The other purpose the author expresses in his prologue is "to deal with male homosexuality and female homosexuality" and try to analyse the dynamic relationship between book notes the gay and women's movements. Curiously, the relationship between these two movements has been analysed very little in France.? Martel's disappointing treatment of this subject makes us regret all the more that it has not been dealt with more elsewhere. Intellectual fraud
The truth is that Martel's book, despite its 400 pages and tons of notes, does not fulfil these lofty ambitions, any more than it has won over the lesbian/gay movement's past and present activists. As many of them have stressed in numerous debates organised since the book came out, this history of lesbians and gay men in France is an intellectual fraud. It personalises the gay movement's theoretical debates and actions to excess; it fails to analyse, still less understand the social movements of the 1970s; it overestimates some forces and underestimates others (particularly far-left organisations); it fetishises high culture (great writers and film directors). The author does not "follow" history, he dresses it up and makes it ridiculous for his own ends. In this way his "false revelation" that gays reacted with denial to the AIDS epidemic in the mid1980s becomes for Martel the shining example of the gay "communitarian deviation", his book's central argument.
In whose name does Martel speak? From what vantage point today does he pass judgement on others' actions, thoughts and behaviour? What is the moral of his story? What are his historical and sociological methods? People blame Martel not so much for the position he takes but for his dishonesty in imposing his position on the facts, without ever making clear to the reader which is which.
The way he uses numerous quotations thoughout the book — a very French intellectual practice — often adds nothing to his argument and in many cases is even suspect. For example, Martel finds the history of the Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front (FHAR) particularly difficult. Born in action — from an Act Up-style zap against a TV broadcast called "Homosexuality: This Painful Problem" 3 — FHAR's achievement