The Dictionary of Homophobia (46 page)
In conclusion, it appears that the relatively recent introduction of the concept of homophobia into judicial analysis has permitted new light to be shed on debates related to homosexual discrimination. This clarity would appear to be useful; however, it should not be forgotten that homophobia remains unfortunately quite common in a heterocentric society, and that, confronted with this apparently ancient phobia, it is important not only to remain vigilant, but also to instruct, be tolerant, and have patience.
—Mathieu André-Simonet
Borrillo, Daniel.
Homosexualités et droit
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998.
———. “L’Orientation sexuelle en Europe: esquisse d’une politique publique antidiscriminatoire,”
Les Temps modernes
, no. 609 (2000).
———, and Pierre Lascoumes, eds.
L’Homophobie: comment la définir, comment la combattre
. Paris: Ed. Prochoix, 1999.
Congrégation pour la doctrine de la foi. “Au sujet des propositions de loi sur la non-discrimination des personnes homosexuelles.” La Documentation catholique, no. 2056 (1992). [Published in English as “Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons.” By The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Roman Curia (July 23, 1992).]
Dawidoff, Robert, and Michael Nava.
Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America
. New York: St Martin’s Press, “Stonewall Inn Editions,” 1994.
Delor, François.
Homosexualité, ordre symbolique, injure et discrimination: Impasses et destins des expériences érotiques minoritaires dans l’espace social et politique
. Brussels: Labor, 2003.
Duberman, Martin, and Ruthann Robson, eds.
Gay Men, Lesbians and the Law (Issues in Gay and Lesbian Life)
. New York: Chelsea Publishing, 1996.
Eribon, Didier. “Ce que l’injure me dit. Quelques remarques sur le racisme et la discrimination.” In
Papiers d’identité, Interventions sur la question gay
. Paris: Fayard, 2000.
Fassin, Eric. “L’Epouvantail américain: penser la discrimination française,”
Vacarme
, no. 4–5 (1997).
Formond, Thomas.
Les Discriminations fondées sur l’orientation sexuelle en droit privé
. Doctoral thesis on private law. Université de Paris X–Nanterre, 2002.
Herman, Didi.
Rights of Passage: Struggles for Lesbian and Gay Legal Equality
. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1994.
Leroy-Forgeot, Flora, and Caroline Mécary.
Le PaCS
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000.
Mécary, Caroline, and Géraud de La Pradelle.
Les Droits des homosexuels
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998.
Gross, Martine, ed.
Homoparentalités, état des lieux, parentés et différence des sexes
. Paris: ESF, 2000.
Newton, David.
Gay and Lesbian Rights: A Reference Handbook (Contemporary World Issues)
. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1994.
Tin, Louis-Georges, ed.
Homosexualités, expression/répression
. Paris: Stock, 2000.
Watts, Tim.
Gay Couples and the Law: A Bibliography
. Public Administrations Series P-2810. Monticello, IL: Vance, 1990.
—Adoption; Closet, the; Criminalization; Decriminalization (France); European Law; Insult; Jurisprudence; Marriage; Parenting; Privacy; Tolerance; Workplace.
DISCRIMINATORY LAW.
See
Discrimination
DISEASE.
See
Medicine
DURAS, Marguerite
Writer Marguerite Duras (1914–96) was born in French Indochina (now Vietnam), where her parents had moved in response to a French government campaign encouraging citizens to work in the colony. In 1932 at the age of eighteen, she went to France, where she began to study mathematics, but then switched to political science, and finally to law. After finishing her studies, she joined the Communist Party of France, and got involved in the French resistance during World War II. In the 1950s, she became the darling of literary Paris, accumulating one success after another—
Un barrage contre le Pacifique
(published in English as
The Sea Wall
),
Moderato Cantabile
(same title in English),
Le Ravissement de Lol. V. Stein
(
The Ravishing of Lol Stein
),
Le Vice-Consul
(
The Vice Consul
), and
L’Amant
(
The Lover
), the last for which she received the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984. The opacity of life, the difficulty of existence, the torpor of desire never realized—these sum up the recurring themes in her diverse
oeuvre
.
At the same time, Duras constituted an interesting case of homophobia, for two reasons. First of all, she displayed a type of feminine (but not feminist) homophobia, based on a concept of woman that is both exalted and restrictive. In her view, a woman was only able to connect with her true nature through a relationship with a man and a bond with a child; it was only in this manner that she could achieve the glorious joy of being. “I do not see passion as anything but heterosexual, thunderous and brief,” she once declared, and as her biographer Laure Adler noted, “in [Duras’] opinion, childless women were not real women,” a narrowly
heterosexist
point of view that correlated to a hostility toward homosexuals in general. Duras’ close friends were often struck by the virulence with which she regularly attacked those “
sales pédés
” (“dirty queers”), justifying her
insults
with paradoxical allegations: “I see in the seeming softness of homosexuality the provocation of violence.”
The irony of fate would be that in 1980, Marguerite Duras fell in love with Yann Andréa Steiner, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was gay. This final passion of her life, and its accompanying contradictions, provided the subject matter for several of her books. Notably, 1982’s
La Maladie de la mort
(
The Malady of Death
) included the strange scene of a man who was trying for the first time to make love to a woman, who cruelly observes: “You don’t love anything or anyone; you don’t even love the difference you think you embody. The only grace you know is from the bodies of the dead, of those just like you.”
Beginning with its title,
The Malady of Death
combines two themes common to homophobic rhetoric: to the individual, homosexuality is an illness, and to society, it represents the
peril
of death. Through the gauze of the novel’s beautiful language, Duras, by her own admission, tried to impose her negative views of homosexuality on readers. For those (and they were many) who had missed the lessons contained in the novel, she set out a laborious explanation in another book, 1987’s
La Vie matérielle
(published in English as
Practicalities
). Describing, as it were, the advent of homosexuality, she stated: “It will be the greatest catastrophe of all time,” and that it would lead to population decreases until no one is left: “We will be asleep…. The death of the last man will pass unnoticed.”
Homosexuality became an object of both fascination and hatred in her work as well as in her life, and this helps to explain some of her public positions in favor of homosexuality as well as many of her statements that were hostile to gay men. Frustrated by her relationship with Steiner, she tormented him as much as she saw in him a desirable monster:
In the morning, when I hear you come downstairs, always late, always light and charming, words of vomit fill my head: “fag,” “queer,” “auntie.” That’s it, that’s him. But it seems as though you are a charming young man, about whom I ask myself why he is with me. However, you are the only person in the world who I could stand in spite of the abjection you represent to me.
Nonetheless, in 1986’s
Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
(
Blue Eyes, Black Hair
), Duras makes an attempt at a reconciliation. Employing the same kind of sparse narrative, this time she comes to a sort of resignation: “The way you detest me, it isn’t about me. It comes from God, it has to be accepted like that, respected like nature, or the sea.” Yet in the book homosexuality was no less of a theme of suffering, tears, and hatred. She tried to give shape to this painful experience for a third time with a work tentatively entitled “Le Sommeil” (Sleep), but she abandoned the project, exhausted.
Certainly, Marguerite Duras was not the most homophobic literary figure of the century; far from it. But it was her opinionated will, however desperate, to struggle, fight, and comprehend homosexuality through her writing that constitutes (with regard to homophobia) the other interesting aspect of the Duras example. Further, while her homophobia was tied to her experiences as a woman whose vocations as lover and mother were both denied by homosexuality, it was also a source of literary influence, albeit profoundly ambiguous. In public, her crude
heterosexism
led her to make declarations that were quite violent, and at times, quite stupid. (For example, she refused to acknowledge Roland Barthes as a master of thinking for the simple reason of his homosexuality.) In her work, on the other hand, her homophobia is evidenced (and thus distanced) in a way that was poetic and contained, and thus embraced by many fans, including homosexuals.
—
Louis-Georges Tin
Adler, Laure.
Marguerite Duras
. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. [Published in the US as
Maguerite Duras: A Life
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.]
Duras, Marguerite.
La Maladie de la mort
. Paris: Minuit, 1982. [Published in the US as
The Malady of Death
. NewYork: Grove Press, 1986.]
———.
Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
. Paris: Minuit, 1986. [Published in the US as
Blue Eyes, Black Hair
. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.]
———.
La Vie matérielle
. Paris: POL, 1987. [Published in the US as
Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour
. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.]
———.
Yann Andréa Steiner
. Paris: POL, 1992. [Published in the US as
Yann Andréa Steiner
. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2006.]
Eribon, Didier.
Papiers d’identité
. Paris: Fayard, 2000.
—Feminism (France); Gender Differences; Heterosexism; Literature; Rhetoric.
EASTERN EUROPE.
See
Europe, Eastern & Central
EMPLOYMENT.
See
Workplace
ENDOCRINOLOGY
In 1912, while looking for incontestable scientific proof for his theory of the third sex, Magnus
Hirschfeld
claimed the existence of “gandrin” and “gynecin,” hormones behind the principles of male and female. This hypothesis was formulated in the context of new scientific knowledge that led to the creation of the field of endocrinology, which deals with disorders of the endocrine system and its secretions known as hormones. Much of this knowledge was originated by physiologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard, who was one of the first to identify the existence of hormones, which led to the therapeutic use of organ extracts to treat disorders. Supported by the scientific autonomy earned by physiologists during the early nineteenth century, interest in this new field turned almost immediately to the sexual glands. In an 1893 report to the French Academy of Sciences, Brown-Séquard made claims of the physiological and therapeutic attributes of a liquid extracted from the testicles which had a positive effect on an impressive list of pathologies, ranging from influenza to cancer, and from gangrene to hysteria.
And so began the quest for the sexual hormones, which was finally accomplished between 1923 and 1934 with the discovery of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. However, in 1929, a relatively unexpected discovery was also made at the same time by Ernst Laqueuer at the University of Amsterdam, who identified the presence of female sexual hormones in the urine of “normal, healthy” men. This fact, confirmed in 1934 by an article in
Nature
magazine that revealed evidence of a significant amount of estrogen in the urine of a stallion, naturally lent credibility to the idea of an intermediary gender, and to the concept that homosexuality was the result of an imbalance between male and female hormones. The theory enjoyed immediate success. On one hand, it fit perfectly into previously established knowledge, confirming the theories of
inversion
and precisely locating the female factor in men and the male factor in women. On the other hand, hormonal theory (finally) paved the way for new therapies that were far less nebulous than those attempted by psychotherapy.
Clinical trials on homosexuals based on the new principle of hormonal rebalancing sometimes led to rather comical situations, such as the essay published by Doctors J. C. Glass and W. Johnson in the
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology
in 1944, which concluded that the treatment had not only failed in eight cases (being successful in only three), but that all eight ended up with increased homosexual impulses! But this amusing anecdote should not conceal the fact that many homosexuals became guinea pigs for endocrinologists during this period. Testing the new theories under the guise of therapy sometimes led to grave consequences, not to mention that the purity of many of the hormonal extracts with which subjects were injected, at least at first, were not exactly “ideal.” More dramatically, it was in the framework of this therapeutic research that the Danish endocrinologist Carl Vaernet, encouraged by Nazi SS leader Heinrich
Himmler
, tested the implantation of an “artificial male gland,” which administered testosterone into the bloodstream over a prolonged period of time. In fact, endocrinology was the basis for numerous serious attempts at “curing” homosexuality, including ones that were carried out in the United States as recently as the 1960s. Nonetheless, the endocrinologists’ lack of their success meant that they failed to prove their hypothese, and therefore they have never really threatened the hegemony held by
psychiatry
on the subject.
—
Pierre-Olivier de Busscher