Queer Sites

Gay Urban Histories Since 1600

David Higgs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415158978
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134724673
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

There are areas which can be described as gay space in that they have many lesbians and gays in the population. Queerspace: A History of Urban Sexuality, edited by David Higgs, offers a history of gay space in the major cities form the early modern period to the present. The book focuses on the changing nature of queer experience in London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janiero, San Francisco, Paris, Lisbon and Moscow.
This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of extensive source material, including diaries, poems, legal accounts and journalism. By concentrating the importance of the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches, the contributors explore the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt by those who used this space and their individual histories.

1 Paris

Michael D. Sibalis

‘Refugees from Sodom. – We know that the biblical fire did not destroy all the inhabitants of this corrupt city. Scattered over all the earth, they proliferated in Paris.…’

(La Petite Revue, 15 October 1864)

Space, visibility and the gay identity

In 1895, André Raffalovich drew public attention to the clandestine homosexual subculture of Paris and other European urban centers with the warning that ‘[e] very where… Sodom exists, venal and menacing, the invisible city’ (Raffalovich 1895: 447). One hundred years later, on Saturday afternoon, 24 June 1995, 80,000 Parisians celebrated la Lesbian and Gay Pride – the international commemoration of the Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York City – with a parade along the boulevards of the Left Bank. Banners and placards raised high, balloons and flags afloat overhead and music blasting from a hundred loudspeakers, the jubilant crowd of men and women made its way along the 4-kilometer route from the Montparnasse Railway Station to the Place de la Bastille.

Parisians have observed Gay Pride in this way every June since 1982, but until recently the number of participants rarely exceeded 5,000–10,000. The unprecedented turnout in 1995 therefore marked a turning-point for France's gay community. ‘Visible we chose to be…’ exulted one gay journalist at the time. ‘And numerous we were…’ (Muhleisen 1995). Subsequent demonstrations have been even bigger. In 1996, 120,000 people showed up, and twice that number marched during the Europride celebrations of 1997, when (in the words of a leading newspaper) Paris became, for a few days at least, ‘the European capital of homosexual visibility.’¹ Clearly, the denizens of Raffalovich's ‘invisible city’ have taken ‘visibility’ as their watchword.

Visibility is a very recent objective for French homosexuals. For many centuries, homosexually inclined men and women usually preferred to conceal their unconventional desires from a hostile society. Today's gay visibility is the culmination of a long process by which homosexuals not only created and expanded private gay space, but also struggled to secure a share of public space. This effort to appropriate urban space for sexual activity has been the work of gay men in particular, whereas lesbians have tended to be more discreet and more private in the conduct of their sexual lives.

A sociological study of contemporary French male homosexuals published in 1984 has pointed out the paradoxes inherent in gay men's strategic use of urban space: ‘Space is a very complicated thing.…Because space is defined by an inside and outside, it excludes and includes, encloses and liberates.’ Closed and private space – like clandestine or semi-clandestine commercial venues, but also personal networks of friends and acquaintances – protects, but at the cost of isolating men from the outside world. And yet closed space also creates new possibilities by bringing men together, ending their individual sense of isolation ‘and confer[ring] a collective strength that allows people to be themselves in public.’ Inversely, however, gay liberation (as ‘being oneself in public’ has come to be called) leads to a proliferation of exclusively gay spaces (like bars, clubs and cruising areas), which eventually creates gay-dominated enclaves (so-called ‘gay ghettos’) that can sometimes cut homosexuals off from the broader society in which they live. Ghettos set gay men apart from fellow citizens so that they run the risk of making their status as a scorned minority a permanent one (Cavailhes et al. 1984: 43–4).

Historically, Parisian gay spaces have been situated both literally and figuratively on the margins of city life. Thirty years ago, a rather unusual guidebook classed Paris's gay spaces among the city's many ‘bad places’ (mauvais lieux), which it defined as ‘[s]treet, business, quarter, residence, even public place, square, train station, riverbank that human evil and the force of circumstances have transformed into a chosen domain of sin and vice’ (Bastiani 1968: 7). This equation of homosexuality with moral turpitude is typical of how most French people have traditionally regarded sexual relations between men or between women.

Terminology provides striking evidence of these negative public attitudes. Frenchmen who have sex with other men have been designated by many words over the years: ‘sodomites,’ ‘buggers,’ ‘vile creatures’ (infâmes) and ‘anti-physicals’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; ‘pederasts’ (still the most common term) from about 1740; ‘uranians,’ ‘inverts’ and especially ‘homosexuals’ since the late nineteenth century; and ‘gays’ (a term imported from the United States) beginning in the 1970s. As these words indicate, society at large has usually considered these men to be sinful, depraved, degenerate, sick or insane. Even today, although two-thirds of the French tell pollsters that homosexuality is ‘just another way to live one's sexuality,’² the words pédé (slang for ‘pederast’ and equivalent to the American ‘fag’ or the British ‘poofter’) and enculé (literally, a man who is sodomized) are common taunts with an especially harsh sting.

‘Gay Paree’

Urbanization is a precondition to emergence of a significant gay subculture. Paris is France's historic capital and has always been by far its largest city. It had perhaps 300,000 inhabitants in 1600, slightly less than half a million under Louis XIV in the 1680s, and close to 600,000 on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. The population reached 1 million by 1850 and 2 million by 1876. It peaked at 2.9 million in 1921. Only 2.2 million people live within city limits today, but the greater Paris region counts 11 million inhabitants, or about 20 per cent of the national population (Fierro 1996: 278–9). And yet a 1993 study of French sexual behaviour indicated that the region was home to 46 per cent of the country's homosexual men. The sample was small: 2,359 heterosexuals, 53 bisexuals, 52 homosexuals (Messian and Mouret-Fourme 1993). Gay men have apparently migrated to Paris from every part of the country.

Countless heterosexuals have also moved to Paris in search of work, professional advancement or a new life, but the city has almost certainly drawn a disproportionately high number of homosexuals. Until quite recently, even the largest of other French towns offered these men very little in the way of a gay subculture. Gay venues were (and in most cases still are) rare in provincial France, and strong social and familial constraints make it very difficult to live one's homosexuality openly there. As a result, as an American journalist explained in 1976:

Gay Paris is the center of all homosexual life in France. A French homosexual will almost inevitably turn to the anonymity of the French capital to escape his fate in any one of thousands of provincial outposts. This makes Paris a privileged place no other city in the country can match.³

One gay journalist, now in his forties, recently recalled his move to the capital some twenty years ago: ‘Paris to me meant freedom.…Things became much easier for me. I knew…that I would end up living the life that I wanted.’ And a much younger biologist, still in his twenties, remarked that ‘in the provinces, there are very few places to meet someone.…It's different in Paris. There are a lot more possibilities’ (Minella and Angelotti 1996:61–2).

Foreign homosexuals, too, have often seen Paris as a promised land of freedom. In the words of Dennis Altman:

Paris occupies a special place in the homosexual imagination. It offers neither the tolerance of Amsterdam or San Francisco, nor the inexhaustible sensuality of New York. But we are reminded by such names as [Marcel] Proust, [Andre] Gide, [Jean] Cocteau, Colette, and [Jean] Genet that Paris has certainly been a major center for homosexual culture and a refuge from more repressive cultures for homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, and James Baldwin (who set Giovanni's Room there).⁴

The city's appeal to homosexuals undoubtedly extends well into its past. Of forty-six sodomites incarcerated in Bicetre prison between 1701 and 1715, only twenty-one (45.7 per cent) were native-born Parisians. One hundred and fifty years later, the director of the city's vice squad reported that only 32.3 per cent of the pederasts arrested between 1860 and 1870 were born in Paris, whereas 58.5 per cent originated in the provinces and 9.2 percent were foreigners (Carlier 1887:444–5).⁵

The recorded history of Parisian homosexuality begins in the Middle Ages. An anonymous twelfth-century poet observed that ‘Up to now Chartres and Paris have revelled / In the vice of Sodom,’ while a clergyman lamented in the early thirteenth century that ‘this shameful and abominable vice’ was rampant in the city (Boswell 1980: 262; Lever 1985: 43). Allusions such as these to same-sex activity became more frequent as the centuries advanced. By the 1500s and 1600s, accusations of sodomy were standard weapons in the rhetorical arsenal of polemicists, who often alleged that foreigners (especially Italian courtiers) had first brought this strange taste for one's own sex into France and that it infected principally artists, clergymen and libertine noblemen, as well as the domestic servants whom they purportedly corrupted. Although men of every social class almost certainly did participate in same-sex activity, the surviving evidence from before the eighteenth century displays a marked bias toward the privileged elites. Consequently, to the extent that this can be determined, if seventeenth-century Paris had ‘gay space’ (a term that is surely anachronistic for the period), it was in the all-male schools run by the clergy, in aristocratic mansions and at the royal court, where in the 1680s many of the highest nobles in the land allegedly belonged to a secret ‘Italian brotherhood’ of sodomites (Lever 1985; Estrée 1902).

By the eighteenth century, however, there is substantial evidence of a more widespread and more socially diverse ‘sodomitical subculture’ in Paris among men whose sexual desires defined a collective identity and, some historians would claim, even a distinct ‘lifestyle.’ Maurice Lever, for instance, has argued that:

[d]espite disparities of social class, the homosexual world [of eighteenth-century Paris] formed a community apart, with its own language, rules, codes, rivalries and clans. A closed society, secret by necessity, perhaps also by taste, situated on the margins of traditional society.…For everybody, young or old, priests or laymen, great lords, financiers, workers, vagabonds, a single activity, devouring and obsessive: cruising for sex [la drague].

(Lever 1985:299)

If this subculture existed earlier, it has unfortunately left almost no trace in the archives. Police reports, the main source for the history of homosexual activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, do not exist for the period before 1700. It was only in 1667 that Paris got an effective police force to administer the growing city, control criminal activity, maintain good order and enforce public morals. In the early 1700s, special police agents began to patrol those parts of the city known to be frequented by sodomites, and harassed, entrapped and arrested the men they found there. Sodomy was a serious crime at the time and formal legal penalties harsh: death by fire until 1791. In practice, however, enforcement was almost always lenient. Only seven Parisian sodomites were burned at the stake in the entire eighteenth century, and five of them had other serious crimes, like rape and murder, on their conscience. The exceptions were a couple of hapless wretches executed by way of example in 1750, after the night watch caught them having sex in a darkened street. The police more usually released arrested sodomites with a warning or locked them up for a few weeks to teach them a lesson (Rey 1979–80).

In 1791, the French Revolution enacted a new penal code that decriminalized sodomy between consenting partners in private. A homosexual act was now criminal only when it occurred in public space, in which case it constituted an offense against public decency. The police consequently paid little heed to private and discreet homosexual conduct, but in 1817 a reconstituted vice squad resumed its rounds in the streets and parks (Sibalis 1996). These patrols continued into the early 1980s. The reports generated by policing constitute one very valuable source for the history of homosexual men and their use of Parisian space. Other kinds of sources also appeared in a gradually widening stream in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Policemen, magistrates, clergymen and medical doctors – the pillars of the established order – expounded their expert (and generally hostile) opinions of homosexual behavior. Newspapers reported trials for public indecency and the occasional sensational scandal. Law courts kept records of such cases, which eventually found their way into the archives. And books, written for an insatiably curious reading public and sporting lurid titles like Paris's Garbage (1874), Corruption in Paris (1890), Satan Leads the Ball (1925), Among the Bad Boys (1937) and The Underside of Paris (1955), purported to exposé the seamy side of Parisian life (including crime, prostitution and homosexuality), while clearly reveling in the accounts of the moral evils that they stigmatized (Urville 1874; Coffignon 1890; Georges-Anquetil 1925; Coglay 1937; Delpêche 1955).

Fiction, too, can be a useful historical source. The first French literary masterpiece to deal extensively with homosexuality was Marcel Proust's seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, which shocked many people with its panoramic view of Parisian homosexuality at the turn of the century. But even before Proust set pen to paper, minor novelists had already treated the subject and dozens more of varying talent would follow suit over the years. Some of their novels offer precious insights into past attitudes and sexual activities through their strong characterization of homosexual men and their vivid evocations of urban gay spaces.

For instance, ‘Dr Luiz’ (pseudonym of Paul Devaux), author of Les Fellators (1888), claimed that his mildly pornographic book was ‘more a social study [of sexual perversion] than a novel.’ Its main character, a beautiful Spaniard named Arthur, was one of ‘those young men, models of elegance and good taste, who live in luxury and idleness,’ spending their time in the fictional Café de la Guerre (standing in for the real Café de la Paix). Luiz told readers that he wanted to ‘to a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1 Paris
• 2 Moscow
• 3 Amsterdam
• 4 London
• 5 Lisbon
• 6 Rio de Janeiro
• 7 San Francisco
• Some suggestions for further reading
• Bibliography