent. That said, in 1978, the so-called Briggs Initiative proposed (in vain) to Californian voters that all homosexuals be banned from teaching. It is because the pedophiliac myth still persists that many American teachers today continue to hide their homosexuality from their students. In France, the situation began to relax in the 70s. Associate professor of literature Jean-Louis Bory contributed enormously to this with his writing and radio appearances which featured his devastating wit (“I’m not a danger to my students, I’m a danger to my students’ fathers”). During the same period, Guy Hocquenghem and Dominique Fernandez became the first university professors to publicly announce their homosexuality on television. However, it should be pointed out that the ministry of education’s first official recognition of homosexual teachers only occurred in 1999, with the inclusion of PaCS in its employer contracts. The situation in schools varies greatly depending on the institution: it is much easier to be openly homosexual for a university or preparatory school instructor, or those who work in privileged middle schools inside a major city. Otherwise, homosexual teachers still have a difficult time, especially those who work in elementary schools or daycare, where the connection between homosexuality and pedophilia is common, or worse, private schools, where teachers are subjected to harsh Catholic homophobia.

Homophobia has also been evident in school programs and practices, resulting at times in extraordinary symbolic
violence
. The Christianization of classical studies established long-standing taboos that are difficult to escape. Christian educators (“Homosexuality is a sin”) and their positivist rivals (“Homosexuality is a disease”) agreed at least that the matter should never be spoken of in front of students. This attitude seemed to set the expectation of “magical thinking”—that homosexuality was an aberration that was encouraged by its discussion and, thus, would disappear if never spoken of. Naturally, this did not lead to neutrality in terms of the content taught: the dream of a humanist return to the days of Antiquity butted up against the depiction of Virgilian shepherds and Attic pederasty; Plato’s dialogues became mere catalogs of
horrenda
and
nefanda,
and all Greek literature needed to be carefully sanitized. In his 1851 essay
Le Ver rongeur des sociétés modernes ou le paganisme dans l’éducation
(The worm gnawing at modern society, or paganism in education), Jean-Joseph Gaume, a nineteenth-century clergyman, urged that the profane Greek authors, those masters of immorality, no longer be taught in schools. This taboo also extended to higher education: “Omit any reference to the unspeakable
vice
of the Greeks,” a Cambridge tutor recommended to E.M. Forster in the 1900s; a Greek classics professor said to Georges Dumézil during World War I, “Now don’t go imagining anything.” Scholarly research has also long felt the influence of homophobia. In 1948, Henri-Irénée Marrou declared in
Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité
(
A History of Education in Antiquity
) that “studying the technicalities of inversion in Greek society is of little interest except to
psychiatry
and moral
theology
.” And Robert Flacelière, with bourgeois prudishness, wrote in 1937 on the subject of pederasty in his
Vie quotidienne en Grèce au siècle de Périclès
(
Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles
): “As unpleasant as the subject may be, it is impossible to simply ignore.”

This discomfort is not limited simply to the classics of Antiquity. In England, Shakespeare’s sonnets have for decades posed a very thorny problem; it would not be until the very end of the nineteenth century that universities began to recognize that the majority of his sonnets were addressed to a man, which in the Victorian context meant that the greatest English poet of all time was afflicted by the greatest vice imaginable. In France, when professors of literature were debating during the 1960s how to best integrate twentieth-century French
literature
into the high school curriculum (where it was not yet being taught), the debate kept getting hung up on the sexuality of André
Gide
and Marcel Proust. It is striking to note just how this discomfort (found in textbooks, like those of Lagarde and Michard, which are often inadvertently funny, such as when it introduces Proust’s character of Charlus with the enigmatic title of “a strange character”), manifested in embarrassed phrasings and unquestioned prejudices, has passed from generation to generation almost right up to present day. Around 1980, teachers could still be found talking of the “Greek vice” in discussions about Emperor Hadrian or the “awful habits” of the revolutionary Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, or claiming during a philosophy course that “desire is born of the
difference
between the genders,” at which their students would laugh. It is clear that even during that era, homosexuality was still not considered a legitimate subject by most professors at the Sorbonne, though centers of “gay studies” had been appearing in American colleges and universities since the early 70s (at the University of Nebraska,Yale University, the City University of New York, and the City College of San Francisco, to name a few). Even now, this sort of academic homophobia has not completely vanished: a 2002 issue of
Ravaillac
magazine, published by the students of the Lycée Henri IV, commented on one of the school’s history teachers known for making remarks to his students that were as ridiculous as they were homophobic.