The Dictionary of Homophobia (39 page)

The first French “experts” to write about homosexuality in the nineteenth century—at that time, one would call it “pederasty”—were most often medical examiners (Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, for example, author of
Etudes medico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs
[Medical-legal studies of assaults against decency], 1857) or policemen (such as François Carlier, author of
Les Deux prostitutions
[The two prostitutions], 1887). They tended to link crime to homosexuality, even holding the victim of a crime (theft, murder, blackmail) as being responsible for his situation by simple fact of his homosexuality. To this effect, Tardieu quoted a magistrate who in 1845 stated during the trial of twenty people accused of blackmailing Parisian homosexuals (known as the Rue de Rampart affair): “It can be said that in Paris, pederasty is the school in which the most capable and most audacious criminals are educated.” Without showing any sympathy for gay victims of crime, Tardieu went on to explain that “these shameful habits [homosexuality] have become a means and a particular technique of theft, for the purpose of which guilty associations have been formed,” and that “under graver circumstances, pederasty has served as the pretext, and in some ways the catalyst, for murder.” As for Carlier, he stated that “Pederasty is peculiar in that it excites the appetites of all wrongdoers. You could say that it is a provocation for crime.” He followed this with: “The ease with which pederasts spill blood is truly frightening; these people who are so timid, so pusillanimous, so soft in ordinary life, can all of a sudden take on a cruelty to rival that of the most hardened wrongdoers.”

Italian Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), one of the founders of scientific criminology and author of
Criminal Man
(1876; English translation published 1911) and
Crime, Its Causes and Remedies
(1899; English translation published 1911), believed that crime was for the most part hereditary, and that the
psychology
and even the physical appearance (e.g., the shape of the head) of born criminals differed from that of others. Lombroso further suggested that criminals are subject to primitive and “atavistic” passions and to an “abnormal sexual appetite” (i.e. homosexual desire). Lombroso’s ideas were very influential. Their echoes can be heard in a French psychologist known simply as Dr Bérillon, who declared in the journal
L’Eclair
in 1908, concerning a homosexual charged with murder, that “a man with errant tastes is more inclined toward crime than another.” Further, he added: “There are individuals who only have the appearance of being men. You have everything to fear from them.”

Bérillon was speaking here of hotel manager Pierre Renard, a homosexual accused of having murdered his employer in June 1908 in his hotel on Rue de la Pépinière in Paris. During the trial, the prosecutor asked the jury, “There is no … material proof against Renard, but is it even necessary?” In effect, Renard’s homosexuality was the more serious charge laid against him during the trial, and it was enough to sentence him, in February 1909, to a life sentence of forced labor. According to the newspaper
Le Matin
, inclined to believe that Renard was innocent, “the prosecution’s argument, in short, went like this: it started with homosexuality, and finished with the crime.” The newspaper article was a succinct summary of the homophobic attitudes of the era, which too often confused homosexuality with crime, and which André
Gide
would denounce, thinking specifically of Renard, in his book
Corydon
.

This sort of homophobia would persist for decades in France within the
police
force and the justice system. This was why, in 1958, the director of criminal investigation for the Paris police gave a speech in which he described the homosexual milieu as “an environment that favored delinquency,” and as “a breeding ground where criminal viruses are spawned”; he also warned the public against taking part in “those dangers that could lead to activities that promote homosexuality” (e.g., theft, prostitution, murder). The sensational French press, too, did their part to maintain these homophobic sentiments. Here are two examples out of many: on January 10, 1935,
Détective
magazine published an article on the death of a young pastry cook, found strangled in his apartment on Rue Tournefort in Paris, in which the police inspector sighed, “Another story of ‘aunties’.” The magazine also explained to its readers the difficulties of a police investigation in such an environment: “Crimes of loners, and of homosexuals, are the very soul of the secret crime.” And, after the murder of an antiquarian in Cannes by an old lover in 1947,
Police-Hebdo
on October 21, 1947, published his photograph on the cover with the eye-catching caption: “This man was killed by his own habits.”

This homophobic attitude can also be found in popular culture, especially cinema and literature. In 1981, Vito Russo published
The Celluloid Closet
, a study of homophobia in Hollywood films, in which he identified two contrasting stereotypes of homosexuals: the sissy (the effeminate and ridiculous dandy) and the criminal (the devious and dangerous pederast, or the murderous lesbian). Alfred Hitchcock’s films are particularly good examples, such as
Rebecca
(1940), in which the sinister Mrs Danvers, who was fiercely in love with her employer’s first wife, threatens the happiness (and life?) of the second; or
Rope
(1948), in which two young lovers kill a college classmate for the simple pleasure of killing, but also to prove their intellectual superiority over normal people. The controversy brought about by William Friedkin’s controversial film
Cruising
(1980) should also be mentioned, given that it mobilized the gay community in the United States: a police officer investigating a series of murders in a gay neighborhood ends up falling victim himself to homosexual and murderous impulses, as if homosexuality and criminality were contagious and somehow connected.

On the other hand, literary representations of what French writer and queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem called
homosexualité noire
, or “dark homosexuality”— because it was nocturnal, dangerous, sometimes violent, and even criminal—were often written by homosexuals themselves, who sometimes basked in a state of marginality and lawlessness. Jean Genet is perhaps the best example of this, although as French philosopher Didier Eribon has shown, “the great theme of similarity between homosexuals and criminals” can be found in many other homosexual writers, such as Oscar
Wilde
, Marcel Proust, Marcel Jouhandeau, and Julien Green.

Thanks to the social evolution of the gay and lesbian lifestyle since the 1960s (which put an end to secrecy and initiated the phenomenon of “coming out”), as well as the development of a militant activist movement and in particular the slow but steady improvement in public attitudes toward homosexuals over the past two or three decades (at least in the West), the perception of homosexuals as criminals has finally started to disappear. That said, less than ten years ago, a police commissioner from the 3rd arrondissement in Paris actually told the author of this essay: “You have to admit that there are still a lot of criminals in the homo environment.”
—
Michael Sibalis

Amnesty International.
Breaking the Silence: Human Rights Violations Based on Sexual Orientation
. London: Amnesty, 1997.

Buhrke, Robin A.
Matter of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Men in Law Enforcement
. New York/London: Routledge, 1996.

Carlier, François.
Etudes de pathologie sociale: Les Deux prostitutions
. Paris: E. Dentu, 1887.

Eribon, Didier.
Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet
. Paris: Fayard, 2001.

Fernet, Max. “L’Homosexualité et son influence sur la délinquance,”
Revue internationale de police criminelle
(1959).

Guérin, Daniel.
Shakespeare et Gide en correctionnelle
. Paris: Edition du Scorpion, 1959.

Gury, Christian.
L’Honneur perdu d’un politicien homosexuel en 1876
. Paris: Kimé 1999.

———.
L’Honneur perdu d’un capitaine homosexuel en 1880
. Paris: Kimé, 1999.

Hahn, Pierre.
Nos ancêtres les pervers
. Paris: Olivier Urban, 1979.

Peniston, William A. “Love and Death in Gay Paris: Homosexuality and Criminality in the 1870s.” In
Homosexuality in Modem France
. Edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.

Rey, Michel. “Police et sodomie à Paris au XVIIIe siècle,”
Revue d’histoire moderne contemporaine
. (1982).

Russo,Vito.
The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies
. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.

—Cinema; Criminalization; Decriminalization; Deportation; Devlin, Patrick; European Law; Gulag; Jurisprudence; Literature; McCarthy, Joseph; Media; Medicine, Legal; Peril; Police; Prison; Proselytism; Scandal; Treason; Vice.

CRIMINALIZATION

In 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee declared that outlawing sexual relations between people of the same sex was an infringement on the right to
privacy
. Nevertheless, still today, many countries around the world actively repress homosexuality; in 2007, according to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, there were eighty-five countries that have laws that discriminate against homosexuals, with penalties ranging from, in the best of cases, the age of consent being set later than for heterosexual relations, to, in the worst of cases, long
prison
sentences, torture, physical punishment, and even execution.

At the time of this writing, nine states (Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iran, Mauritania, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen; as well as some parts of Nigeria and Somalia) punish “homosexual acts” by death. In other countries, the threat of arbitrary arrest, police brutality, expedited trials, and imprisonment are a daily reality for many gays and lesbians, especially those who are active in fighting for their rights as homosexuals. Moreover, in certain countries where the law does not specifically name homosexuality as a crime, other, more generalized infractions (indecency, sexual molestation, public scandal, crimes against the
family
,
unnatural
acts, etc.) are invoked in order to take legal action. For example, in Egypt in 2001, fifty-two men were arrested and tried for an “offense to morality and to public sensitivity” when in fact they were being reproached for being homosexual.

The penalty inflicted can be particularly violent: in
India
, for example, homosexual crimes are considered “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and sexual relations between men can be punishable by ten years to life imprisonment. In Iran and Chechnya, convicted gay men or lesbians are whipped and stoned; in Pakistan, the law allows for life imprisonment and a punishment of 100 lashes of the whip. Elsewhere, gays and lesbians can be sentenced to prison for anywhere from one month to twenty-five years.

The criminalization of homosexuality today is mostly limited to countries in the
Middle East
or Africa. There is a general tendency in the West toward the elimination of discrimination against homosexuality or differences with regard to the age of consent. Membership in the European Union requires the repeal of anti-homosexuality legislation. Therefore, no European countries have laws against homosexuality, except the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a de facto independent republic that has received diplomatic recognition only from Turkey. However, there are still a few European states that maintain a higher age of consent for homosexuals (Gilbraltor, Greece, and the Bailiwick of Guernsey, including Alderney, Herm, and Sark).

The persistence of homosexual repression in certain countries, however, appears to correlate to their autocratic and/or religious tendencies. The most explicit and harshest sentences for the crime of homosexuality are imposed by Muslim countries that invoke
sharia
(Muslim law) (such as Afghanistan, Iran, Kuwait, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen). Additionally, until such state laws were overturned by the US Supreme Court in 2003, fully one-third of the states in the US condemned the act of sodomy on the same terms as in Leviticus in the Bible, i.e. as an “act against nature”; under the uniform code of military justice, sodomy is illegal for members of the United States Armed Forces. However, given that the United States is fully democratic, this long-lived legal stigmatization can only be explained by these states’ reliance on an outdated moral code based on a strong religious tradition.

In 2006, the IDAHO Committee (the NGO coordinating the International Day Against Homophobia) launched a petition calling for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality, which was supported by many significant persons, including several Nobel Prize winners, prominent intellectuals, artists, and entertainers, and political leaders. On May 17, 2008, as requested by Louis-Georges Tin, the founder of IDAHO, French Secretary of State for Human Rights Rama Yade announced that France would bring forth a declaration to the United Nations for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality.
—
Arsenal Pulp Press
[Based on the original essay by Daniel Borrillo and Thomas Formond.]

Amnesty International. “Breaking the Silence: Human Rights Violation Based on Sexual Orientation.” Report. Amnesty International, 1998.

———. “Identité sexuelle et persecutions.” Les Editions francophones d’Amnesty International, 2001.

Assemblée parlementaire du Conseil de l’Europe. “Situation des lesbiennes et des gays dans les Etats membres du Conseil de l’Europe.” Report (document 8755)
http://stars.coe.fr/doc/doc00/fdoc8755.htm
(accessed June 6, 2000).

Buhrke, Robin A.
Matter of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Men in Law Enforcement
. New York/London: Routledge, 1996.

International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission:
http://www.iglhrc.org
(accessed January 4, 2008).

International Lesbian and Gay Association:
http://www.ilga.org
(accessed January 4, 2008).