Lesbianism in France with Dr. Tamara Chaplin

Gary Girod: Today's special episode is an interview with Doctor Tamara Chaplin, a former professional ballet dancer and trained actor. Chaplin received her doctorate in modern European history from Rutgers University and her B.A. from Concordia University. She is currently the Professor of Modern European History and Lynne M Martin, Professional Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also a visiting professor at the university the Paris Panthéon Assayas. Chaplin's first book, turning on the Mind French Philosophers on Television, examined the relationship between TV, high culture and French national identity. Today we are discussing her latest book, Becoming Lesbian A Queer History of Modern France, a documentary film based on becoming lesbian is under development with filmmaker Olivier Pedroso. Thank you very much for being on the show, Doctor Tamara Chaplin. Your book is a wonderful examination of lesbian history and culture in modern France. What made you want to study this topic?

Tamara Chaplin: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your show. It's a real pleasure to be here. I think, Gary, that my initial interest in working on the history of sexuality and in working on this particular topic actually emerged from earlier work that I had done because I wrote a first book on the televising of philosophy in France. And when I was an undergraduate, I had discovered the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Um, I imagine you're familiar with his book The History of Sexuality, Volume one and introduction. I was very taken by that book as an undergraduate, and in that book, Foucault argues that, uh, sexual identities in particular, what we might think of is the invention of the homosexual as a type of person is actually a historical construct that can be linked to the 19th century. So in essence, and this is something that I talk to my students about, he's reminding us that while there have always been all types of sexual practices. The idea that sexuality is understood as a part of an individual's identity, as something fundamental about who they are in the world, is an idea that was a product of a particular moment in history, and I was fascinated by that. Like many people, actually, I was fascinated by that argument, um, and taken by it. I also studied as a graduate student at Rutgers with Bonnie Smith and Joan Scott. Joan Scott, in particular, wrote a really important article called gender a useful Category of historical analysis and working with Bonnie and Joan, who are both women's historians and historians of gender, made me really interested in writing about the history of women and gender. So when I completed that first book, I knew that I really wanted to work on something that was more directly dealing with women's history. And at the time that I started the book, another colleague of mine, Julian Jackson, who's a wonderful historian, a British historian, but of the history of France, had just finished a book on male homosexuality in 20th century France. The book is called Living in Arcadia. And Julian really encouraged me to do some research on the history of lesbian life in 20th century France, as did my partner at the time, uh, the poet Angie Estes. And I think he was encouraging me to do that, in part because no one has written this history before. And when I realized that I actually came to France in 2010, and I started looking for other scholarship on this topic, and there was so little that I thought, wow, this is a gold mine. This is an area that, um, needs to be written about, so I wanted to do that.

Gary: The book draws from a number of interviews you conducted with lesbians of different ages and backgrounds. Can you tell us about some of these characters? Do you have any particular favorite person or story?

Tamara: Ah excellent question. You know, if we go to that moment in 2010, when I arrived in Paris, deciding that I was going to try to write this history and realizing that it hadn't been written. One of the first things that I had to do was to find my sources, and it was a lot harder than I had anticipated, because there was this question of how do you write about a topic that is taboo where there has been so, um, much social sanction against it that it's often been hidden? And ultimately, one of the ways that I decided to try and uncover that history was through doing oral history interviews. And over the course of the research for the book, I interviewed over 100 women from all over France. I was really interested in trying to find women who were as elderly as possible, so that we could kind of take that oral memory back as far as possible, and I was extremely lucky to kind of move into a network and be able to sort of advertise myself in various places, both online and through word of mouth and with the assistance of the people that I met, sort of in French, we would call that a Danish, like a snowball effect. Um, and eventually I met some really amazing women who were willing to talk to me and share their stories with me. I think there are a couple in particular. One is a woman named Lilianne Gilbert, whom I discuss in my books. Epilog. I met Lilianne when she was 92 years old, and I interviewed her and I filmed all of these interviews. So I'm also actually working on a documentary film, um, at this point, but for this interview that I did with Lilianne, I actually went to her retirement home in Cannes and she welcomed me into her room, which she has one tiny room there. She's actually, unfortunately no longer alive. But this was in 2016, and she had a little twin bed that was covered in, um, stuffed animals and a tiny, uh, toy poodle who was there, and a room that was just cluttered with, um, things all over the walls, paintings and posters and whatnot. And Lilianne had a very interesting background in that she was a musician. She had played the accordion and sang in the cabaret of one of the most famous lesbian cabaret singers in the history of France, a woman named Suzy Solider. Suzy Solider actually opened her first cabaret in 1933, in Paris. Now, Lilianne had barely been born at that point, but many years later Suzy moved to the south of France. She retired to a tiny village. They call it a village. perché, village up on a kind of up on a cliff above the sea on the Cote d'Azur. And Suzy Solider retired there. But she opened a last cabaret, and Lilianne ended up working for Suzy in that final cabaret. And I think one of my absolute favorite moments in the interview process was at the end of a very long day that I had spent with Lilianne, in which, for a good part of it, she was actually napping because she was quite old and quite fragile, and she was a tiny little woman, and she was in her bed while I was taking photographs of documents that she had shared with me. And at the very end of the day, I. I tapped on her and I woke her up and I said, Lillianne, I'm really sorry, but I have to leave because I have to take two trains to get back to where I'm staying. And she said to me, but Tamara, you can't leave yet because I haven't sung for you. And I thought, what? And she insisted that we go over to the corner, and she unpacked this accordion, and, um, she asked me to help her put it on. It was quite heavy. She actually got angry with me because I didn't do it properly at first. But we got this accordion strapped onto her back, and at that point I had already dismantled my camera. But I grabbed the camera because she started speaking to me about how she was going to sing this song for me. And according to Lilianne, the song had never before been recorded, but it actually was. Edith Piaf recorded the song um, but she perhaps didn't remember that at the time. And then she proceeded to sing and play for me, and it was one of the most moving experiences. It was a song called volatile, which means essentially did we have to. And what was fascinating for me, in addition to the fact that it was just incredibly beautiful, and the minute that she began to sing, she came to life. It was really astonishing because she had seemed so fragile and, um, and tiny, and suddenly she was this huge presence singing for me. And at the end, I was really I was quite moved and, um, and she, she said to me, no, no, you have no idea what it was like, because you see me here in my little room, and this is nothing. You have to imagine me in my costume, you know, and the and the special shirt that I wore that was all sparkly. And then she explained to me how the song that she had just sung was a song where one woman was upset because the woman that she loved had left. And she's asking, did it have to be that way? And the thing that was fascinating for me is that the song itself has no gender, and clearly Lillianne was imagining it in this way as a love song between two women. And I find that really fascinating in terms of thinking about how marginalized minorities often appropriate, um, normative culture in ways that serve them and serve their stories. So I would say Liliane is one of my favorites. There are others, and I could talk on and on about them. Um, but, uh, that's up to you if you want. I'll tell you about another one, but, um, you can please do. Okay, so another really important person in the writing of this book is a woman named Catherine Gonad. And Catherine, it was not, uh, of the same generation as Lilianne. She's probably in her early 60s now. But Catherine was very important in the seminal movement, the lesbian movement, the gay rights movement that emerged really in the I mean, Catherine, I think, became activated in the late 1970s and the early 1980s. She is an archivist at the National Television Archive, but she was also a key actor in much of the politicization of homosexuality in France, and she is an absolute encyclopedia of information about that history. She was also a key actor in an initiative that I ended up writing about in chapter seven, I believe, of the book, which was an initiative that attempted that didn't just attempt it actually achieved, that created the first website for lesbians that has ever existed. And that website was created for something called the Minitel. The Minitel was a precursor to the internet. It was a closed network system that was developed in France. It used a phone and a modem to connect you to this closed network. You could do many of the same things that we could do and that we can still do online. You could purchase tickets on it. You could check the weather, you could, um, make travel reservations, but you could also it had, um, chat and email capacity and there were chat rooms on it and Catherine Gounod and some friends of hers when they first learned about this new technology, which was in 1984, long before we start to see use of, um, email and internet, um, on the World Wide Web, she thought that this would be an amazing technology to help women who identified as lesbian to connect as community, because particularly one of the things that we know about histories of homosexuality is that people often migrate to cities in order to find other people like themselves. Catherine had grown up in Brittany, a small town in Brittany, and she knew about the kind of suffering that women underwent when they felt completely isolated and didn't have contact with other women like themselves. And she thought this would be this fantastic thing that could actually network all of France together. And so with a group of other women, they actually created, um, you know, they got a domain, they created the website, and they ran this, um, this website telematic for three years. It was genius. It was an absolute precursor to the way in which our contemporary world has been completely revolutionized by the internet. Unfortunately, at the time, it was actually unsuccessful. They could not convince people that this was important, and they had a lot of difficulty in getting women at the time, especially to adopt the new technology. There were also a lot of concerns about privacy, about how would we know that there were actually women on the other end. These are all good questions. But regardless of the fact that that the initiative failed, it was just this incredible revolutionary creation invention that was years ahead of its time. Catherine was also an editor in chief on a major lesbian publication called Lesbian Magazine, which was one of the longest running gay magazines in France. I believe that it first appeared…It first appeared in the early 1980s. The numbers are escaping me at the moment and finished. And then. And then was finally, uh, finally ended in the 2000. Um, but longer than any other, any other magazine. It was in existence, and Catherine was the editor in chief of that for about a ten year period. So she was an incredibly important person in terms of helping me to understand the period of politicization and So the identity that we know now as lesbian became politicized in particular ways following the student revolutions of 1968 and led to some of the quote unquote, achievements that we now, um, think of when we think about lesbian rights in France. So, for example, the acquisition of the right, um, to be partnered with what the French call the PACS in 1999, or, uh, the right to marry and um, to adopt children in 2013 or more recently in 2021, the right to medically assisted pregnancy. Um, all of these things kind of emerge out of the lesbian rights movement. And there are probably a couple of other people who I could talk about, but I'll maybe wait and talk about them later. Once you've we've gone through a few more of your questions.

Gary: Right. We wouldn't want to give it all away. We want to send. That's right. Your book. Exactly.

Tamara: That's right.

Gary: Your work begins by noting how lesbians, as women have been pushed into the background of queer history, as men have been much more studied. This lack of focus on women has further resulted in a number of false narratives regarding lesbian history. Can you talk about why gay men have taken a predominant place in queer history, and also the false narratives about women?

Tamara: Sure. I think one of the questions that I had as a historian as I began this project was given that so much. Of the history of homosexuality has been shaped around issues that have been central to male sexuality. And by that I would mean, for example, um, early work in the 19th century on the history of, um, homosexuality often focused on male prostitution, for example, the work of um or work on um. I mean, whether we're looking at prostitution, whether we're looking at sodomy laws, whether we're looking at the history of AIDs much later. So much of the chronology has been shaped by issues that were central in men's lives. Much of the history has also been written because of the focus on the questions of legality, um, and the way in which in many countries, male homosexuality has been targeted more than female homosexuality. Now, it's interesting because in France, that's not the case. Um, the I think it's important to note that same sex practices, namely sort of medical practices, were legalized during the French Revolution in 1791. So since that time, um, sexual practices between two people of the same gender are technically have technically been legal. They've nonetheless been prosecuted and persecuted by other means throughout the 19th and 20th and now into the 21st century. And we can talk about that more after. But to return to your question about the prominent, sort of predominant or prominent place that men have had in queer history and the false narratives about women. One of the questions I had was if we shift the focus, if we look at women, what is that historical narrative going to look like? What are the moments that are more important or less important in women's lives? How might that focus change how we understand the history of homosexuality? And also, how might looking at that history contradict assumptions that we have about how that history was enacted for and by women? So you asked me, what are the false narratives? I would say one of the first ones is that there's a lot of work that's been done recently on what we might call queer geographies. And in that work, There's an argument that women don't claim space in the public sphere. Partly that's supported by the notion that women don't have as much capital. They don't have the financial capital to circulate in the public sphere or establish businesses in the public sphere in the same way that men do. And there's a certain amount of truth to that. There's also, um, a presumption that as soon as women find a romantic partner, they retreat into the private sphere and couple up, whereas men are far more promiscuous, which means that they are circulating more in the public sphere. But one of the things that I found in my work is that this idea that women don't claim space in the public sphere, or that they're not successful entrepreneurs or that they're not successful in business, is actually not true. It's certainly not true in France. I spend a considerable amount of the book, the first half of the book, talking about the establishment, first in the interwar period. Of over 20 cabarets, cabarets, I call Sapphic cabarets. That were run completely by women, run by, staffed by and attracting, uh, female publics. And we can talk more about those cabarets later, but that would be one false narrative that my book shows and sort of argues against by showing that women actually have claimed space in the public sphere, and that they've done that in ways that have changed the geography of the city. I have a term that I call Sapphic genealogical Geographies, which is a term to describe how women sort of transfer power and knowledge across generations, but also geographically, so that we can actually map in my book the way in which female businesses take space in the public sphere, which is something that's really important because it contradicts what we might think of as the, um, patriarchal or andro-centric image of the public sphere as a male space. And we can think of that going all the way back to the emergence of separate spheres in the 19th century, with men in the public and women in the private. This is really a contradiction of that. And it's something that, as I show, links these spaces across generations so that they're established in the 1920s, but they thrive all the way through the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s, and I even have a genealogical sort of chart that shows the connections that go all the way through, um, the 21st century. So there's that. I would say a second major false narrative is that lesbians are not targeted by the police, and that we can't find lesbians, for example, in the police archives, because lesbians are not as, uh, sexually promiscuous as men and have not been as involved in various forms of sex work. This, to my work contradicts. Many of my colleagues told me when I decided that I wanted to try and look for, uh, sources on lesbians in the police archives. They basically told me that I wouldn't find any there. And What I discovered was that if I looked in some of the traditional places where people were looking for histories of homosexuality, generally around arrest records around prostitution, that it was complicated. But if I started looking at the surveillance records of the cabarets that I was working on, I found lots and lots of records. And they were remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. One of the things that I do in, in the book is I look at something called White papers, over 100 white papers that I found in the police archives. And these white papers were basically surveillance papers, because the police were very, very interested in keeping track of who was working in the cabarets, because the cabarets were frequently linked to the Mafia and the underworld, to prostitution and to drugs and trafficking. So consequently, the police would often, um, keep files on each of the women who were employed there. And these files are absolutely rich with information about who these people were. Talks about not just name and age and occupation and level of education and where they live and what they pay for their, um, for their rent and how much they're paid for the work they do and what kind of work they do and how long they are at each of the cabarets that they work at. But also we can see that the police really are keeping these people under surveillance because they keep track of who shows up at these women's homes, whether these women are going out with other women or other men. Um, and particularly after the Second World War, they're especially interested in whether or not any of these women are consorting with women of the same gender who are minors because under the Vichy regime, the age of majority for homosexual relations is, um, lowered. And so, um, sorry, excuse me is raised. And so consequently, um, it's criminal to, to have sex with someone who is. Of course, it's under the age of 18. Um, I think it starts under the age of 21, and then later it's, it's lowered to 18. But, uh, whereas it's legal to have sex between, um, heterosexual sex at a much younger age. So in any event, when we're talking about false narratives, one of the things that my work shows is that there's actually a rich body of sources in the police archive that lesbians were very active in sex work that lesbians also sometimes pimped one another in heterosexual prostitution, so that you might have a couple where one of them is actually working as a prostitute to make money for the couple, as a heterosexual prostitute, to make money for the couple. I think the third false narrative that we have has to do with gender performativity. There's a lot of work that's been done in the history of homosexuality, and particularly the history of lesbianism on female masculinity and the identification of the couple, the butch femme couple. And in general, we tend to think of female masculinity as something which is either a personal choice. You just have a predilection for dressing in masculine clothing or a political choice. We can think about that when we think about films like Albert Nobbs with Glenn Close, which came out a while ago, in which Glenn Close plays a character who is in part or presumably dressing in masculine clothing because this is a way of having more power in the public sphere. It's a way of evading the male gaze. It's a way of, um, holding down, um, male employment and consequently making more money. So we tend to think of this type of female masculinity as either issuing from that personal desire or from this sort of political goal. One of the things that my work shows is that the cabarets are also spaces that promote female masculinity in really interesting ways. And we have to link that to the history of sexology in the 19th century, because sexologists became very interested in this question of homosexuality. How is it that two people of the same gender, um, can be interested in one another? And one of the central ideas that they promoted was this notion of, um, inversion and inversion. We might think that, uh, if two women are attracted to each other, one of them must actually be a man. So she is, um, basically the soul of a man trapped in the body of a woman. What I found really interesting in the work that I did on the staff at cabarets. Was that by the early 20th century, these ideas about female masculinity were actually circulating in the public sphere. Very scholarly material on sexology was popularized and tabloids and whatnot. And we get this idea that if a woman is interested in other women, she must be attracted by women who are dressed like men. And I was mesmerized to discover that in these cabarets, when a woman would come to be hired to work in the cabaret. Sometimes she was actually required to wear masculine clothing. Now, as a side point, it's important to remember that it was illegal to wear parents at that time, since 1800, actually, there was a law in effect in France that made it illegal for women to wear pants or masculine clothing. That law actually wasn't abrogated until 2013, which is astonishing, but it wasn't actually, um, enforced much after the 1940s. But nonetheless, what that meant was that these women who were hired in these cabarets were required to wear male garb on top. They would wear like a smoking jacket and a tie, um, and very masculine looking clothing with a straight skirt and short low-heeled shoes, um, and cut their hair short. And it was kind of an exaggerated image of the modern woman, the flapper, or what, in French we would call la sun. So the thing that I became very interested in, in terms of this third false narrative, was the way in which a business promotes female masculinity in order to attract female clients. And what I was fascinated by in my interviews with speaking to very old women who told me about going to these bars, to these cabarets, walking in, seeing these women dressed like men and some women dressed like women, and consequently becoming educated into a belief that this is how women interested in other women dressed, that you should choose one of these two presentations of self. And I think that's really, really fascinating. It gives us a whole different insight into how that form of gender performance was promoted for economic reasons and not just personal or political ones. And I think the fourth false narrative that we have refers back to something that I just spoke about, which is the idea that women were not active in technology and that women don't tend to play a large role in histories of technology. And I think that we can see that this is not the case with the history of the Minitel, nor is it the case, um, in early radio, where we can see with the emergence of, um, first pirate radio and then sort of small alternative radio stations that emerge in the 1980s in France, we can see women active in radio technology, but also in the alternative press. So both in technology and the media, women are playing very key roles. We also see this in the history of television, which is something that my, my book, um, interacts with. And perhaps that's a good moment to, um, interject that one of the key arguments of the book. Has to do with the mass media, because one of the questions that I was asking was, how does a behavior. Come to be understood as an identity? How does an identity? Become a community? And how does a community make claims on the public sphere? So make claims on the nation. And in my work, what I discovered was that the media plays a really key role in that process, both the way the media represents these individuals and groups, and also the way that these individuals and groups deploy the media itself. So I think those would be kind of four false narratives that my work is, um, pushing back on.

Gary: So let's start with the long history of lesbianism in France. The French public largely saw male homosexuality as dangerous, sinful perversion, with the last execution of two men for homosexual activity taking place in 1750. Whereas lesbianism is not seen as such an assault on public morals, something which does seem to be pretty universal across various societies. So, for example, in both the Bible and the Quran there are severe stipulations, even the death penalty for male homosexuality. But lesbianism is either regarded as much less of a crime or not, perhaps not even mentioned in the Christian Bible. Uh, so looking specifically at the French case, what were popular attitudes towards female homosexuality?

Tamara: If we go back to something that I said a little bit earlier, your point about the last execution of two men for homosexual activity taking place in 1750 is well taken. But as I noted, sodomy, medical practices, same sex practices were legalized during the French Revolution. And, um, and yet nevertheless persecuted by other means. One means in particular was, uh, something called Bonheur, which we might translate as, um, public indecency. And that was often used to target male homosexuals in particular, because male homosexuals often cruised in public places, whether that was at the theater or in certain parts of the city, uh, around. When we're speaking of Paris, around the Palais Royale, for example. But when you suggest that the French public did not see female homosexuality as a dangerous or sinful perversion, I think we could push back on that just a little bit. The work of someone like Lynn Hunte. Quite some time ago, Lynn Hunte did some really interesting work on the representations of Marie Antoinette as a triad, a try bad, which was a word for a lesbian. And what we see in Lynn Hunt's work is the way in which political pamphlets and images of Marie-Antoinette having sex with other women were used, and also having such incestuous relations with them. The dolphins were used in order to discredit the monarchy at the time of the revolution. So we can see that there is, um. There is a public perception of lesbianism as dangerous, perverted, sinful. We can also see this in the work of the Marquis de Sade, for example, that focus on lesbianism as Pornographic. Infuses that entire period from the 18th and into the 19th century. The exoticism of lesbianism continues. We can think of Baudelaire, the poet, Baudelaire's La Femme Donnée, for example, which deals with lesbianism. I think that in so far as my work is concerned, because I'm focused on the 20th century, it's interesting to think about the ways in which, during the Third Republic, lesbianism was a threat to pro nativism. And when we think about the concerns with population increase that permeated the Third Republic, it's no wonder that women who were seen as shirking their roles as Republican And mothers were, uh, considered sinful, perverse, you know. Um, and were excoriated. I think there's a wonderful book by Nicole Albert that's been translated as lesbian decadence, something like representation, lesbianism, and Representation in Art and literature, A Fantasy of France, which really talks about a proliferation and obsession with lesbianism among male writers and artists at the end of the 19th century. And I think that some of this can be tied to this obsession with population control, and really takes us back to the opening of our conversation and some of Michel Foucault's ideas about biopolitics and the ways in which sexuality and attempts to control the population of a nation can come together. So when we get to the 20th century, I think one of the narratives that I'm writing, perhaps not against, but in parallel to also is in general the one part of the history of lesbianism that we tend to know about. If we know anything about lesbianism in France is this period known as Lesbos, this period of sexual liberation and emancipation that occurred in the interwar period, in which ex-pats, namely women like Natalie Clifford Barney the American heiress, or René Vivian, the British poet um, or Gertrude Stein, the American writer played key roles, and this was a group of um, largely um. Literary and aristocratic, mainly ex-pats, although also some French women who were part of a burgeoning, um, scene of avant garde artistic modernism in the 1920s and 30s. There are some lesbians, like Claude Cahun, the photographer and writer, uh, and her partner, that are also part of this. But these are really the only narratives that we know about. And the general presumption is that this very vital period of explosion of interest in lesbianism in the interwar period was shut down with the onset of fascism and then the German occupation and the Second World War, which is a narrative that we often get when we think about the history of homosexuality, is that there's this kind of moment of emancipation, liberation and sexual excess in the 1920s and 30s. This is, you know, in the United States, this would be, um, the period of, oh, what do we call it, Gary? What do we call that period.

Gary: The lavender scare?

Tamara: No, the lavender scare as much later, actually, um, this would be, um, Progressive ERA. This would be the Roaring 20s.

Gary: Oh, okay.

Tamara: It's the Roaring 20s. It would be the period where we have, um, you know, it's before prohibition. It's when we've got flappers and we've got Hemingway and we've got I mean, we've got F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's the equivalent of that. But in France. Right. And what I was interested in doing in my work was talking not about these relatively elite, educated women, but about everyone else, because one of the things that I really wanted to expose was the fact that our current contemporary ideas about homosexuality are precisely that they are current and contemporary, and that at the time, people's sexual identities were far less fixed, as were their gender performances then. We tend to think of them today, and I wanted to explore the degree to which working class women, French women, Um, middle class French women, the extent to which they were also involved in non-normative forms of sexuality and gender performance. And that's part of what the book attempts to do.

Gary: Right. I think that's an important note. I can't help but think of the Roman idea, because in the Roman mind, you know, it's not gay. If you're the dominant, it's only gay, the submissive. So ideas of, uh, of sexuality certainly have changed. Now, the first three chapters of your book are devoted to the cabarets. Uh, you've touched on these, uh, quite a bit, but for those who don't know, can you explain what a cabaret was? The two main types of lesbian cabaret that you define, and how these became an epicenter of lesbian in culture.

Tamara: Sure, I'm happy to do that. So the cabarets really emerge in the late 19th century in France, and these are public spaces for performance, for also eating, drinking, smoking, where one would go in the evening and see a series of performers singing, perhaps skits, sometimes people who are called desserts, which means, um, reciting poetry, for example, uh, comedy skits, little theatrical skits. And these cabarets, which were really avant garde spaces, um, developed in Montmartre under people like Aristide Briand and, um, some of the really famous cabarets that we have images of in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, for example. These cabarets by the 1920s were also becoming popular spaces for people to go for amusement to dance with each other. They were connected to spaces that we would call that were called balls, actually. Um, or gadgets. Um. For lesbians. In my book, I describe two different types of cabarets. One are the cabaret artistic, which tend to be bourgeois spaces where people would go to watch the performers and um, uh, key example of that would be the cabaret of the woman I mentioned earlier when I was talking about Lilianne, Suzy Solider, Who opened her cabaret La Vie Parisienne in 1933. And this was a cabaret that was, um, you know, frequented by artists and intellectuals and members of the bourgeoisie and politics. Um, it attracted a mixed crowd of both men and women, but also in the Sapphic cabarets was known as a space where women could meet other women, particularly because frequently the women who directed these cabarets, like Suzy Solider, were themselves publicly known as women who had non-normative sexual practices. Um, in this case, Solara was known to be, um, either lesbian or bisexual, depending on how she was framing herself for the press and how they were, um, how they were interpreting her at various times. The other type of cabaret. So on the one hand, we have the cabaret. Artistic. This is performance bourgeois mixed. On the other hand, we have what we call the cabaret feminine. The category feminine is specifically a place for women to meet women. It is linked to the world of sex, prostitution, the underworld. It often has close links to the mafia and pimps. I should mention that all the entire cabaret scene at this time also had these kinds of links, because this is nightlife, but with the cabaret artistic, these links tend to be more or less explicit in the cabaret feminine. It's very evident that these are, um, these are nightclubs where you go to meet other women. Were there men present in them? Yes. There were there were bouncers at the door. Um, men were admitted. You didn't have the right to keep men out, but they were also, um, sharply, uh, admonished if they interfered with anything that was going on. So it was very much a voyeuristic practice. Sometimes couples would go there as well. There was a fair amount of, uh, sex work that happened, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, depending on exactly where these cabarets were. They tended to congregate either on the right bank, up around Montmartre and Pigalle, or in the left bank, um, near Montparnasse, where one of the most famous cabaret féminin opened almost at the same time as Suzy Soldiers La Vie Parisienne, which opened in 1933. And this would be the monarch, or The Monocle, which opened in 1932. The Monocle, became one of the most famous cabaret féminin, along with a series of cabaret féminin, which were run by a woman named Madame Moon. These spaces, because homosexuality was not illegal, were able to advertise in the press so we can find, um, numerous advertisements in the newspapers for places that are advertised as cabaret féminin, as cabarets for women, or where there is somewhat coded language talking about how you will find women in their habitual dress, which is referring to sort of female masculinity. But we also see direct representations of women as couples, um, on the business cards On matchboxes or matchbooks that were used that had photographs on them that were used to publicize these spaces. So these were very publicly known. In addition, these places became linked to specific performers. So in the case of Suzy Solider, Suzy Solider was a singer, a chanteuse, and in addition to singing in her cabaret, she was highly mediated. So she cut records. She sang on the radio. She was featured in, um actuality the film archive sort of film reels before, uh, that would air before a motion picture. And then she actually became one of the first woman to be featured on French television. In my book, one of the things that I talk about is the ways in which the women who become famous in these cabarets and who are attracting women to these cabarets. While this is initially a sort of semi-private space because it's it's open to the public, but it's happening after dark, it's an after hours club, and they tend to be emerging mainly in Paris, but also in the suburbs of Paris and also in other cities throughout France. But these spaces, um. Will become popularized. And this was something that I was absolutely fascinated by. Once television takes off and television is actually going to bring these cabarets to the masses, going to bring these women, these very specific women, and the very specific kinds of cabarets that they're in onto the small screen. And I think that that's a really fascinating piece of this history, because what it means is that we're taking this very discreet population and we're making it available for viewing by not just the national public throughout France, but also thanks to Eurovision, which was established in 1954, to any of those countries where France is televising too, as well as to France's empire, because France is broadcasting at this point to Algeria, and I'm speaking now of the 1950s and 60s to Algeria, to Tunisia, to Senegal, to Morocco, um, as well as, uh, throughout the nation itself. So that becomes an important way of advertising a certain form of, uh, lesbian performativity. Um, in the postwar period.

Gary: Before I read your book, I was unaware that there was a French Stonewall for anyone who knows about queer history. Stonewall is a legendary name. The Stonewall Inn in New York City was a famous gay establishment which police often targeted. Then, on the 28th of June 1969, the patrons of Stonewall fought back against police, beginning a series of riots that caught worldwide attention. The Stonewall riots are often credited with bringing homosexual men into the public eye and spurring the gay rights movement in the United States and beyond. Can you tell us about the French Stonewall, which was actually led by women?

Tamara: Well, thank you so much for raising this issue of the French Stonewall. I think when we think about queer history, as you have rightly said, Stonewall and the riots at the Stonewall Inn are often pointed to as that particular moment that crystallizes, um, and A kind of shift in the zeitgeist, where we move into the era of the politicization of homosexuality and not just in the United States, but around the world. Now, you're correct. The French stonewall occurred on the 20th of June, 1969. What I would call the French Stonewall did not happen until two years later. The French were in the midst of their own revolution. In May of 1968, the student revolutions of 1968, which almost brought the government to a standstill, and in the aftermath of the student revolutions, we see the emergence of the women's rights movement with the movement the Liberation des femme MLF, and then the women who are beginning to come together to talk about and demand more rights. In the women's rights movement. We'll also be thinking a lot about their right to control their own bodies and to do what they want with their bodies, both in terms of their sexuality and in terms of their control over their capacity, um, to procreate. And so one of the things that will happen is the politicization of body politics. Um, at this time, we'll see, for example, that lesbians become very, very active in the fight to legalize abortion, which becomes successful in France just slightly after Roe v Wade, which was 1973, and in France in 1974 and 1975. We'll see the legalization of abortion in France following a very famous trial called the Bobigny trial. Lesbians are very active in these feminist initiatives because they're really interested in breaking free from patriarchal control over their bodies. And some of these women will form a separate group, and that group will actually be the basis for the homosexual rights movement that was known as the FARC or the Homosexual Action Revolution. These women will attend a radio show that was held by a woman named Minnie Gregoire in Paris on March 10th, 1971. And that show. The title of that show was Almost Sexuality a problem, homosexuality That Painful problem, and many. While it was a very interesting radio host, and I think that she probably felt that she was taking quite a liberal stance towards homosexuality, but she wanted to talk about how difficult it was for people to be homosexuals in contemporary French society. And there were a number of key individuals who were invited to that show, including a priest and, um, psychologist, psychiatrist and others. But women from this group, the FA, came to the radio broadcast because it had a live audience and were listening to the things that were being said, and they were outraged at the way in which homosexuality was being by the way in which homosexuality was being pathologized. So they stormed the stage. There was a general riot. There are all sorts of incredible there's actually incredible audio footage of this that you can still listen to if you look it up online, and various historians have written about it. Michael Ceballos, who is unfortunately no longer alive but was a really dear colleague of mine, has written some wonderful stuff about sort of the emergence of the gay rights movement in France, in which he recounts, um, this particular riot that happened there. And that moment for France is often pointed to as the crystallizing moment after which we see the emergence of a public politicization of demands for homosexual rights for both gay men and lesbian women.

Gary: One thing which I just want to note at this moment, um, is importantly, since we're talking about history in general and queer history, that, uh, even though we're talking about lesbianism and of course, we often touch on male homosexuality because it is this huge issue that specifically when I mentioned Stonewall and it being something that brings attention to, uh, male homosexuality worldwide, it was certainly the narrative was on male homosexuality. However, male homosexuals were not the only people involved. In particular, there were a number of who would become very famous, uh, transgender activists such as Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who were highly influential in the queer rights movement. And I just bring this up because right now in the United States of America, actually, this was just a couple of days ago. But the Trump administration has wiped any mention of transgender people on their websites, including on the page about Stonewall, despite the fact that transgender people were central to this entire movement. So I just wanted to note that that even as the United States government is erasing the history and identity of trans people, in fact, if you go to the websites today, the government websites, they say LGB, they leave out the T that we are not forgetting this. But in any case, moving forward with your book, uh, one thing that I appreciated was how you decenter Paris. You mentioned how to lose the Pink City played an oversize role in lesbian history. Can you explain how places outside the capital contributed to French lesbian identity and culture?

Tamara: I'm sure you know, I'd be happy to talk about Toulouse and the role of Toulouse, but I think what you just raised is so incredibly important that I'd like to stay on that for just a second.

Gary: Sure.

Tamara: I think, you know, just recently, when I was, uh, giving some talks at Cambridge and Oxford, I was I was in England talking about the book. And while I was there, just before I went, uh, Donald Trump gave his inauguration speech in which he declared, and I quote him as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of United States government that there are only two genders, male and female. And when I went to Cambridge, I got out of the train station and I took a cab, and the cabbie in the cab that I was in asked me whom I had voted for in the last election. And when I told him, he replied to me, no, I like your new president. The best thing he's done since taking office is to say that there are only two genders. And I was fascinated by that and we talked a bit about it. But I think that one of the things that's so key to underscore is that this policy and the hetero sexist belief system that it supports violently condemns anyone who identifies as gender queer, and it erases them from public life, and it relegates any non-normative form of gender to the private sphere. But when we depoliticize gender, and when we insist that the gender binary is an ahistorical scientific fact. We are ignoring what scholars and scientists and um, philosophers take to be irrefutable, which is the point that I made at the very beginning of this talk, which is that sexual identities and gender performances are historical constructs which are shaped in dialog with relations of power. So therefore, essentially what I'm saying is that the truths that we hold to be self-evident about sex and gender are actually the products of history and power. So I think that the gender policies that we see and the anti-trans policies that we see being put into play right now, can be understood as an attempt in America to both deny and reverse precisely the kinds of historical transformations that my book argues occurred in France, and not just in France, but that I'm basically arguing our fundamental to human societies and history. Um, so I'm glad that you raised that. I think this is a really key and important Issue for anyone who is working in the sphere of the history of sexuality, but also just for people in general. Um, at this point. So let me turn now to your question about Toulouse. One of the things that I wanted to make really clear in the book that I wrote was that this is not just a history of Paris. I am a great admirer of some of the amazing scholarship that has been done in the history of homosexuality that really focuses on one specific city. And I think for those of us who work in the arena of the history of homosexuality, George Chauncey is gay. New York would be the key work that we think about when we think about that. But in my book, I'm interested in how this process of identity formation and community Information and counter public information spreads. And one of the places that I talk about is Toulouse. We see after the 1970s the emergence of an incredible amount of lesbian activism in Toulouse. Um, emerging out of the feminist movement, which there was a maison des femmes, a women's house established in Toulouse in 1976, I believe, in which lesbians played an outsized role, actually, and eventually a group of women opened what we might think of as a contemporary cabaret in Toulouse in 1989, and they called it Back Dam Cafe. And in that they were playing off of a film actually, that had that had come out about a friendship between, um, uh, a black woman and a white woman. Um, Bagdad cafe, Bagdad cafe, when it opened, became a center for um. Conviviality for women to meet other women, for politics, for education. It was both a cafe and a kind of nightclub. There were performances there. It was music, theater, art, um, literature. It was an incredibly vibrant, uh, space that attracted women from all over France and actually from many other countries as well. The two women who were at the center of it, Jacqueline Julianne and Brigitte Boucheron, as well as some other key women who helped them to shape Baghdad Cafe. Um, really established Toulouse as a strong center, um, for lesbians. And it was amazing. I read hundreds of letters that were actually sent specifically to Brigitte, who often answered them, talking to her about how much this space meant to these women, who often came from very small towns where there was nothing like it, and where they felt like they were the only person who actually, um, felt this way in the world. Uh, so to come to a place like that was absolutely, uh, spectacular for them. Baghdad Cafe actually lasted for about ten years. And then when it closed. Jacqueline. Giuliana. and Brigitte Boucheron continued the work of Bagdad Café with something called Bagdad Éspace Lesbienne, which was not a consistent space but was just a sort of regular initiatives in which they held conferences about lesbianism. They had a sort of what they called a school, um, and they held events, um, kind of in the more of a pop up tradition that we might consider, um, that we have a kind of familiarity with today, for the last 30 years, they've also sponsored a festival that takes place in Toulouse every spring. Um, and it will happen again this April. And it's called the Prenton Lesbian. And in that period, for several weeks in April, they essentially attempt to make their presence known in the city. They stage readings and talks and, uh, they do film showings. Um, there are musical performances. I've actually been invited to talk about my book there, and I'll be, um, speaking at the closing evening on April 19th in Toulouse and showing some excerpts from my films in that. But these two women, Jacqueline Julian and Brigitte Bouchon, have done just an unbelievable amount for, uh, lesbians, um, in the last 30 or 40 years. Um, it's even longer now, um, really revolutionizing, um, what is possible for, uh, for women in France. And, um, so I think that when we think about the history of lesbian life in 20th century France, we would be remiss if we didn't think about Toulouse as well.

Gary: The final topic you end on is that of nonwhite lesbians. France has a very interesting cultural outlook compared to the Anglosphere in the Anglosphere. There is this idea of people holding multiple identities in the United States, a person can be an African American, Asian American, Latino, while also being Hispanic or Indigenous. At the same time, people can be part of the queer community, neurodivergent community, or any number of self-identified groups. France has a very different mindset. French universalism is this idea that a person's ethnicity, national origin, or anything else is at best secondary to being French. Unlike most countries, the French government is banned from taking statistics based on race, supposedly to prevent racial discrimination. President Emmanuel Macron has denounced American woke culture, and French conservatives regularly attack any type of social movement as being American inspired subversion, rather than an authentic French attempt to deal with the country's underlying issues. How does this stifling culture of French universalism impact nonwhite lesbians and the growing population of French Muslim lesbians?

Tamara: Such an important question.

Gary: I have them every now and then.

Tamara: Yeah. That's great. I think, you know, one of the reasons people often ask me why France? Why write a history of lesbianism in France? And one of my reasons for that is that I think that France provides such an interesting place to study the ways in which a marginalized group has made claims on the public sphere, precisely because of how individual rights are conceptualized in that country. So, as you so rightly put it, in the French republican framework, we need to remember that civil equality and political membership are grounded in that notion of the human subject as universal, as divested of all particular affiliations. So, as you said, what this really means is that all the things that make us distinct race, gender, sexuality, class, religion and ethnicity, all those things belong in the private sphere, and that sphere is understood as the realm of freedom of expression. Now, on the one hand, we could think of that. And you mentioned, you know, you use this word sort of this stifling culture of French universalism. We need to remember, I think, that part of the goal of French universalism was to treat every individual on the basis of their common humanity, as equal, so that it is that part of ourself which is like everyone else. Which is what, um, which is what permits us to claim our rights. And I think if we think back to something even, you know, just as recent as the Second World War and, um, the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, It was the fact that nations were able to identify the religion, or what they called race of individuals that made it possible to actually target the Jewish populations and, um, deport them to concentration camps. Right, and to exterminate them. So when we think about why it might be a good idea not to identify people, um, according to statistics like race or religion, we might look at that. But on the other hand, um, it's been really robustly argued by people like John Scott that in practice, the abstract universal citizen is itself discriminatory. Right. And if we think about the fact that, like, French women were denied the right to vote until 1944, that would be just one example of that. Moreover, since French law doesn't recognize minority groups as a protected class of citizens. French queers, just like Muslims or anyone else, are legally disenfranchised from claiming their rights on a collective basis. So one of the things that my work is trying to do is to really demonstrate how, when lesbians are demanding either social recognition or political rights in France on the basis of private sexual or gender difference, they're posing challenges to the abstract, universal individualism that undergirds French republicanism and to the private and public divide. Now, one of the difficulties, of course, is that lesbians are not themselves, um, necessarily devoid of prejudice. And so in the last chapter of my book. One of the things that I talk about is I raise the question, first of all, of where are the nonwhite lesbians in my history? Because the history that I'm telling is a largely white history, and that's a problem. So we need to ask why. Well, we know that there were women of color in those Sapphic cabarets. Uh, Josephine Baker, um, who was herself bisexual and was an African American performer who was tremendously famous in France during the 1930s and 40s and who went on actually to be the first woman buried in the in the black woman buried in the pantheon, I believe. Um, because she was also a hero during the French Resistance. Um, because of Josephine Baker's tremendous celebrity and the, um, popularity in the fashion for what was called sort of Negro philia at the time. We know that many of these Sapphic cabarets actually sought to hire women of color. Um, but this is a kind of exoticized Asian of race. We also know that during the interwar period, France and even after did not practice the kind of racial discrimination that we see, for example, in the United States. Many African Americans came here, James Baldwin, for example, because this was a relatively more liberated space to live less with less social prejudices, not without, but with fewer social prejudices. But one of the things that I talk about in my book is that there were conflicts within the lesbian rights movement over issues of race, and particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, around 1994 95. We really start to see lesbians of color coming to the fore and making, um, these, uh, accusations against other lesbians in the movement that they are being, uh, treated, you know, that they're being discriminated against, basically. And I think that this is not that dissimilar to what we can also see happening in the women's rights movements in the United States, where we start with sort of Betty Friedan in a very white, middle class, uh, women's rights movement that then is diversified and eventually with the work of someone like Kimberly Crenshaw, as you're talking about, we start to think about intersectionality and the ways that people have, um, multiple identities that perhaps come to the fore in different situations in France. The question of what it means to be a lesbian of color has been even more complicated by this ideology of French republican universalism, which, as you rightly stated, bans the French government from taking statistics, you know, based on race and, as you say, supposedly to prevent racial discrimination. One of the things I talk about in that last chapter is that even studies on lesbian phobia, which have been done in France, the studies that I've studied anyways, Don't tend to ask questions about race, and that's really important, particularly in a country where now we're also seeing a lot of political discourse moving towards the right, which is very anti-immigrant. So I'll see if I can kind of succinctly summarize what the issue is here. Part of the problem is that people like Marine Le Pen and the National Rally are now trying to win the white homosexual vote by demonizing immigrants and namely, people of color who are Muslim, because traditionally Muslims have often been homophobic and patriarchal and misogynist. So neither defenders of women's rights nor of homosexual or lesbian rights. And so this is a move, I believe, on the part of, um, the National Rally and the extreme right parties to try and win the white homosexual vote by, uh, excoriating and, um, targeting and othering, um, Muslims. Now, of course, one of the things that this ignores is the fact that there can be people of color who themselves identify as homosexual. And when you're trying to write a history the way that I am that also, uh, addresses this question of the homosexuality or the lesbianism of women of color in France. One of the things that you come up against are the cultural taboos that continue to be so strong Against speaking about that. And so the imperative to hide that aspect of one's, um, identity, behavior, performance. I think we've just started to see more work emerge in that arena. There's, um, Samira. Um, her name is escaping me at the moment, but there's work that's there's interesting work, um, that has recently come out about, um, about the experiences of Muslim lesbians. As a matter of fact, there's a novel that was published not too long ago. It's a somewhat autobiographical novel by a writer named Fatima Das, or the last one, um, which Recounts the story of the daughter of Algerian immigrants who identifies as lesbian, and the difficulties that she has growing up in, um, a majority Muslim suburb of Paris. Um, and how she attempts to navigate the relationship between her religion and her sexual identity. So I think we're seeing more and more of that work being done. But one of the things that I address at the very end of the book is just how very complicated these multiple identities are, while also acknowledging that in order to achieve political change, people do have to be able to come together around, um, specific aspects of who they believe they are. And I think that that can be done quite effectively using what we might call strategic essentialism, where we decide that we are going to prioritize one aspect of our identity, for example, one's lesbianism, in order to achieve certain kinds of rights. But I think that the issues that we're seeing brought to the fore in the United States right now are not going to stay just in the United States. I think that we will increasingly see these battles over gender performance and sexual identity moving into the public sphere, because these are key ways of trying to control populations and to other individuals and to create, um, and to garner political power for particular, particular reasons. So, um, I would say that there Is a large population of lesbians who are very sensitive to of a white lesbians who are, um, very sensitive to these questions and issues and who are really doing a lot of hard work to try to eradicate, um, white supremacy essentially from, uh, the behaviors and spaces, um, where they congregate. So.

Gary: Yes. And to be clear, when I mentioned that France has a stifling culture, um, perhaps this just comes from my ever present presence on the internet. Uh, I'm very active on this space, and I'm very connected with, uh, quite a bit of, uh, French culture. And I think what is remarkable. So there's I think what a lot of people are aware of the sort of surface level difference between the Anglosphere and France, which is that the Anglosphere, you can have multiple identities. France, it's more universalism. But there is this whole other issue, which I don't think as many people necessarily realize, which is that the more reactionary forces in France have a very powerful weapon on their side, which is anti-Americanism, which they can use against any sort of, uh, native movement. Um, basically, you know, to have Emmanuel Macron, who bear in mind he is supposed to be the centrist between the socialist left. And then you now have the Rosenbloom on national on the, on the right. And he is criticizing Sizing any sort of movement in France towards addressing social issues by various groups as being somehow in American import, and literally uses the term, you know, wokeisme, which is, you know, the French of woke. And so this is, I think, an especially stifling environment because you don't just have, you know, the right saying this, but you even have the center saying that any attempt for people to identify as anything other than French is somehow this. On French, it's this American thing.

Tamara: Yeah. It's, it's, it's, you know, the point's well taken. I think if we look to the scholarship of someone like Elena Elliot, who is a French scholar of lesbianism, who recently defended. Not that recently, perhaps a couple of years ago, a dissertation at the London School of Economics. But who is French and I believe is now teaching in Geneva. Elena has written about the way in which lesbianism was seen as an American import, um, in France, um, that a certain sort of the work of Monique Fatigue and others that informed the French feminist movement, um, was likewise sort of othered. And I think that, you know, and so have chemical bases. Uh, Bruno, Pablo, there are others who've also written about the ways in which the political center and right in France have sort of, um, exteriorized what they see as threatening political stances and cast them as American in order to extract them from the French nation and to make them French in a way that, you know, can then be rejected. And I think that these are powerful political moves and ones that we should rightly be aware of, um, because they gain a lot of traction and, um, can be deployed in really dangerous ways. You know, I think ultimately. You know, if there was any message at all for me in the writing of my book, um, it's that it is so important for us human beings around the globe to recognize our common humanity and to. Realize how crucial it is for people who live outside the norm in any way whatsoever, to be both represented and respected in both the private and the public sphere.

Gary: And what a great note to end on. The book is Becoming Lesbian A Queer History of Modern France. Thank you so much for being on the show, doctor. Chaplain.

Tamara: You are so welcome. Thank you for having me.

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