BECOMING LESBIAN
A Queer History of Modern France
by Tamara Chaplin
Univ. of Chicago Press. 464 pages, $35.
THERE HAS LONG BEEN evidence of women-loving women, often as domestic companions: the Ladies of Llangollen, Boston Marriages, and “romantic friendships.” As Lillian Faderman argued in her groundbreaking Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, before the 20th century, as long as the women were discreet they could be quite public and respectable. The French had many (not polite) words for women who have sex with women, such as tribade, fricatrice, anandryne, and saphiste. Eighteenth-century texts described counterrevolutionary anandryne (anti-male) secret societies dedicated to undermining the patriarchy. Rumors and pornography about Marie Antoinette’s tribadism circulated so freely that the queen herself wrote to her mother: “They have been liberal enough to accuse me of having a taste for both women and lovers.”
However, the “lesbian”—as a personal and political identity—only emerged in the late 19th century. As far as I know, “lesbienne” first appears in print with its current denotation in neurologist Jules Cotard’s Études médicales (1870). He was part of a wave of European neuropsychiatrists obsessed with the “sexual perversions,” including “sexual inversion.” Historian Tamara Chaplin opens Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France with this 19th-century context for the emergence of lesbian identity. However, her rich documentation of Belle-Époque dance halls and women’s cabarets brings to life a world of lesbians who bypassed the shaming pathologization of homosexuality. Perhaps it was because many of these were working-class women who never read sexology textbooks to learn that they were “neurodegenerates.” They were among the throngs of young Parisians out for a fun night of drinking, dancing, and cabaret. Their libidos just happened to lead them into the embrace of another woman.
Historians rightly bemoan the fact that queer history is dominated by publications on gay men or that lesbians have been hidden from the record—even more so than women in general. Some queer scholars sniff out same-sex desire in whatever texts turn them on. Chaplin, on the other hand, does the hardcore sleuthing of a historian: inhaling paper dust in the archives, seducing candid recollections from scores of informants, scouring countless hours of television and radio broadcasts, and digesting hundreds of primary and secondary sources. Although her book is about “becoming lesbian”—the construction of lesbian identity and culture in 20th-century France—she documents the most indubitable and glorious lesbian culture.
Chaplin argues that gender and sexual fluidity were far more common in this early 20th-century period, before the sharper binarization of sexuality into hetero- and homo- categories. There were certainly women who fit the stereotype of the “mannish invert” that preoccupied sexologists. Some sported the more tomboy or androgynous look of the garçonne. The interwar period saw a rise of single young women in cities, with new career opportunities after the death of so many men in the Great War. Free from the inquisitive eyes of provincial families, young women had the chance to experiment stylistically and sexually. Chaplin documents the period’s explosion of women-oriented and women-owned cabarets with all-female staffs, musicians, and entraîneuses (serving girls and sometimes sex workers). The “sapphic cabarets” mushroomed on the Left Bank and the Right, in working-class and upper-class neighborhoods alike. Some even survived the Nazi occupation of Paris. They welcomed Black patrons and performers, including Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt.
Based on extensive interviews and police records, Chaplin documents the role of cross-dressing and the emergence of butch-femme role complementarity. This was cleverly poetized by Monique Wittig and her partner Sande Zeig:
Si tu es pauvre / Tu es une jules, Si tu es riche / Tu es saphique Mais si tu n’es ni l’une ni l’autre / lesbienne, lesbienne, / c’est bien ça que tu es.
[If you are poor, you are a jules (butch), if you are rich, you are sapphic, but if you are neither one nor the other, lesbian, lesbian, is what you are.]
Chaplin argues that a mannish or garçonne look was sometimes adopted for purely professional reasons to draw clients (particularly by the entraîneuses). It then became an increasingly popular and public way of standing out as a lesbian. Chaplin’s scrutiny of police records is a sobering reminder that “gay Paree” was not without repression. Vice squads surveilled the cabarets and kept files on “adepts of Lesbos,” particularly butch ones. One entry notes: “Lesbienne active, small stature, a very decidedly masculine type … wears only masculine clothes.” Besides police harassment, lesbians also faced a largely homophobic, family-oriented Catholic culture, as well as discriminatory laws.
The 1950s—both in France and the U.S.—are seen as a particularly homophobic, conservative period. Yet Chaplin’s radio and television archival research draws up a fabulous array of more or less coded lesbian-produced women’s cabaret shows airing on French nationalized media. Chaplin sketches a line of continuity between the earlier Parisian sapphic cabarets and these mid-century shows that must have normalized talented mannish lesbians for the general (and perhaps clueless) public. I imagine it as being like blue-haired ladies in Vegas gushing over Liberace without realizing he was gay.
Chaplin continues her exploration of lesbian television into the 1970s, when social and cultural politics became hugely complex after the tumult of 1968, the rise of feminism, and the arrival of the gay rights movement. Unlike the U.S., France didn’t have a racial civil rights movement, largely because of its ideal of color-blind citizenship (discussed below). Nevertheless, French airwaves were dominated by conservative intellectuals who were largely hostile to feminism and gay rights. For a century, France had struggled with a declining population and military defeats. Cultural critics bemoaned the decline of motherhood and the psychopathology of sterile homosexuals.
Despite the earlier decades of sapphic splendor, it was only in 1977 that a lesbian officially “came out,” undisguised, on French TV. Elula Perrin was the coquettish, French-Vietnamese owner of a glamorous lesbian discothèque. She became the go-to lesbian to appear on debate shows. Despite her lesbian advocacy in the media and in books, she became a lightning rod in gay politics because of her culturally bourgeois, traditionalist views. She opposed same-sex marriage, gay parenting, feminists, and butch. For Chaplin, Perrin embodied one of three dominant stereotypes of lesbians in 1970s French media: the conservative “lipstick lesbian.” The second was the “good mother” battling for child custody. The third was (rather confusingly) the absence of lesbian feminists. The burgeoning feminist movement, while full of lesbians, strategically relegated homosexuality to the closet. I’m reminded of the similar conflict in the U.S. feminist movement when Betty Friedan warned that the “lavender menace” would turn public opinion against the women’s rights movement. In the U.S., as in France (somewhat later), this would lead to ugly fractures between the feminist, the lesbian feminist, and the radical lesbian feminist movements.
This complicating dynamic of lesbian politics marked the last three decades of the 20th century, occurring, ironically, just as a personal and public lesbian identity was coalescing in France. Lesbian broadcasts, bookstores, cafés, magazines, support groups, and organizations were springing up not only in Paris but all around France. Chaplin carefully documents a number of these. She poignantly relates their importance in consciousness-raising and in furthering lesbian identity and connectedness. Most nostalgic for me was her chapter on the Minitel. It was a clunky predecessor of the World Wide Web, launched nationally in 1982 to provide a phone directory, to send email, and to facilitate sex chats. Les Goudous Télématiques (GT)—a lesbian Minitel service—only lasted three years (1985 to ’88), but Chaplin richly documents the founding cyber-activists’ high ideals for reducing lesbian isolation and spreading information on news and cultural events via the Minitel. The gay male equivalent became profitable as a hookup site, but GT suffered from wanting to stay affordable and from poor audience adoption of the new technology.
Chaplin’s final chapter forthrightly and sensitively tackles the issue of the nearly complete whiteness of her sources and her history. As mentioned earlier, post-Revolutionary France idealized itself as a nation of equal citizens. The French Republic did not track citizens’ race. Inspired by the American Declaration of Independence, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen established that all men were born free and equal in rights. Article 1 of the revised Constitution of 1958 declared: “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race, or religion.” These lofty Enlightenment principles remained as unrealized in France as in the U.S. The French battle for equal gay rights (e.g., marriage equality and adoption rights) was hard-fought and elicited deep homophobia in French culture. In the lesbian context, Chaplin acknowledges that women of color were largely invisible (except as entertainers) until the 1990s. Tellingly, she manages to get some of her informants to make candidly racist admissions about the absence of women of color—though they were evident in photographs taken in lesbian clubs.
France’s colonial history would lead to a rising population of people of color throughout the country, but they seem to have kept a low profile in women’s clubs and politics. They would have faced homophobia in their ethnic communities and racial invisibility or hostility in lesbian spaces—as is painfully familiar to gay people of color in the U.S. They became radically more visible in 1999 following an activist intervention at a lesbian-feminist film festival in Paris. A young generation of queers ramped up racial diversity at women’s nightclubs and Pride marches.
American-style “identity politics” (now disastrously weap-onized in initiatives opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies) run counter to France’s republican universalism. Chaplin’s work shows how a lesbian public identity emerged nonetheless. Quite cynically, the French far-right party (formerly the homophobic National Front, rebranded in 2018 as the National Rally) has integrated homophobia into its own nationalist “La France pour les français!” movement: Immigrants from the unenlightened (former) colonies are portrayed as sexist and homophobic; Muslims especially are said to be unable adapt to lay, republican French culture.
Becoming Lesbian weaves together four of Chaplin’s articles from the past fifteen years into a monumental and brilliant work of queer studies. Her voice is engaging and jargon-free. She makes the scholarship of a handful of French LGBT historians available to English speakers, and she significantly enriches the field with her extensive research. Her book should be standard reading in queer history classes and graduate courses in historiography. Although an academic monograph, it avoids being burdened by its extensive documentation, despite containing footnotes and references that will keep scores of graduate students busy. Lovers of French history and queer history (indeed history tout court) will devour Becoming Lesbian.
Vernon Rosario, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is the author of The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity.
