Anyone lurching up the boulevard Sébastopol in the pre-dawn darkness of that October morning might have witnessed a shocking incident. It was near five o’clock, four men were grouped around a defenseless person, kicking and punching him in a frenzied attack.
The victim was lucky. According to RTL news, a police patrol appeared just in time to save the victim from suffering serious injury. The man told police that the altercation had become violent after his attacked yelled homophobic epithets at him. When he began to film them, they threw him to the ground and attacked. All the aggressors were arrested and charged with degradation and “violence of a homophobic nature.”
But just how common are incidents such as this in the City of Lights? While acceptance for one’s sexuality is increasing, there are still endless problems for the average queer person, who can be emotionally and physically harmed just for walking down the street. But with the public view of queer people, the landscape for queer spaces is changing — splitting those experiencing queerphobia into several groups with very separate experiences.
As more and more countries begin to break the barriers LGBT citizens have fought their whole lives it’s clear that the traditional political, social and interpersonal codes of the queer experience are being completely upended. The latest country, Singapore, was the stage of a landmark ruling allowing a gay man to adopt a child he fathered through surrogacy and in multiple cities across the world, a previously underground, taboo queer culture is emerging onto the streets and beyond. One must look no further than the roaring popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race to see how what was once one of the most rejected parts of queer culture is today met with overwhelming celebration. Cruising, a pastime as old as homosexuality itself involving a search for sexual relations by glance alone, has been replaced. Not just by gay-specific apps such as Grindr, but by spaces made for “all” such as Tinder or even older online dating mainstays such as OKCupid.
“Cruising has gone away in Paris, and with it, the way that the city is sexual. Tuileries is harder to get into at night, the Quais are no longer spaces of cruising, they’re family spaces,” explains Geoffrey Gilbert, gender and sexuality Professor at The American University of Paris.
Such spaces were previously cornerstones of the expression of queer sexuality; the shrinkage of these spaces represents a phenomenon many queer Parisians and transplants will attest: a strong, but still markedly underground queer scene in the City of Light. Historically queer neighborhoods and clubs in Paris are these days more frequented by tourists and people on the fringes of the queer scene, such as Le Marais, which many a guidebook will call Paris’s “gay mecca” but are these days more frequented by tourists and straight locals. Champs-Elysées club Queen, once a Paris LGBTQ hotspot, is now less of a queer party zone and more of a place for study abroad students on a night out on the town.
These days, outspoken declarations against non-traditional sexuality are what’s truly taboo — however, there seems to be something special about Paris that makes it a particularly safe haven from many forms of queerphobia. This has a strong historical precedent; Paris has a well-known history as a sexually liberal capital. Writers known for their lives in Paris, such as Henry Miller, chronicled the city as a mecca of sexual debauchery, regaling readers with tales of rampant prostitution and sexually open peers. Prostitution in the city is a strong indicator of overall sexual openness, and this phenomenon, especially, isn’t just modern. An unaccredited painting of the Palais Royale depicts prostitutes meeting with clients in the 1800s. Additionally, Gilbert revealed that this is linked to Paris’s very legal framework; “sodomy,” a frequent charge to criminalise homosexuality in many countries, was not illegal here.
This importance of privacy — especially when it comes to one’s sex life — possibly contributes to the modern separation between Paris’s modern queer spaces and everyday life as cited by both Gilbert and Brochard. Gilbert speaks to a compartmentalization of individual familiarity in queer spaces, explaining that, “It’s really normal for someone here I’ll know in city are and who will recognize me happily in that context will see me in a gay bar and there will be no recognition at all. That space is private.” Brochard speaks to a separation between queer and public spaces as a whole, saying, “While it’s still super integrated, the community in Paris is more “discreet” than in other major queer cities such as Berlin or San Francisco. The queer scene isn’t at the touristy bars in the Marais (that at this point host more straight people than queer) — it’s mostly based around underground clubs and parties that you’ll only know about if you know someone already involved in the scene.”
Today, the effects of this are can be seen in many; 21-year-old bisexual woman Destiny Jones from Minneapolis, Minnesota, 23-year-old Brannen Barker, a gay man from Los Angeles, California, 20-year-old Sophia Foerster, a pansexual woman from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and 24-year-old gay man Clément Brochard, born and raised in Paris, all reported experiencing next-to-no queerphobia in Paris during their time here.
Brochard reports his experience in high school as being equally as inconsequential as his adult experience, saying, “When I came out in high school, nine years ago, it felt super natural and everybody was ok with it; I even had a boyfriend in my class and there was nothing strange about it.”
This is in stark contrast to Foerster’s experience in Wisconsin. She says, “My mom is lesbian, so I was raised very liberally; however, I went to a Catholic [high] school and there were a lot of bullies who made fun of both me and her.”
Jones also reported a negative experience during her schooling in America; in this case, for no apparent reason. She said, “In middle school, a group of girls started to call me a dyke because I was never interested in the boys who were interested in me and who these girls all had crushes on.”
Interestingly, Barker reports that his only experience with queerphobia in Paris came from American tourists in the city. As he was walking in the most recent Gay Pride Parade in June 2017, he recalled hearing “three American guys saying, ‘that’s gay Paris for you.’ Then, they shouted, ‘make Paris great again.’ I lost my sh*t and started screaming at them in French, and they just shut up and walked away.” Clearly, Americans take much less kindly to queer people in public spaces than the French; it seems as if queerness is inconsequential in the eyes of the French.
Such a contrast poses an interesting question — what has created this difference between Parisian and American cultures? Gilbert cites the more general yet deep-rooted importance of privacy in the French culture and legal structure, saying, “In France, the laws that historically govern sexuality tend to not be sodomy based, so there isn’t a history of persecution of people for particular kinds of sexual acts. People really formally aren’t interested in the private acts of other people — ways in which privacy is imagined here are very different [to America].”
Testimonies collected first-hand were much thinner on the side of those who have experienced homophobia, but certainly still present. Interestingly, some seems to have found a home in the spaces that homosexuality privately thrives.
Clément Garrel, 23, reports a harrowing experience through Grindr, a dating and meetup app for queer men. He describes using the app one night at a bar and speaking to a man through the app who invited him to “take something other than trivia questions.” He decided to see him, noting that it was interesting that the man “didn’t give base info — codes, floor, etc — just the address.”
Upon arriving at the address, 192, rue Saint-Maur (“don’t go there, an enormous trap”), he noticed a group of men about 20 meters away, making lots of noise and “saying things like ‘oh, that’s the faggot, it’s sure.” His new friend then suddenly arrived “not from the building door, but from outside, and explained that before our affair, we would spend a few minutes with his friends. I started to panic, but I don’t know why I started to follow him. The insults got louder — ‘oh, there he is, the faggot’s coming.” We got closer and my ‘friend’ started to move towards them faster. Then one of the men said ‘Alright, come here, we’re gonna get you in the papers.’ My instincts turned on. I didn’t want to be another statistic. So I turned on my heel and started to run, run, run, all the way to République,” Garrel said.
However, it is more than clear from news and statistics that many others in Paris have significantly different experiences than the many subjects interviewed. 2017 saw a 4.8 percent rise in queerphobia from the previous year, with 15 percent more physical aggressions, according to French organization SOS Homophobie, a LGBT support organization. This is the result of 1,650 individual testimonies collected by the organization, up from 1,575 in 2016 and 1,318 in 2015. The French news cycle, especially in the fall of 2018, was dominated by reports of queerphobic aggressions, a point in the issue that lead to an assembly against homophobia in October 2018, organized by SOS Homophobie and L’Inter-LGBT association, calling for “all the people for whom the hatred of homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia does not have a place in the Republic to mobilise themselves.”
The protests attracted over 3,000 people according to Agence France Presse, and came at the end of significant media attention.
The Annual Report from SOS Homphobie additionally details numerous specific incidences of homophobia, both in Paris and across France. One details a 46 year old gay man, in a handicapped situation, who was minding his own business in a parking lot [when] a young man insulted him without reason, and then pushed him violently onto a car. The victim, who lost consciousness for an hour, was hospitalized for several days. Unfortunately, the consequences — anxiety, severe weight loss, and medication — that lasted for several months; clearly, such crimes are not just emotionally scarring, but can have physical consequences as well.
The report uses this testimony to detail that public spaces, including the professional sector, are one of the most common areas where homophobia occurs. In another incident, a man in a Noctillien bus in Paris witnessed a group of three men “exchanging homophobic comments … one of the men then asked [the bus driver] if he was homosexual, and when he responded yes, the man approached him and hit him several times.”
Some testimonies received by the organization detailed homophobic comments from even close friends. Fabienne, a bisexual Parisienne currently dating a man, was confronted by her best friend Sarah, a lesbian, and told that she had more than friendly feelings for her. Fabienne “did not share this attraction,” but, according to Sarah, “bisexuals must have relations with women and men simultaneously. From this, Fabienne must look for extra conjugal relations with women. Fabienne felt like a traitor who was not ‘a true lesbian’ in the eyes of Sarah, her best friend.
Interestingly, some bisexual women experience a different, if not entirely innocuous experience when they are presented differently; in this case, in a relationship with a woman. Jones reports that she finds “Paris [to be] progressive enough that people aren’t that shocked when I mention that I have a girlfriend.” She did, however, report an amount of erasure, but without suggesting a directly emotionally harmful aspect, saying, “I constantly have people assume I’m a lesbian automatically because I’m dating a girl, but I think bi-sexual erasure is common everywhere because people find the concept harder.” However, this is not to suggest that such an experience isn’t at least dysphoric to a degree.
Such a strong difference in between individual cases is quite striking, especially considering the proliferous of even microaggressions in most other places in the word, big and small; all interviewees that are not originally from Paris and had not experienced homophobia mentioned, at least casually, incidences such as overhearing small comments or maintained gazes that were interpreted as malicious.
Gilbert stresses that the lack of queerphobia may be inherent to the privilege of those living and operating in Paris’s more privileged neighborhoods, saying, “We need to be careful when we’re saying that we don’t experience homophobia in Paris. We want to think what our movements in the city are like.” Essentially, those moving in more privileged spaces may simply be inadvertently avoiding spaces where numerous problems of oppression, including queerphobia, are present. Perhaps therefore the scene ultimately still needs to remain relatively underground; while many can exist in the city as their true selves, there are some that may not be so lucky.
Such a concept of spaces of movement plays inherently into the idea of class privilege, and begs the question: do people moving in more privileged circles and spaces in Paris experience less homophobia? While an all-encompassing declaration is certainty beyond the scope of anything less than an incredibly thorough regional survey, the testimonies presented certainly lead to some conclusions.
It’s notable that several responder’s that cited experiencing little to no homophobia in Paris are not only American expats, but students at The American University of Paris — a relatively comfortable institution in Paris’s 7th arrondissement. Paris’s wealthiest arrondissement is by far the 7th arrondissement, with an average monthly income by residents of 3,806 euros, according to SalaireMoyen.com, and students at the university — while certainly representing a diverse group in not only race, nationality, experience, and sexuality, but also in class — spend a large majority of their time operating in this cushy arrondissement. Gabby Guichard echoed this sentiment, to a degree.
Guichard is a fervent volunteer dedicated to combating queerphobia and especially focused on support for queer youth in the city and surrounding suburbs, spending several years working for the Centre LGBT de Paris and an informal network of foster homes for queer youth who “are unsafe in their homes, kicked out or who were abused.” Guichard echoed and refined Gilbert’s sentiment on spaces and placement in the city, saying ““The polarity is about the placement — where you are in Paris. n the 7th you’ll get a nasty look that they think you can’t see — but somewhere else, you might get attacked.” She did, however, caution that the 7th is not as glittery and safe as it may seem, clarifying, “I don’t have any more faith in this place than anywhere else. Literally two days ago I left class and a woman on the street was talking on the phone and I heard her say ‘oh, this dyke….” Clearly, even a place that is a, “tourist city and [filled with] rich people,” as Guichard characterises the 7th, is not completely free from troubles.
This additionally plays into the concepts of privacy of space held in French society as cited by Gilbert, something that possibly suggests why transplants reported a noticeable difference between their experiences in France and America.
These differences remain even when respondents’ younger years were considered. Brochard even reports that his experience in high school was equally as inconsequential as his adult experience, saying, “When I came out in high school, nine years ago, it felt super natural and everybody was ok with it; I even had a boyfriend in my class and there was nothing strange about it.” This is in stark contrast to Foerster’s experience in Wisconsin. She says, “My mom is lesbian, so I was raised very liberally; however, I went to a Catholic [high] school and there were a lot of bullies who made fun of both me and her.” Jones also reported a negative experience during her schooling in America; in this case, for no apparent reason. She said, “In middle school, a group of girls started to call me a dyke because I was never interested in the boys who were interested in me and who these girls all had crushes on.”
Guichard shared the opinion that the French concepts of privacy and personal space applies to homophobia, saying “I guess that there’s a little bit less care about what people do with their own business; I say that homophobia still exists, but in the grand scheme of things this is still Paris, it’s still very liberal, and we have the reputation of being a very queer-friendly city…but the 7th is not representative of Paris in any way, and for me the 7th is not Paris, There’s a lot of nuance of how Paris is based on where you are and who exactly you are. The Marais is still a very bougie, white representation of homosexuality.“
While some may be tempted to say that homophobia is nonexistent in the city of Paris, it is clearly simply a question of spaces — class, area, and even one’s immediate personal spacial space — that either makes them ignorant or a close party to of a problem that still rages just beneath the surface.