The Dictionary of Homophobia (61 page)

The end of the nineteenth century also saw the beginning of the development of
lesbophobia
. Paradoxically, it seemed to diminish among the
bambocheurs
(party crowd); the spread of recreational heterosexuality promoted the
Sapphic
theme in literature, as witnessed by Pierre Louys’
Chansons de Bilitis,
in 1894, but also in pornography and high-level prostitution, which feeds polygamous fantasies of dejected males. This empowerment of lesbianism in the homophobic unconscious left traces up to today: it is still an excellent criterion of “
beaufisme
” (“between men, it disgusts me, but between women, I do not refuse,” explained sport journalist Thierry Roland). The end of the nineteenth century, however, also saw the emergence of the lesbian threat theme, global society being threatened by perversion. Warnings multiplied, as in Julien Chevalier’s medical 1885 textbook,
De l’inversion de l’instinct sexuel
(On the inversion of the sexual instinct), or with the vaguely sociological pretension of Ali Coffignon’s
Paris vivant: la corruption à Paris
(1889) and Léo Taxil’s
La corruption fin de siècle
(1891; The Corruption at the end of the century). In the same era, certain medical doctors pretended to “cure” lesbianism by clitoris ablation.

The first utterance of homosexual expression at the beginning of the twentieth century, then from the First World War, with growing visibility of gays, challenging sexual roles, and de-naturalizing sexual identities, resulted in an upsurge of homophobia. From its origin, the Olympic movement produced homophobic residue: according to Pierre de Coubertin in his
Essais de psychologie sportive,
1913 (Essays on sports psychology), “psychoneuroses are characterized by a kind of disappearance of the virile sensibility and only
sport
can restore and affirm it.” Literature for the general public associated homosexuality with decadence (Gustave Binet-Valmer:
Lucien,
1909,
Sur le sable couchées,
1929; Willy et Menalkas:
L’Ersatz d’amour,
1923; Charles-Etienne:
Notre-Dame-de-Lesbos
and
Les Désexués,
1924; Victor Margueritte:
La Garçonne,
1922; Charles-Noël Renard:
Les Androphobes,
1930). The conservative literary critics of the interwar years regularly admonished the invasion of the homosexual theme in literature (in
Le Temps,
October 23, 1931, André Thérive talked about “baneful propagandism”) and the satirical magazine
Fantasio,
which published between 1906 and the middle of the 1930s a large number of gay
caricatures
, affirming that it was defending heterosexual bawdiness, a healthy element of an endangered national heritage. The right wing of the 1920s and 30s saw homosexuality as an important factor in depopulation: for it, gays, women who work, and abortionists were the main people responsible for the weakening of the country. As for lesbianism, it was often assimilated into
feminism
by its detractors, as proven by rumors circulated about the radical feminist Madeleine Pelletier or the media treatment of the accused in the Marthe Hanau affair in 1928–32.

Homosexuality brought up for many an image of foreign behavior: in the Belle Epoque
,
Dr Laupts (Georges St-Paul’s alias, friend of Emile Zola) maintained against Raffalovitch that it was very rare in France, that “inversion is unknown in most regions, and the large majority of French people ignore the existence of this tendency; French people who heard of it expressed an extreme repulsion toward it”; and Dr Riolan, in
Pédérastie et homosexualité
(1909), contended with a straight face that Greeks were gay because their wives were ugly, but because French women were very beautiful, homosexuality could not develop in their country. In the nineteenth century, it was often called “Arabic behavior.” Around 1910, the many works on homosexuality and the unveiling of the
Eulenburg
affair
in Germany brought forth the adoption of the expression “German vice,” that held until World War II (this premise explains why French newspapers covered the homophobic policies of Nazism so badly, repeating until 1940 refrains from the Weimar Republic on “Berlin, the New
Sodom
”). England was not spared by this savage ethno-sexology:
Fantasio
maintained in 1927 that one quarter of English men were gay, the same fantasist proportion was taken up by French Prime Minister Edith Cresson sixty years later.

In the 1920s and 30s, the name that focuses the most animosity and the homophobic hate of do-gooders in France is André
Gide
. Anti-Gidism became a durable ingredient of French homophobia, having crystallized in the enormous scandal produced by
Corydon
in 1924–25. In this essay, Gide had taken the other side of the numerous prejudgments: he affirmed that gays were not necessarily effeminate and could make excellent soldiers, that pederasty (love of teenagers and very young people; the age of majority was then thirteen) offered an excellent solution to protect young girls from prostitution and venereal diseases and that its emotional richness made it a real preparation to responsibilities of marriage and
family
. In short, pederasty was not a calamity but a benefit to French society. The reaction of physicians and psychologists was immediate and violent: Dr François Nazier published
L’Anti-Corydon
as early as 1924 (with the epigraph, “Nature holds Gide in horror”); Angelo Hesnard did the same in
Psychologie homosexuelle
(1929). These authors refused to admit that homosexuality could be healthy or honorable. For them, gays were immature beings, particularly when they refused to admit that they are sick, and Gide was a very dangerous misleader of youth. Beyond the medical world, the Catholic Right unleashed itself against Gide in the name of family rights and the future of France. The poet and dramatist diplomat Paul Claudel, particularly horrified, wrote to him: “If you are not a pederast, why is this strange predilection for this type of subjects? And if you are one, unfortunate being, heal yourself and do not spread these abominations.” In 1931, Claudel launched a homophobic boycott, ending his collaboration with renowned actor Louis Jouvet when Jouvet took it upon himself to direct
Un Taciturne
(A silent man)
,
a play by Martin du Gard featuring some representations of homosexuality. General de Castelnau and Member of Parliament Henri Roulleaux-Dugage took advantage of the
Corydon
scandal to re-apply for the “family vote,” to denounce the egotism of unmarried people that did not prepare the future (a future so much darker since World War I left such an imbalanced sex ratio), and to implore women to come back to their natural role and to eternal femininity (for certain authors of this era, male homosexuality was caused by the multitude of domineering mothers under the influence of feminism). Those more moderate, like François Porche in
L’Amour qui n’ose pas dire son nom
(1927; The Love that dare not speak its name), maintained that homosexuality was a vice that could not coexist with love; they accused Gide of not respecting the boundaries of private life, of wanting to engage in
proselytism
and of “planting a flag” for homosexuality. For a while, there were reproaches to Gide coming from everywhere, as described by Didier Eribon, for “wanting to bring to life a gay speech on homosexuality.” This anti-Gidism was a very influential phenomenon. It painted the homosexual into a sort of monster, doggedly trying to ruin the family, in a phantasmagoria that lasted until the
PaCS
debate; it very clearly inspired the Vichy government’s 1942 law criminalizing homosexual relations with a twenty-one-year-old minor; it consistently saturated the core of the French elite and a significant part of the teaching body; and it offered common ground to the journalistic right for a long time. While Gide’s attitude was very peculiar and most gays lived hidden, it was written that pederasts were practicing
exhibitionism
and proselytism; and, on a model of imputation already used against Jewish people, it was affirmed that cultural circles were infested by this mob and that one had to be “one of them” to make it there.

Homophobia, however, did not only involve the elite of the Catholic Church or medical establishments during the interwar period. In France of the early twentieth century, there was an avant-garde of homophobia. We find it among feminists: Christine Bard demonstrated that most of them were afraid to be associated with lesbians and described them as the very enemy of woman. It is significant that the heart of Parisian lesbian life was mostly constituted of Anglo-Saxon women. Homophobia was rampant among the surrealists. (André Breton: “I accuse pederasts of bringing to human tolerance a mental and moral deficit that tends to erect itself into a system and to paralyze all enterprises that I respect.” Albert Valentin: “Pederasts disgust me more than anything in the world.” Paul Eluard: “I have the most heinous feelings for the lesbian males.”) It finally developed in the
Communists
after 1934: under Stalin’s influence, the Party resumed the refrain of “German vice” and continued to associate homosexuality with
Fascism
and the decadence of bourgeois society.

From 1942 to 1971: Homosexuality as a “Social Plague”
The Vichy Government’s family policies, hostile to republican individualism, were fundamentally homophobic: under influence of Catholicism and the
far
right
Action française
,
Vichy developed a critique of the moral liberalism and hedonist individualism which was derived from the French Revolution, declining birth rates, and declining principles. The law adopted August 6, 1942, for the first time since 1791, specifically criminalized homosexual relations: it created a new section of the penal code, Section 334, which mandated
prison
sentences for “immodest acts or acts against nature” with a minor of less than twenty-one being of the same sex as the agent. This law was clearly aimed at much loathed Gidism, but it also propped up Republican familialism of the end of the 1930s; we find here the “Republican origins of Vichy,” studied by Gérard Noiriel. The Code of the Family of 1939 and the law of January 1940 sanctioning anti-natalist propaganda had contributed to the diffusion to the public, before Vichy, of the belief in a weakening of France due to loose living. For many people, according to René Gillouin (Petain’s speech writer) France was “devastated by alcoholism, rotten from eroticism, undermined by low birth rates.” The regime meant to rectify this trend: women’s eternal femininity would anchor sexual roles, as would patriarchal structures. It was the time of the
Le Voile bleu
(
The Blue Veil
), a film released in 1942 about a woman who devotes her life to caring for children, projecting for the feminization of feminine education, and efforts for the virilization of elites.

This being said, Vichy did not send gays to death as was rumored (in France, the only deported gays were from Alsace-Moselle, a territory directly under the rule of Paragraph 175 of the German penal code between 1940 and 1944).

Vichy’s homophobia became a key element of postwar familialism consensus: the content of the 1942 law ended up in the 1945 ordinance. At Liberation, policy-makers moved to institutionalize heterosexual familialism, which was maintained until the 1990s: defense of family was written in the 1946 constitution, the Union nationale des associations familiales became continuous influence on public authority, and other essential agencies aimed to defend family structure (Union nationale des caisses d’allocations familiales, Haut conseil de la population et de la famille, and Ministère de la population et de la famille). There was from then on an important family lobby, much more powerful than before the war. This lobby summarized the Church family doctrine (founded on an esoteric concept of family and very hostile to the individual) and state familialism (more pragmatic, aiming to fight lower birth rates and help large families). In 1946, Emmanuel Mounier, a leader of the Catholic intelligentsia, published the homophobic doctrine in his
Traité du caractère
.

In the political sphere, Christian democrats, Communists, and Gaullists shared the same conception of family, kinship, and good morals, and an unquestioned homophobia. The unprecedented power of the French Communist Party inside of the left, the fact that Centrism was from then on a lot more Christian democrat than radical (while the Popular Republican Movement often played the role of “Pétainist’s recycling machine”), the moral caution that Gaullism gave to the least appealing ideas of the hardest right, all combined to bring about particularly devastating effects. The years 1945–68 were thus the “era of combat” in the law. The 1945 Ordinance, making Section 334 of Vichy, Sections 331-32 of the new penal code, penalized “immodest acts against nature with a minor”; the law of July 16, 1949 on publications aimed at youth limited the distribution of gay literary works and publications; the 1960 Ordinance, creating Sections 330– 32, factored in an aggravated punishment in cases of public homosexual immodest offences; and finally in 1968, France officially adopted the World Health Organization classification that made homosexuality a mental disease. Gays thus became second-class citizens, at best tolerated and without any possibility of protestation or free expression, which was clearly expressed by
Mirguet
’s 1960 amendment. Everywhere, enactments reminded homosexuals that the social order is heterosexual and that they must live hidden. Until 1982, the Tenancies Act stipulated that tenants had to occupy their housing units as “good patresfamilias”; until 1983, public servants had to be of “good behavior and good morality”; and from the end of the 1940s to the end of the 60s, police ordinances prohibited gender impersonators and dancing of two same-sex individuals in public places.

This legal battery is accompanied by a reinforcing of public fears: Alfred Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,
published in the United States in 1948, was immediately translated into French and led to the perception that gays were much more numerous than previously thought. Chiefly under the effect of the circulation of the Freudian thesis of “infantile blockage” (promulgated by most women’s magazines, many popularizing medicine books and the increasing numbers of childhood development professionals), homosexuality was more and more perceived as the result of an error of education. The feelings of parental responsibilities then became enormous, to the extent that it was social catastrophe to have a gay child. In the middle and upper classes, parents felt obliged to watch more closely over children’s play, discourage cross-dressing, offer toy weapons to boys and dolls to girls, and refrain from having too strong a relationship develop between sons and mothers.