louis landerson- france’s own gay liberation

Over the last few years, along with some of the more obnoxious aspects of American culture, several important political ideas have been spreading to France, expanding the realm of traditional politics to what is now called “existential problems.” Gay liberation, like the women’s movement, is among those imported political conceptions.

The FHAR (Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire), main organ of gay liberation in Paris, was formed in March 1971 after a group of lesbians and faggots disrupted one of those humdrum radio discussions which just happened to be entitled “Homosexuality, This Painful Problem.” A year and a half before, in September 1970, a group of lesbians had contacted the MLF (French Women’s Liberation Movement), wanting to form a revolutionary lesbian movement. Over a year later they were joined by a small group of faggots and it was this mixed group which carried out the action that generated the FHAR.

Since that time FHAR people have participated in May Day celebrations, Mother’s Day celebrations, picnics at the Tuileries, a demonstration against psychiatrists in San Remo, Italy — pretty much the same kinds of things we’ve been doing here. There have also been rap groups, consciousness-raising groups, guerrilla theatre, and seminars.

The greatest impetus for growth to the FHAR was the April 1971 issue of Tout, which was devoted almost entirely to gay liberation. Tout is a straight, leftist-student-underground newspaper whose director is Jean-Paul Sartre. Shortly after the FHAR was formed, one of the staff members of Tout, who is gay, became involved in gay liberation. He suggested that the FHAR people do some writing. Articles began appearing and the people at Tout were eventually persuaded to let the queers speak. And speak they did.

(Before getting to the gay articles in this, the twelfth issue of Tout, the reader had to plow through a statement of the editors — who were mostly straight and mostly male. Unfortunately, this statement reduced everything to an “everyone has the right to do his own thing” kind of position. What was important about the statement was that it was the first discussion on the political implications of personal/sexual relations — basically talking about a new awareness coming out of the women’s movement.)

The FHAR articles reflect the lucidity of the French mind, with lots of Marxist and anarchist rhetoric thrown in, and a touch of Marcuse. The main thrust of the articles is anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, with a sharp critique of the puritan sexuality of French culture. In a statement of purpose, the FHAR claims:

We are against homosexuality as we are against heterosexuality; these are words which take reality only in a socially determined context. It is necessary to destroy this social context so the words will no longer have any meaning. The same goes for relations between men and women, for the family and for the notion of power: we are against whoever presumes to seize power, whatever the ideology with which he identifies himself. Power is not for the taking; it is the notion of power that is to be destroyed.

They also criticize the idealization of virility, gender-programming, and bourgeois psychiatry. But their biggest problem is with the left.

In a country where the orthodox conception of class struggle is still very strong, it is difficult for the voice of sexual politics to make itself heard. According to many Marxists (the Cuban National Congress on Education and Culture, for example), there is no material basis for the oppression of homosexuals. So, accepting the terms dictated by orthodox Marxism, the FHAR articles argue against the kind of straight male mentality which refuses to recognize the validity of psychological oppression. They criticize the male supremacy and repressed sexuality of straight revolutionaries and attack the sexual revolution as a sexist bourgeois plot. 

Their position is perhaps best summed up in the following:

The struggle for gay liberation is not a marginal combat. Revolutionary homosexuals refuse the puritanical terrorism of certain militants who use as a mask the pretext of the necessity for the struggle of the masses. It is true that in France there exists only a weak minority of avowed homosexuals, and this is because in certain sectors of the bourgeoisie, particularly among artists and intellectuals, homosexuality is tolerated or even asserted, and doesn’t tarnish one’s social reputation. But there exist as well, and especially amongst the masses, hundreds of thousands of homosexuals who are repressed and who are very down on themselves because of the burden that bourgeois moral ideology has imposed upon them. The fact that they have not yet been united by a collective consciousness is not a good enough reason to pretend that the notion of the “masses” is not applicable to them.

Homosexual revolutionaries know that homosexuality does not originate in the socio-economic structures of bourgeois capitalism and consequently that the first will not disappear with the destruction of the second. (Ask our Cuban friends about that!)

After the publication of these articles, there was a Storm of Controversy, as it were. Irate citizens wrote in letters of disgust, disappointment, etc.; the government banned the newspaper from newsstands. But there were also a lot of gay people who spoke out for the first time in their lives.

Before l’affaire Tout, the FHAR had about thirty people; after, membership rose to seven hundred in Paris, and groups started forming all over the country. Along with success came hassles, as gay revolutionaries were faced with the problem of integrating seven hundred people of varying race, age, sex, and class into a unified revolutionary movement. It didn’t work.

Most of what has come out of Paris since April 1971 talks about all the difficulties the FHAR is unable to resolve. One article, in the January 1972 Nouvel Observateur (the most widely distributed leftist weekly in France), talked about how chaotic the FHAR meetings are and how difficult it is to carry out any kind of political action. Some revolutionaries are breaking ranks because the group doesn’t come up to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist standards. I have been writing to one member of FHAR; in his last letter he was discouraged, saying we can speak of the FHAR as a mass movement only in the past.

But the problems of FHAR — in-group tensions, elitism, alienation of newcomers, total lack of consensus — are not after all so very different from the problems we once had in the Gay Liberation Front. And I think that the origin of these problems is similar.

In one article, FHAR states that differences between the lesbian’s situation and that of the faggot are not yet clear. And in Faggotry, a magazine put out by a group of New York effeminists, there is the following statement:

“Many faggots have left the Gay Liberation Movement because even the most radical and militant factions have made a one-sided attack against sexism. Faggots have left Gay Liberation because they have seen male supremacy as the root from which all other oppressions branch.” (About two years of struggle separate these two statements.)

During the early years of the Gay Liberation Movement in the U.S., faggots and lesbians — without the help of the two-hundred-year-old precedent which buttresses bourgeois liberalism — led an excruciating search for an ideology or set of principles which could serve as some sort of guide. At first it was thought that we simply had to integrate the question of gay liberation into the already existing mass movements of Marxist-Leninist dogma, within the context of the straight-male revolutionary movement in the U.S. The impossibility of the task, together with the lack of a comprehensive analysis, was responsible for the tensions that grew within GLF and that eventually destroyed it. From what I’ve read, that seems to be pretty much where most of the men in FHAR are at right now.

Upon the ashes and ruins of the GLF in this country, some have begun building “Revolutionary Effeminism” — a movement which is becoming increasingly widespread and which has begun, using the insights of radical feminism as a foundation, to deal with some former GLF problems:

“We are what is feared most: effeminists. Men who are struggling to become unmanly, men who oppose the hierarchy and ideology of a masculine fascism that requires the domination of one person by another, of one sex, race or class by another. We will become gentle but strong faggots who will fight their oppression in militant ways, faggots who are vulnerable to each other, able to cry, but not passive or paralyzed in our struggle to change.”

In France, the impact of radical feminism has not yet been as strong as it has been here (they have a lot of problems that we don’t have). And until very recently, the voice of radical lesbians from within the FHAR hasn’t been strong at all — in fact, they’re still working with faggots. But just as things are beginning to move here, there are signs of change in France. A small group of people from within the FHAR (groupe n°5) has begun putting out a newspaper called le Fléau Social (“The Social Plague”). In it, the voice of women and lesbians is much clearer, with titles such as “Smash Virility,” slogans such as “Free Valerie Solanas,” and an article attacking the youth-beauty ethic. In short, some of the questions are beginning to be answered.

The aforementioned article in Faggotry concludes by saying, “We are going to transform fields of vision exploding purple until there is a creation of a new reality organized during the night breaking the sky.” It took us a long time to get to this point, over two thousand years. 

So if it takes the FHAR a little longer, that’s okay, it’s an ambitious struggle. But for gay men right now, it’s the only struggle.