The Dictionary of Homophobia (68 page)

Homophobic prejudices in Germany, though largely in retreat, have not disappeared entirely. In February and March of 1991, Michael Bochow, in association with the GFM-GETAS Institute of Hamburg, completed a survey on anti-gay attitudes among some 1,000 residents each of the former East and West Germany. While 65% of West Germans and 69% of East Germans claimed to be indifferent to “someone’s sexual orientation”—statistics which demonstrated progress compared to an earlier survey in 1974—there were still many who said they were in favor of social and professional discrimination against gay men. The proportion of those hostile toward homosexuals was notably higher among those who were members of a conservative political party or who were affiliated with a church, as well as those who had been lower in status in the former GDR. In total, at least one-third of the population was strongly hostile to homosexuals and another one-third was ambivalent. While the lessening of anti-homosexual attitudes can be linked to increasing secularization, individualist attitudes, and a decreased interest in the idea of moral standards, the persistence of homophobic prejudices is undoubtedly linked to the relatively low visibility of homosexuals, notably in the
media
, and the continued importance placed on “traditional” male and female roles. The
AIDS
epidemic has furthermore contributed, as in other countries, to the revival of old fears. In 1983, the tabloid
Der Spiegel
ran the following headline: “AIDS, the fatal epidemic. The mysterious illness.” Such proclamations opened the door to hysteria and the likening of the virus to a “curse from God.” However, the last few years have seen significant progress: in June 2001, Klaus Wowereit (of the SPD), who had publicly announced his homosexuality, became mayor of Berlin. Since August 2001, homosexual couples are now officially recognized through the contracting of a “declared partnership,” which affords almost the same rights as
marriage
, even if certain
Länder
(states) such as Bavaria are more hesitant. The very delicate issue of recognizing the “pink triangles” of the Nazi era has not yet been resolved. For the first time, on April 23, 1995, a representative of the gay and lesbian community was authorized to present a speech during official government ceremonies. A plaque in homage to gay and lesbian victims of Nazism was inaugurated in Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz in 1989, and the construction of a monument is now completed. It wasn’t until November 2000 that the German government officially apologized to gays and lesbians for the persecution they suffered under the Third Reich. However, to this day, only the Green Party has declared itself in favor of compensating homosexual victims of Nazism.

—
Florence Tamagne

Anonymous. “A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records.” In
Historical Perspectives on Homosexuality
. Edited by in Salvatore J. Licata and Robert P. Petersen. New York: Haworth Press, 1981.

Anonymous.
Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850–1950
. Berlin: Hentrich, 1992.

Bochow, Michael. “Attitudes et appréciations envers les hommes homosexuels en Allemagne de l’Ouest et en Allemagne de l’Est.” Translated by Pierre Dutey.
http://www.europrofem.org/02.info/22con-tri/2.07.fr/livr_dwl/peur/dwlpeur7.htm
(site now discontinued).

Burkhard, Jellonnek.
Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz
. Paderborn: F. Schönongh, 1990

Grau, Günther, ed.
Hidden Holocaust: Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–1945
. London: Cassell, 1995.

Herzer, Manfred, ed.
Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Jähre Schwulenbewegung
. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1997.

Lautmann, Rüdiger, and Angela Taeger, eds.
Männerliebe im alten Deutschland, sozialgeschkhtliche Abhandlungen
. Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1992.

Leroy-Forgeot, Flora.
Histoire juridique de l’homosexualité en Europ
e. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.

Plant, Richard.
The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
. New York: New Republic Books/Henry Holt & Co., 1986.

Schoppmann, Claudia.
Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität
. Berlin: Centaurus, 1991.

Steakley, James D.
The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
. New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Tamagne, Florence.
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe, Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–
1939. Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. [Published in the US as
A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
. New York: Algora, 2004.]

—Armed Forces; Caricature; Censorship; Communism; Deportation; Discrimination; Eulenburg Affair, the; Fascism; Himmler, Heinrich; Hirschfeld, Magnus; Media; Medicine; Police; Scandal; Violence.

GHETTO

Beginning in the Middle Ages, the section of a city reserved for Jews was known as the ghetto. At that time, it was most often a forced place of residence, surrounded by walls with doors that were locked at night. The term, which dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century, stems from the
Ghetto Novo
, Venice’s Jewish section. Jewish ghettos were discontinued, at least in Western Europe, after the French Revolution and through the nineteenth century, but in the 1920s, American sociologists from the Chicago School appropriated the word to refer to communities in American cities where those grouped by ethnicity or class, often victims of racial or social
discrimination
, came together, sometime voluntarily: for example, blacks, Italians, and the poor. The word “ghetto” suggests that its inhabitants are isolated—geographically, socially, economically, and even culturally—from the dominant society that surrounds them. After World War II and mostly since the 1960s, large North American cities have seen the formation of specific areas catering to an exclusively homosexual clientele (usually male), marked by a high concentration of bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and other commercial establishments. Homosexuals have often chosen to reside in these areas as well, thus creating urban sectors that sociologists, and even gays themselves, have started to refer to as “gay ghettos”: for example, Greenwich Village and Chelsea in New York, Castro Street in San Francisco, West Hollywood in Los Angeles, and the “Village” in Montreal. The same phenomenon occurred in Europe: in the section of Paris known as the Marais, gay establishments have been common since 1979, and the area is now known as Paris’s gay ghetto. Nevertheless, the expression also has negative connotations. In 1995, journalist Tim Madesclaire wrote that the gay ghetto is “the place where a minority is separated from the rest of society. This means that it is closed-in on itself, in a marginal condition. The ghetto acts as a geographic metaphor of the gay condition.” A large number of gays, on the other hand, consider the Marais to be a liberating place where they can openly express their sexuality and live and act as they choose. For them, the ghetto is what makes a gay community.

Such opposing viewpoints is why the gay ghetto is today very much a disputed phenomenon in France, where some view any distinctions made between various groups (whether based on ethnicity, class, or sexuality) as a threat to the French “republican tradition” which emphasizes the unity and indissolubility of the national identity, and which tends to deny the existence (or at least to minimize the importance) of individual or group differences within that identity. For those who criticize it, the gay ghetto represents
communitarianism
, tribalism, and a “refusal of the universal,” symbolizing the fragmentation of the French Republic and the degradation of urban life in Paris.

Thus, Jean-Robert Pitte, a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, writes in
Le Quartier du Marais: Déclin, renaissance, avenir
(1997):

Born in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and London, (gay) ghettoization has reached Paris…. The development of ghettos is obviously dangerous, being so opposed to sociability and urbanity…. Just as a nation, a city can only last if it allows different populations to live together and assimilates new arrivals and minorities…. The real notion of city is negated when authorities accept and even encourage ethnic or more commonly cultural aggregation…. No one dares to venture outside their minuscule territory.

Denunciation of the gay ghetto and communitarianism often leads to expressions of patented homophobia. In the 1990s, non-homosexual residents of the Marais led a campaign opposing the gay ghettoization of the area, believing that “no normally constituted citizen, being gay or heterosexual, can approve the multiplication of these specialized bars.” Their complaints struck a chord with certain municipal authorities. In 1996, the
police
led a short-lived harassment campaign of gay bars, including the removal of rainbow flags adorning their storefronts. Suggesting that “grouped and almost systematic opposition to large dimensioned insignia could lead to hostile reactions,” the police asked gay merchants to “moderate outdoor signage of their community belonging, which was the only way to ensure harmonious cohabitation with the neighborhood.” In 1997, Pierre-Charles Krieg, mayor of the fourth borough in Paris, wrote that the affirmation of the Marais as a gay ghetto “would certainly be a windfall for extremists of all sides and a lucrative bargain for ‘money makers’ but also surely a sign of failure and hopelessness [at the expense of] this [gay] community.” And Dominique Bertinotti, a councilwoman of the borough, declared: “In Paris, we have been pretending to ignore this phenomenon for years.… My position has always been very clear: I am hostile to it.”

One must point out that not all critics of the gay ghetto are heterosexual. Arcadie, the main gay (then called “homophile”)
association
in France from 1954 to 1982, and highly conservative in its attitude and politics (it specifically noted that homosexuals need to be “respectable” and “dignified”), systematically denounced the gay ghetto. In an article published in 1964 entitled “The Gravest Danger,” a member of Arcadie denounced American society as “sick” and “poorly integrated” because it was composed of “a multitude of groups and sub-groups”:

Homosexuals from over there are in the mist of constituting a separate society, a small artificial world, very closed, very oppressive, where everything would be gay: not only bars, restaurants, cinemas, but also houses, streets (in New York, there are already streets that are inhabited almost exclusively by homosexuals), and wards.… A world where one could live one’s entire life without seeing anyone other than other homosexuals, without knowing anything other than homosexuality. In Europe, this is called ghettos. And we violently reject this idea. We have nothing in common with that. We hate this false, ill-omened, grotesque conception of homosexuality Our ideal is a perfect integration of homosexual love in society, in all sectors. We must emphasize all that brings together the gay person and non-gays, not what separates him from them. It would be criminal on our part to artificially create a feeling of isolation among gays and to give them against their wills the false impression that they constitute an “isolated world.”

At the time when he was dissolving the Arcadie in 1982, founder André Baudry also expressed his regrets: “Today certain gays [in France] want to build a ghetto, like in San Francisco. They isolate themselves from the national collectivity. Our doctrine was to meld with the collectivity.”

But some gay radicals of the 1970s and 80s, even the rugged adversaries of Baudry and his conservative views, were also hostile to the concept of the gay ghetto. Members of the Front homosexuels d’action révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Action Gay Front; 1971– 73) in Paris denounced what they called the “merchant ghetto,” the gay bars and nightclubs of St-Germain-des-Prés and Rue Ste-Anne, contending that homosexuals were being confined there, and merchants were exploiting them economically. Jean Le Bitoux, a gay activist since 1968 and founder of the magazine
Gai Pied,
wrote at the beginning of the 1980s: “I believe that the worst thing for gays is ghettoization, in which they are making up their own culture, fabricating their own identity.” Charles Myara, one of the organizers of Paris’s Gay Pride in 1999, said: “After fighting the prejudices of which they were victims, gays have withdrawn into themselves. Gay bars have bloomed [in the Marais], followed by a large number of boutiques. Gays have created their own ghetto.” In fact, a large number of homosexual men in Paris still refuse to live in the “closed circuit” (as they call the Marais), criticizing the gay conformity (in fashion, physical appearance, behavior, lifestyle) that they claim is prevalent there, and instead try to live their lives “outside the ghetto.”

This last viewpoint is important in realizing that those who oppose the concept of the gay ghetto are not necessarily homophobic, given that homosexuals themselves are at times its harshest critics. In this we find a form of “gay homophobia,” that is, a form of self-loathing, in those homosexuals who try to assimilate into the general population by losing or suppressing all visible characteristics of their lives as gay men or lesbians. Although being opposed to the gay ghetto may be perfectly legitimate, from a sincere republican perspective, this worry often seems to reinforce certain arguments of the homophobic rhetoric.
—Michael Sibalis

Galcerain, Sébastien, and Olivier Razemon. “Marais: la guerilla.”
Illico
(December 1996).

“Gay Marais: Ghetto ou village?”
Le Nouvel observateur
. (February 28–March 6, 2002).

Huyez, Guillaume. “Dix Ans de ghetto: le quartier gay dans les hebdomadaires français,”
ProChoix,
no. 22 (2002).

Levine, Martin P. “Gay Ghetto,”
Journal of Homosexuality
, no. 4 (1979).

Mades-Claire, Tim. “Le Ghetto gay, en être ou pas?”
Illico
(1995).

Martel, Frédéric.
Le Rose et le noir
. Paris: Le Seuil, 1996. [Published in the US as
The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968
. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999.]