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“Liberté! Egalité! Fierté!” — Dispatch from the Paris Pride Festival

Posted Tuesday, July 13, 2010 in Reporting by Emily Rutherford

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  • “Liberté! Egalité! Fierté!” — Dispatch from the Paris Pride Festival
<p>A crowd at the Paris Pride Parade </p>

SOURCE: Emily Rutherford

Photos: See photos from the Paris Pride Festival here.

A chant of "Liberté! Egalité! Fierté!" rang out again and again across the Left Bank of Paris on June 26, as the city's annual Pride parade inched its way along the wide, 19th-century boulevards. Political LGBT Parisians revise the slogan of the original 1789 French Revolution ("liberté, egalité, fraternité," which means "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in English) by replacing the last word with the French word for "pride." The updated phrase is a widely recognized symbol of LGBT activism in Paris and says a great deal about what it's like to be queer in an old European city: Despite the modern trappings of Pride, an event which originated in the United States, Paris brings a great deal of its own long history to the event. The result is an event which seems both entirely similar to Pride celebrations in the United States and simultaneously entirely different — and in ways not limited to France's liberal drinking laws at all.

It so happens that Paris is, interestingly, one of the few cities in the Western world which still holds its Pride on the last weekend in June to commemorate the Stonewall riots of June 28, 1969, to which Pride has historically been dedicated. Finding myself in Paris for a couple weeks at the end of June, I immediately searched out information about the city's Pride celebrations. I rounded up a couple college friends and we set out to confront my first European Pride.

I've been to Pride parades and festivals in the United States — last year, I reported on the Pride festival in Washington, D.C., for Campus Progress — and so I expected the flatbed trucks advertising companies, bars, and clubs; muscular men wearing either full drag or nearly nothing; and the phalanxes of motorcycles. Paris had these things, too, but they were far from the only aspects to a festival whose commercialism and sense of race and class privilege, in whatever city it takes place, has begun to concern many progressive and radical LGBT people here.

Instead, I found, there is an edge to the politics of Pride in Paris which is completely absent from my experiences of Pride in the United States. While politics are always present in American Pride celebrations — and particularly in D.C., where federal issues such as "don't ask, don't tell" or the Defense of Marriage Act (as well as the city's recent legalization of same-sex marriage) have added local significance — the Parisian version had a very different sort which spoke both to France's long revolutionary past and to its recent history as a country without a cohesive and active LGBT rights movement.

Youth and student power, for example, is everywhere in France. In fact, I lost count of how many Parisians I met, from street vendors to my neighbors to fellow Pride-goers, who asked me if I was a student. In France, the word has a sort of magic power that grabs people's attention. The history of student activism is arguably stronger in Paris than anywhere else, and it was obvious how much part of Parisian culture that history still is from the way in which the young people owned the streets.

My first introduction to student power came when walking down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, one of the main streets on the Left Bank, when crowds were just starting to gather for the parade. Some homophobic graffiti had been left on the sidewalk, that both opposed marriage equality and called it anti-Catholic (French Christians, after all, are mostly Catholic). And in broad daylight, surrounded by crowds of parade-goers, some young women were armed with a rainbow of spray paint covered up the homophobic slogans with hearts and the international lesbian signifier of two interlocking "women" symbols. We soon established that they, too, were students; they told me that the graffiti would be funny if homophobia weren't such a serious problem. I left them arguing about whether to add an interlocking "men" symbol, even though, as one of the women shouted emphatically to the others, "Nous sommes LESBIENNES!" (We are LESBIANS!")

Young Parisians, I soon learned, never watch the Pride parade from the sidelines. That role is reserved for older people who don't want to walk the 2.5-mile route, tourists, and straight people. In the words of my friend Isaac, who was attending his third Paris Pride, straight people "don't feel as if it's their march. They say that they didn't fight for it, so they don't deserve to march in it." After every corporate float, roughly fifty young people cheered, waved rainbow flags, and danced to the music blasting from the floats. The ever-helpful Paris city government had posted decibel readers that advised parade-goers when to put in their socialized-medicine-provided earplugs.

Nearly everyone, young people included, was drinking cheap beer and wine. France has a drinking age of 18 and liberal open container laws, and that seemed to contribute to the feeling of bravado and ownership the young people had over the street, taking over the parade in a way that young people don't in parades I've been to in the United States.

But youth activism and drinking was not the only part of distinctively French history to make itself known at Pride. Secularism and anti-Catholicism were omnipresent in the parade, in contrast to American Pride parades filled with religious groups (even Catholic ones!). In Paris, the presumption seemed to be that the Catholic and the pro-LGBT are separate. Many marchers carried anti-Church signs: One particularly memorable one was "Fermer le Vatican, Guantanamo mental" ("Close the Vatican, the Guantánamo of the mind").

The third act in the parade was a drag queen dressed as Jesus: Crown of thorns, sparkling loincloth, silver heels, and arms tied to an enormous cross on which was written (in English), "Respect for sexual orientation and gender identity!" Such an image would probably be considered taboo in America; Americans seem to prefer religious plurality to aggressive secularism.

Condoms certainly had their place at Pride. I am happy to report that the free condoms that the French Ministry of Health distributes at Pride come in cute little floral boxes. Another popular anti-Catholic sign featured a cartoon of a grim reaper carrying off a Catholic priest, and included the (English) slogan, "Pro life? Pro condom!" The sign, despite its religious overtones, represented a still more dominant theme at Paris Pride, one which often does not get as much emphasis in America: HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS social services and activist groups dominated the number of floats, emphasizing not just the usual message of using condoms but the continuing impact of HIV/AIDS on the LGBT community. I have found that in modern American HIV/AIDS activism, the message of awareness and prevention today tends to be overshadowed by an attitude of mourning and remembrance for the generation of gay men who died in the virus's initial outbreak in the 1980s. In Paris, however, you could be excused for thinking it was still the late '80s or early '90s: Cute awareness slogans like "Chéri, qu'as-tu fait du virus?" ("Darling, what have you done about the virus?"), a comic "blessing" of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence upon queer people both séropositifs (HIV-positive) and not, and the omnipresent logo of ACT-UP Paris stenciled on street signs and on balloons floating above the crowds.

In preparation for my trip to Paris, I had read American gay writer Edmund White's book about Paris, The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. White, who lived in Paris for a decade in the '80s and '90s, writes that France was slow to develop a network of gay activists or a sense of gay community after gay liberation, and so the community lacked the infrastructure which helped the gay communities in American cities like New York and San Francisco respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the '80s. At the time, French society was still very much in the closet, and as a result of unwillingness to confront and talk openly about the virus, the gay community was hit very, very hard. It seemed almost as if now, in 2010, Paris Pride was still trying to make up for lost time in bravely and openly confronting HIV/AIDS and the challenges it poses. It seemed to be doing it well, combining humor with serious activism and awareness campaigns and compassionate social services, both public and private. Perhaps the U.S. (where HIV infection rates among men who have sex with men are climbing sharply again) could learn something from the way France is confronting AIDS today.

But it's not just HIV/AIDS that gets better treatment in France. The institution of the pacte civil de solidarité, the French version of marriage-like civil unions, has become so popular as a secular and less formal alternative to marriage that they're widely used by young straight couples as well. This is not to say that there is no interest in marriage equality in France—it's a major part of the platform of Inter-LGBT, the biggest French LGBT-rights organization — but it's not an issue which grabs young people in the way it does in America. The version of political activism which seemed to attract young Pride-going Parisians was the activism of visibility. Affiliation with any sort of civil-rights legislative issue was much less important to young LGBT activists in France than crowding in between floats to march down Paris's major boulevards: Dressed up, drinking, shouting, and maybe waving a sign protesting the Catholic Church.

It is a relief, in a way, how local a Pride celebration can be. I came to Paris Pride fearing American cultural hegemony (and the fact that Pride began in America) would shape the European version into something that looked and sounded exactly like its American counterparts. But while there were certainly some similarities — most basically, the fact that, wherever you go, Pride is a celebration of liberation and visibility combined with lots and lots of capitalism — Paris had its own distinct cultural issues with which to contend. Demands for civil rights legislation, which overshadow the LGBT communities in America, were not nearly as important as expressions of community solidarity surrounding fighting HIV/AIDS, a secularism culture war, or — above all — the fierté of the Parisian youth.

Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.

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