Gay pride in France
Over the last three or four years, the lesbian/gay movement in France has become a steadily more active force. Jean-Louis Touton LAST YEAR 80,000 PEOPLE-LESBIANS, GAYS, or people committed to equal rights and fighting against the "moral order"- demonstrated in Paris. Many demonstrations took place in the provinces as well. Again this year, the struggle is becoming steadily broader, the movement's tabric is getting stronger, and lesbian, gay and bisexual people are acquiring the means to have an impact on issues that concern them.
Lesbian and Gay Pride (at the end of June) has become a social and political phenomenon, bringing together discussions, festivals, and shows of force. The minimal victories that have been won-reductions for gay couples on the railways; the brand-new possibility of registering domestic partnerships at (some) left-wing city halls and even a few (secular, republican, liberal-inspired) right-wing city halls—would have been impossible without the relationship of forces that the lesbian/gay movement has created
The Gay and Lesbian Centre in Paris is always full. Each month new groups are formed to represent one interest or another. It may be useful to mention those among them that seem most political and militant. The movement landscape
SOS Homophobia was born two years ago from the desire to create a hotline against homophobic violence in France. An article in the daily Libération bears witness to the importance of this kind of watchdog institution, faced with a resurgence of anti-gay violence from the police. In the Marais, a consumerist Paris neighbourhood where gays are wellestablished, the rainbow flags that have spread from the US movement to the rest of the world have had to be removed from street windows. Right-wing, openly puritanical associations are calling for "law and order". , with all the discriminatory practices that that implies: police checks in the bars, insults, humiliation of gay people and people with AIDS.
It's already been several months since, without much reaction from the parliamentary ranks of the official left, rightwing minister Toubon publicly ridiculed the proposal for a cohabitation agreement (whose name keeps being changed) that would be open to people without regard to sex or sexual orientation. In the good old bourgeois, Catholic (or Stalinist) tradition, Toubon explained that all this could only "disturb public order". Who protested? Who got upset? Not even as many people as joined with ACT UP to try to save an undocumented
"Gay Pride," Paris 1993 Zairean, Marie-Louise, from deportation. (Sick herself, Marie-Louise has an HIVpositive French child who's being treated in France.) This is why the Gay and Lesbian Centre has to continue centralising information from all the gay groups and, together with Lesbian and Gay Pride, create the tools to amplify the collective force that it
Then there are the Research and Study Group on Homosociability and Homo sexualities (GREH) and ZOO. a brand-new group working on the social construction of gender: the sexed identity disconnected from biological sex through which identity can be redefined beyond the reductive polarities of masculine and feminine, gay and straight. They are working to bring to France the USoriginated problematics of gay/lesbian/ women/gender studies and the gay and feminist academic left across the Atlantic. They are sponsoring a seminar together on "imaginative and symbolic strategies in the age of AIDS". Gay Europe heads for Paris
Of course, the lesbian/gay movement operates on a European scale. After this year's Europride demonstration in Copenhagen, next year it will be Paris turn to welcome an expected 200,000 lesbian/gay pride participants. But while Copenhagen, like New York two years ago during the lesbian/ gay march on the UN, participated by providing space and financing exhibitions, Paris City Hall contents itself with asking for discretion so that homophobes will not be confirmed in their intolerance. In short, the right in power in Paris and in France, taking their cue from the lamentable inaction of the
France * various SP governments, are worsening a bit a situation that was already completely untenable.
For this reason, the theme of lesbian and gay pride this year is recognition for lesbian/ gay couples. The major battle is thus for democratic rights and citizens' rights, which we support without hesitation, along with extension to lesbians and gays of all the "universal" rights traditionally reserved for straights (insemination, adoption, etc.). It is urgent to mobilise the radical left and social movements in order to support this struggle, which is beginning with its own specific, unknown and often misunderstood mode of expression: asking real questions about this society of exclusion, "moral order" and discrimination. Links between oppressed groups can and must be strengthened. This is something that ZOO is trying to do: blaze a trail for new political practices on the part of the social movements, in a world where the form and content of struggles is changing profoundly Tension on the left
The Marxists of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) were the first to protect gay contingents in an organized way, deploying its marshals in 1970s May Day marches to protect gay demonstrators against the cops and (Communist-led) CGT trade unionists. The LCR has tried and often succeeded in avoiding every kind of macho workerism. We have always acknowledged the political priority of carrying on the feminist fight. But it's true that in the last fifteen years, since the dissolution of the LCR's national lesbian/gay commission, the end of lesbian/gay commissions in the trade unions, and the physical death from AIDS of many gay leaders in the 1980s and '90s (including some of the most radical figures, like Foucault, Hocquenghem and many others), we have like the rest of the left neglected this fight. Even if it has taken an integrationist form today, the lesbian/gay movement lays the basis for a different kind of society, and particularly for new social relationships, often focussing on the critique of the very idea of power.
In fact, in order to counter the subversive effect of the lesbian/gay couple, the dominant morality often need only depict the world in terms of redesigned binary oppositions. Instead of men and women, we now hear about actives and passives, "diesel dykes" and "queens". We have to reject these categories, or rather re-integrate them into a politicised culture, form of expression, and esthetic project that plays with gendered identity. ZOO has imported from the US one of the most subversive forms of political combat of the last thirty years: queer culture.
For ZOO, "visibility is nothing without
November 1996 #282 17