Patrice Corriveau: Judging homosexuals: a history of gay persecution in Quebec and France

Abstract

In this book, translated and updated from the French language original, Patrice Corriveau compares the changing state response to same-sex sexuality in France and Quebec, from Antiquity to the present day. Corriveau’s book focuses primarily on the regulation of gay man in these jurisdictions using criminal prohibitions. This is by far the most interesting and useful aspect of the book’s discussion. However, the last few sections also consider recent shifts in both countries towards the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships (in the form of equal marriage in Canada and the PACS system in France). In general, the book is a valuable addition to the social–historical literature on gay male sexuality and should be of considerable interest to scholars working in the field of gay male historiography. It will be especially useful to those with an interest in the French-speaking world. It also complements and contextualises those studies which have focused specifically on English-speaking nations, such as Jeffrey Weeks’ magisterial work on the regulation of same-sex sexuality in Britain. The criminal regulation of homosexuality in both France and Quebec follows a trajectory that will be largely familiar to scholars in other jurisdictions in the Western English-speaking world. For example Corriveau compares the relative cultural acceptance of sex between men in ancient Greece and Rome—at least under certain conditions of class and conduct—with the increasingly punitive response to homosexual behaviours in the European Middle Ages. In France as elsewhere this change seems to reflect the growing influence of early Christianity and its preoccupation with the sinfulness of non-procreative sexuality. Like Britain and other European countries state-sponsored persecution was exported subsequently to France’s overseas possessions from the seventeenth century, including the North American colony of New France.