Michael Hone

French Homosexuality Michael Hone

French homosexuality covered the best of times and the worst of times. The first country in which homosexuals were free to bed whomever they wished, and this from 1791, and knew a period so wondrous it was called the Belle Époque, where Montmartre cabarets swarmed with life in all its uninhibited forms, Toulouse-Lautrec recording it all in breathtaking art, the art itself a new form: Art Nouveau, inspired by natural forms, the curved lines of plants and flowers, never before seen colors, where Mistinguett exchanged Maurice Chevalier as lover for an artist aged 16 and Jean Cocteau enhanced films with the beauty of Jean Marias, as did Marcel Carné in Drôle de Drame with the unequalled beauty of Jean-Pierre Aumont. Diaghilev made Paris the ballet capital of Europe thanks to his lover Nijinsky, and Stravinsky astonished the world with his Sacre du printemps as Diaghilev had commissioned him to do. Ravel rivaled Gide and a visiting Gore Vidal for the attention of Arab lads, Genet blew smoke through a straw from one cell to another, the men on each side taking their individual pleasure. A nonstop party that the German occupiers of Paris encouraged during the war and honored with their presence, while in Berlin they sent homosexuals off to concentration camps. It was the worst of times where, under the law that prohibited public offenses to decency, homosexuals were tracked down and persecuted, jailed after the First World War, executed after the Second, where gay marriage was voted in 2013 yet a boy, today, would be crazy to admit to his locker-room buddies that he preferred them to the chirping maidens in the showers next door, this because, in the hearts of the French, nothing, or little, has changed since good Christians began burning homosexuals at the stake 2,000 very bloody years ago. This is the history of those good and bad times.