-by Jean Le Bitoux
"It might be said that everything that marks the breadth of today's French homosexual movement was initiated between 1975 and 1978." - Le Bitoux
FHAR (Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action) was the result of shame ripening into anger. It was able to emerge politically only in the aftermath of the student insurrection and labor strikes of May 1968. It was an unexpected and historic opportunity for the rebellious young homosexual that I then was, but it was spoiled for me when I observed that competing factions disagreed irremediably over both form and content, as much over the way we homosexuals should appear to others as over how we should express the social injustice of which we were victims (p. 249 - Le Bitoux).
I participated in the events of May 1968 in Bordeaux and not on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter. I was a co-founder of FHAR, but in Nice and not in Paris. FHAR's political program, which denounced all authorities and all 'micro-fascisms,' as Felix Guattari put it, may have consisted of nothing more than declarations and denunciations. Nonetheless, FHAR existed as a movement only by its taking a position. Its collapse in 1973 left an entire generation forlorn and adrift, unable to do anything else but return to cruising in the dangerous Tuileries gardens, on the terrace of the Cafe de Flore, at Arcadie's Saturday evening dances, where one had to behave respectably, or in the expensive nightclubs of the rue Sainte-Anne (p. 250).
Meetings started up again in 1975 at the Jussieu campus of the University of Paris. The GLH (Homosexual Liberation Group) had been founded (p. 251).
Certainly, the FHAR was dead, but it was necessary to keep alive at least the best part of its political message, while adapting it to new times...The public image of the homosexual was still mainly bourgeois, most homosexuals still felt ashamed of their orientation, and French intellectuals still grandly ignored the whole question, whereas they talk endlessly of it today (p. 252).
There were 'commando' operations, like the one in November 1977 in response to a homophobic incident at a cafe on the boulevard Saint-Germain (the owner had kicked out two men for exchanging a kiss). Several dozen of us showed up at the cafe after one of our general assemblies at the Jussieu campus. We ordered our drinks, then explained to the owner why we refused to pay for them. Then the windows shattered. The waiters and the guard dogs were unable to catch us (p. 253).
We also formed discussion groups, like the one that studied the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray or Sheila Rowbotham - gays and lesbians together in an alliance that would later fall apart (p. 253).
Once we had opened negotiations with journalists, we were able to place a large number of articles in the French dailies and weeklies between 1976 and 1978...(p. 253).
...As for the Communist Party, since the day when its general secretary Jacques Duclos told homosexuals to get psychiatric treatment in the early 1970s, Pierre Juquin, the party's spokesman, explained in the columns of Le Nouvel Observateur why homosexuals, who polluted the noble demonstrations of the Left, had nothing at all to do with the worker's movement (p. 255).
...But for promises to become acts, there had to be a veritable electric shock coming from the homosexuals themselves, mobilized by the GLH-PQ. Such was the first Gay Pride celebration in 1977. SUch were the homosexual candidacies in the municipal elections at Aix-en-Provence in 1977, and especially the legislative elections in Paris in March 1978. Such too, was the Pagoda Affair in January 1978, which involved the banning of a homosexual film festival, a fascist attack, the arrest of a delegation sent to the Ministry of Culture, petitions by prestigious personalities, and finally a riot on the rue Sainte-Anne. Within a few short weeks, a page in French homosexual history would be decisively turned (p. 255).
The festival held at the Pagoda theatre in January 1978 took place in a relatively tense political context. The Minister of Culture refused to authorize the showing of an important number of gay films, including Jean Genet's Chant d'Amour.
In January 1978, I placed an anonymous announcement in the columns of Libération that there would be a protest demonstration that midnight. Remembering Christopher Street some nine years earlier, we occupied the Rue Sainte-Anne with its chic nightclubs, its hustlers, its bathhouses, and its leather bars, in brief, the falsely gay and hypocritically fashionable showcase for Parisian homosexuality. I was hoping for - we all were hoping for - a French 'Christopher Street,' but this nighttime riot could not go very far (p. 257).
...I launched my political campaign in the March 1978 legislative elections with Guy Hocquenghem. It was a unique event in the history of the French homosexual movement (p. 258).
What kind of reformist gains did the GLH-PQ make? (p. 259)
What was happening to the homosexual map of Paris during this during this time? (p. 260)
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