There was, for a fleeting few years in the 1930s, a brief suggestion that the history of queer people in the 20th century could have looked very different. This happened in Paris, a city which, between the wars, was the center of the world.
“So don’t let anyone ever tell you us queers have no history. We are history,” remarks Claude, one of the central characters in Why in Paris?, my historical novel published by Encircle on May 11. He’s referring to the long chain of queer people who’ve changed the world, a chain which is still mostly buried. Bumps are visible in the ground when persecution was not the climate of the day. These moments are few and far between prior to the 1960s in most parts of the world, except of course, in Paris.
The French Revolution did away with sodomy laws in 1791, turning Paris into an invisible magnet for us artsy types throughout the nineteenth century. People came to Paris from all over. Seventy-five of every thousand Parisians was foreign born, a number unseen in a European city since Imperial Rome. Unsurprisingly, this concentration of social outcasts sparked the Bohemian Revolution, a century-long movement which hit its apex in Paris at the dawn of the 20th century.
After the First World War, these times were looked back upon as the Belle Époque, an era of progress and artistic flourishment. They say it started with the crushing of the Communards in 1871 and ended on the killing fields in 1914. But the Bohemian Revolution lived before, and after.
Hemmingway, Stein, Fitzgeralrd, Porter, Baker, Man Ray. Picasso, Matisse, Munch, Kandinsky. There are no end of names who made Paris their home between the wars. The city was a haven for some Black artists coming eastward from the United States, just as it was the westward meeting point for those who may have drifted in another time to the imperial capitals of Vienna, Berlin and St. Petersburg.
The 1920s is known in Paris as the Années folles, or crazy years. A more self-aware Bohemian spirit reasserting itself in a truly international city. The social engine of Paris in the 20s was nuclear powered. Its fallout spread across the world, the city radiating like a beacon to the greatest minds of the generation.
The central character of Why in Paris?, a young Viennese Jew named Anders, arrives in Paris in 1936, and the story begins a year later. A generation too late for Bohemia, Claude remarks.
But to queer people, this is a familiar time frame. The social revolution of the 1960s paved the way for gay liberation in the 1970s. The social change fostered by Bohemia and cemented by the Années folles birthed a curious few years in pre-war Paris. A fleeting confluence of space and time that was fully inhabited by Jean Cocteau.
He’s a supporting character in Why in Paris?, but a central figure of 20th century France. Artist, poet, novelist. He wrote plays for Édith Piaf and rejected party invitations from Coco Chanel. Jean Cocteau’s lovers read like a who’s who of the Parisian Avant Garde: the actor Eduad de Max, the poet John Le Roy, the novelist Raymond Radiquet, the Resistance leader Jean Desbordes, and perhaps his greatest love of all, the great actor Jean Marais.
Jean Marais is a megastar of early French cinema, and his acclaim only rose even as he and Cocteau parted ways after the war. Before the occupation and throughout it, Marais and Cocteau were unapologetic about their relationship. In fact, neither man seems to have even seen so much as the door of a closet. Cocteau and Marais are two of the most famous men in 20th century France, and they are undoubtedly one of the century’s greatest power couples; gay or straight. Neither were the men seen as much of an oddity or aberration. Cocteau, and later Marais, were a fundamental part of Parisian architecture as much as Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice Toklas.
These couples offer a glimpse of what might have been. A Bohemian Revolution that, had it not been for the global trauma of a world war, could have delivered a prototype of queer equality more than half a century earlier. Many things were lost in the fires of the Second World War. We’ve spent decades picking through the wreckage. One thing barely remembered are the lives of queer people at the time. For some, Paris offered the opportunity to live and love openly. Like the central character Anders, it drew people from across the world to a cosmopolitan capital and a cultural mix so potent we’re still influenced by it today. I hope with my new novel, we might understand a little bit better why, of all places, they were in Paris.
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