Sex, Politicans and Morality in France 1945-1982

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My work can be situated within the context a whole body of new historical writing which has begun to explore the social and cultural history of homosexuality before the early 1970s, challenging the view that the preceding decades can be characterised as a period of invisibility and passivity, when many homosexuals internalised dominant culture's hostility. John d'Emilio's work on the American 'homophile' movement Mattachine revisits the 1950s and early 1960s. George Chauncey's work on New York, uncovering the richness of gay male subcultures of the 1890s-1930s, show that the 'modern homosexual' did not appear until well into the 1930s and that the power of medical discourse in fashioning homosexual identities was weaker than often believed. He is now taking this research into the post-war period, and challenging certain received images about the 1950s. There is also interesting work on models of sexual identity bycultural commentators such as Eve Kossovsky Sedgwick and David Halperin. Until recently, however, work on France has lagged behind. This is due to a certain suspicion within the French historical community towards approaches seen as too influenced by 'Anglo-Saxon' identity politics (for the same reason French historians were slow to address the issue of immigration). A good indication of this is the book by Frederic Martel whose survey of the history of homosexuality in France since 1968 ended with a denunciation of homosexual 'communitarianism'. Over the last ten year attitudes have been changing, partly under the influence of non-French scholars, but also owing to the research of a younger generation of French historians who have started to explore the history of homosexuality in a more sophisticated manner. But so far cost of their work has been on the period before 1945. My book will be the first to apply some of the research agendas described above to France after the war. The aim of my book will be to revisit the history of the politics of the French homosexual movement between the 1950s and the early 1980s. Focusing on the 'homophile' movement Arcadie, it will challenge a certain set of assumptions which were born out of the political struggles of the period, but which now require to be analysed historically. I want to show the complexity and diversity of Arcadia's discourses on sexuality; to examine the ways in which it affected and transformed the lives of thousands of French homosexuals; to test the success of it political strategy; to probe its political influence. It is reductionist and unhistorical to reduce the strategies of survival and solidarity, adaptation and resistance, which homosexuals developed in the 1950s and 1960s to an 'interiorisation' of homosexual repression (as claimed by Arcadie's critics). I plan to explore a lost continent of homosexual experience in France after 1945. My work will be a piece of historical research, and in that sense it cannot be said to have any immediate applications. I think, however, that it will feed into current debates in France about sexual politics (gay marriage and the French civil partnerships) and identity politics. Owing to the strong intellectual dominance of the French republican tradition, religion, ethnicity and sexuality are relegated to the sphere of the private. This intellectual context influences the way discussions over gay politics are conducted. Already in 1964 Arcadia published an article stigmatising the emergence in the United States of a gay 'community'. In reality the polarity between 'communitarianism' and 'universalism', between what one Arcadia writer called 'le droit a!'Indifference' in opposition to gay liberationists' claim to 'le droit a Ia difference' is too simplistic. Arcadia itself embraced a discourse of 'integration' in theory, but in practice it created the embryo of a gay community in France. This ambiguity makes Arcadie an interesting prism through which to approach these issues.