“Second-Class Citizens”: The Mobilization of the French Homosexual Movement for the “Right to Difference” (1979–1982)

Abstract

While the French constitution of 1791 abolished the crime of sodomy, the 19th century nevertheless allowed the political power and the bourgeoisie to repress homosexuality thanks to a broad legal arsenal. In 1942, Philippe Pétain explicitly reintroduced the criminalisation of homosexual relations into French law. Some years later, an amendment adopted in 1960 considered homosexuality a “social plague”, like tuberculosis or alcoholism. French homosexuals remained what they had always been: second-class citizens. The homosexual movement that emerged in the 1970s was mostly revolutionary and very few were interested in legalist demands. Many of activist came from extreme left-wing organisations; for them it was more a question of fighting for the revolution than attempting to become citizens like the others. With the end of the 1970s, the revolutionary horizon vanished and the French homosexual movement, in a quest for popularization, evolved its paradigms to fight against repression. This article retraces and discusses the evolution of homosexual mobilisation in the early 1980s, when gay and lesbian activists reconfigured the French homosexual movement from the perspective of claiming a “right to difference” and ending their status as “second-class citizens”.