The Gay Liberation Movement in France

Abstract

In his history of the ‘long sixties’ (1958–1959 to 1973–1974), Arthur Marwick distinguishes 17 social and cultural developments that transformed the Western world, among them ‘the formation of new subcultures and movements’, including ‘feminist and gay rights movements’, and ‘a general sexual liberation, entailing striking changes in public and private morals’.1 The connection would seem self-evident: sexual liberation facilitated the emergence of a radical gay movement, which in turn promoted greater social acceptance by opposing the legal repression of same-sex acts and challenging the opprobrium attached to homosexuality. Such an interpretation, however, is overly simplistic. An examination of the gay movement in France from the 1960s into the 1980s suggests that it is more pertinent to analyse it in terms of political activism rather than the sexual revolution. Moreover, today’s gay movement, which defends homosexual rights (such as the right to marry) is in many ways closer to the moderate ‘homophile’ movement of the 1950s than to the radical gay movement of the 1960s and 1970s.