Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 / Edition 1 available in Hardcover, eBook
Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0415158974
- ISBN-13:
- 9780415158978
- Pub. Date:
- 01/28/1999
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis
- ISBN-10:
- 0415158974
- ISBN-13:
- 9780415158978
- Pub. Date:
- 01/28/1999
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis
Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 / Edition 1
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$180.00Overview
This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of extensive source material, including diaries, poems, legal accounts and journalism. By concentrating the importance of the city and varied meeting places such as parks, river walks, bathing places, the street, bars and even churches, the contributors explore the extent to which gay space existed, the degree of social collectiveness felt by those who used this space and their individual histories.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780415158978 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 01/28/1999 |
| Pages: | 222 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Paris
Michael D. Sibalis
'Refugees from Sodom. — We know that the biblical tire did not destroy all the inhabitants of this corrupt city. Scattered over all the earth, they proliferated in Paris....'
(La Petite Revue, 15, October 1864)
Space, visibility and the gay identity
In 1895, André Raffalovich drew public attention to the clandestine homosexual subculture of Paris and other European urban centers with the warning that '[e]verywhere ... Sodom exists, venal and menacing, the invisible city' (Raffalovich 1895: 447). One hundred years later, on Saturday afternoon, 24 ,June 1995, 80,000 Parisians celebrated la Lesbian and Gay Pride — the international commemoration of the Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York City — with a parade along the boulevards of the Left Bank. Banners and placards raised high, balloons and flags afloat overhead and music blasting from at hundred loudspeakers, the jubilant crowd of men and women made its way along the 4-kilometer route from the Montparnasse Railway Station to the Place de la Bastille.
Parisians have observed Gay Pride in this way every June since 1982, but until recently the number of participants rarely exceeded 5,000—10,000. The unprecedented turnout in 1995 therefore marked a turning-point for France's gay community. 'Visible we chose to be ...' exulted one gay journalist at the time. 'And numerous we were ...' (Muhleisen 1995). Subsequent demonstrations have been even bigger. In 1996,120,000 people showed up, and twice that number marched during the Europride celebrations of 1997, when (in the words of a leading newspaper) Paris became, for a few days at least, 'the European capital of homosexual visibility.' Clearly, the denizens of Raffalovich's 'invisible city' have taken 'visibility' as their watchword.
Visibility is a very recent objective for French homosexuals. For many centuries, homosexually inclined men and women usually preferred to conceal their unconventional desires from a hostile society. Today's gay visibility is the culmination of a long process by which homosexuals not only created and expanded private gay space, but also struggled to secure a share of public space. This effort to appropriate urban space for sexual activity has been the work of gay men in particular, whereas lesbians have tended to be more discreet and more private in the conduct of their sexual lives.
A sociological study of contemporary French male homosexuals published in 1984 has pointed out the paradoxes inherent in gay men's strategic use of urban space: 'Space is a very complicated thing.... Because space is defined by an inside and outside, it excludes and includes, encloses and liberates.' Closed and private space — like clandestine or semi-clandestine commercial venues, but also personal networks of friends and acquaintances — protects, but at the cost of isolating men from the outside world. And yet closed space also creates new possibilities by bringing men together, ending their individual sense of isolation 'and confer[ring] a collective strength that allows people to be themselves in public.' Inversely, however, gay liberation (as 'being oneself in public' has come to be called) leads to a proliferation of exclusively gay spaces (like bars, clubs and cruising areas), which eventually creates gay-dominated enclaves (so-called 'gay ghettos') that can sometimes cut homosexuals off from the broader society in which they live. Ghettos set gay men apart from fellow citizens so that they run the risk of making their status as a scorned minority a permanent one (Cavailhes et al. 1984: 43-4).
Historically, Parisian gay spaces have been situated both literally and figuratively on the margins of city life. Thirty years ago, a rather unusual guidebook classed Paris's gay spaces among the city's many 'bad places' (mauvais lieux), which it defined as '[s]treet, business, quarter, residence, even public place, square, train station, riverbank that human evil and the force of circumstances have transformed into a chosen domain of sin and vice'(Bastiani 1968: 7). This equation of homosexuality with moral turpitude is typical of how most French people have traditionally regarded sexual relations between men or between women.
Terminology provides striking evidence of these negative public attitudes. Frenchmen who have sex with other men have been designated by many words over the years: 'sodomites,' 'buggers,' 'vile creatures' (infâmes) and 'anti-physicals' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 'pederasts' (still the most common term) from about 1740; 'uranians,' 'inverts' and especially 'homosexuals' since the late nineteenth century; and 'gays' (a term imported from the United States) beginning in the 1970s. As these words indicate, society at large has usually considered these men to be sinful, depraved, degenerate, sick or insane. Even today, although two-thirds of the French tell pollsters that homosexuality is 'just another way to live one's sexuality,' the words pédé (slang for 'pederast' and equivalent to the American 'fag' or the British 'poofter') and enculé (literally, a man who is sodomized) are common taunts with an especially harsh sting.
'Gay Paree'
Urbanization is a precondition to emergence of a significant gay subculture. Paris is France's historic capital and has always been by far its largest city. It had perhaps 300,000 inhabitants in 1600, slightly less than half a million under Louis XIV in the 1680s, and close to 600,000 on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. The population reached 1 million by 1850 and 2 million by 1876. It peaked at 2.9 million in 1921. Only 2.2 million people live within city limits today, but the greater Paris region counts 11 million inhabitants, or about 20 per cent of the national population (Fierro 1996: 278-9). And yet a 1993 study of French sexual behaviour indicated that the region was home to 46 per cent of the country's homosexual men. The sample was small: 2,359 heterosexuals, 53 bisexuals, 52 homosexuals (Messian and Mouret-Fourme 1993). Gay men have apparently migrated to Paris from every part of the country.
Countless heterosexuals have also moved to Paris in search of work, professional advancement or a new life, but the city has almost certainly drawn a disproportionately high number of homosexuals. Until quite recently, even the largest of other French towns offered these men very little in the way of a gay subculture. Gay venues were (and in most cases still are) rare in provincial France, and strong social and familial constraints make it very difficult to live one's homosexuality openly there. As a result, as an American journalist explained in 1976:
Gay Paris is the center of all homosexual life in France. A French homosexual will almost inevitably turn to the anonymity of the French capital to escape his fate in any one of thousands of provincial outposts. This makes Paris a privileged place no other city in the country can match.
One gay journalist, now in his forties, recently recalled his move to the capital some twenty years ago: 'Paris to me meant freedom.... Things became much easier for me. I knew ... that I would end up living the life that I wanted.' And a much younger biologist, still in his twenties, remarked that 'in the provinces, there are very few places to meet someone.... It's different in Paris. There are a lot more possibilities'(Minella and Angelotti 1996:61-2).
Foreign homosexuals, too, have often seen Paris as a promised land of freedom. In the words of Dennis Altman:
Paris occupies a special place in the homosexual imagination. It offers neither the tolerance of Amsterdam or San Francisco, nor the inexhaustible sensuality of New York. But we are reminded by such names as [Marcel] Proust, [André] Gide, [Jean] Cocteau, Colette, and [Jean] Genet that Paris has certainly been a major center for homosexual culture and a refuge from more repressive cultures for homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, and James Baldwin (who set Giovanni's Room there).
The city's appeal to homosexuals undoubtedly extends well into its past. Of forty-six sodomites incarcerated in Bicêtre prison between 1701 and 1715, only twenty-one (45.7 per cent) were native-born Parisians. One hundred and fifty years later, the director of the city's vice squad reported that only 32.3 per cent of the pederasts arrested between 1860 and 1870 were born in Paris, whereas 58.5 per cent originated in the provinces and 9.2 per cent were foreigners (Carlier 1887: 444-5).
The recorded history of Parisian homosexuality begins in the Middle Ages. An anonymous twelfth-century poet observed that 'Up to now Chartres and Paris have revelled / In the vice of Sodom,' while a clergyman lamented in the early thirteenth century that 'this shameful and abominable vice' was rampant in the city (Boswell 1980: 262; Lever 1985: 43). Allusions such as these to same-sex activity became more frequent as the centuries advanced. By the 1500s and 1600s, accusations of sodomy were standard weapons in the rhetorical arsenal of polemicists, who often alleged that foreigners (especially Italian courtiers) had first brought this strange taste for one's own sex into France and that it infected principally artists, clergymen and libertine noblemen, as well as the domestic servants whom they purportedly corrupted. Although men of every social class almost certainly did participate in same-sex activity, the surviving evidence from before the eighteenth century displays a marked bias toward the privileged elites. Consequently, to the extent that this can be determined, if seventeenth-century Paris had 'gay space' (a term that is surely anachronistic for the period), it was in the all-male schools run by the clergy, in aristocratic mansions and at the royal court, where in the 1680s many of the highest nobles in the land allegedly belonged to a secret 'Italian brotherhood' of sodomites (Lever 1985; Estrée 1902).
By the eighteenth century, however, there is substantial evidence of a more widespread and more socially diverse 'sodomitical subculture' in Paris among men whose sexual desires defined a collective identity and, some historians would claim, even a distinct 'lifestyle.' Maurice Lever, for instance, has argued that:
[d]espite disparities of social class, the homosexual world [of eighteenth-century Paris] formed a community apart, with its own language, rules, codes, rivalries and clans. A closed society, secret by necessity, perhaps also by taste, situated on the margins of traditional society.... For everybody, young or old, priests or laymen, great lords, financiers, workers, vagabonds, a single activity, devouring and obsessive: cruising for sex [la drague].
(Lever 1985: 299)
If this subculture existed earlier, it has unfortunately left almost no trace in the archives. Police reports, the main source for the history of homosexual activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, do not exist for the period before 1700. It was only in 1667 that Paris got an effective police force to administer the growing city, control criminal activity, maintain good order and enforce public morals. In the early 1700s, special police agents began to patrol those parts of the city known to be frequented by sodomites, and harassed, entrapped and arrested the men they found there. Sodomy was a serious crime at the time and formal legal penalties harsh: death by fire until 1791. In practice, however, enforcement was almost always lenient. Only seven Parisian sodomites were burned at the stake in the entire eighteenth century, and five of them had other serious crimes, like rape and murder, on their conscience. The exceptions were a couple of hapless wretches executed by way of example in 1750, after the night watch caught them having sex in a darkened street. The police more usually released arrested sodomites with a warning or locked them up for a few weeks to teach them a lesson (Rey 1979-80).
In 1791, the French Revolution enacted a new penal code that decriminalized sodomy between consenting partners in private. A homosexual act was now criminal only when it occurred in public space, in which case it constituted an offense against public decency. The police consequently paid little heed to private and discreet homosexual conduct, but in 1817 a reconstituted vice squad resumed its rounds in the streets and parks (Sibalis 1996). These patrols continued into the early 1980s. The reports generated by policing constitute one very valuable source for the history of homosexual men and their use of Parisian space. Other kinds of sources also appeared in a gradually widening stream in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Policemen, magistrates, clergymen and medical doctors — the pillars of the established order — expounded their expert (and generally hostile) opinions of homosexual behavior Newspapers reported trials for public indecency and the occasional sensational scandal. Law courts kept records of such cases, which eventually found their way into the archives. And books, written for an insatiably curious reading public and sporting lurid titles like Paris's Garbage (1874), Corruption in Paris (1890), Satan Leads the Ball (1925), Among the Bad Boys (1937) and The Underside of Paris (1955), purported to expose the seamy side of Parisian life (including crime, prostitution and homosexuality), while clearly reveling in the accounts of the moral evils that they stigmatized (Urville 1874; Coffignon 1890; Georges-Anquetil 1925; Coglay 1937; Delpêche 1955).
Fiction, too, can be a useful historical source. The first French literary masterpiece to deal extensively with homosexuality was Marcel Proust's seven-volume A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27), translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, which shocked many people with its panoramic view of Parisian homosexuality at the turn of the century. But even before Proust set pen to paper, minor novelists had already treated the subject and dozens more of varying talent would follow suit over the years. Some of their novels offer precious insights into past attitudes and sexual activities through their strong characterization of homosexual men and their vivid evocations of urban gay spaces.
For instance, 'Dr Luiz' (pseudonym of Paul Devaux), author of Les Fellators (1888), claimed that his mildly pornographic book was 'more a social study [of sexual perversion] than a novel.' Its main character, a beautiful Spaniard named Arthur, was one of 'those young men, models of elegance and good taste, who live in luxury and idleness,' spending their time in the fictional Café de la Guerre (standing in for the real Café de la Paix). Luiz told readers that he wanted to 'to aid you by dissipating your last doubts concerning those overly well-dressed ephebes.' Francis Carco's Jesus-la-Caille (1910) examined a very different but no less shocking milieu. In recounting the story of a teenage male hustler, Carco portrayed the world of crime, prostitution and homosexuality that flourished in the Montmartre district of early twentieth-century Paris. Montmartre was also the setting for Adonis-Bar, by Maurice Duplay (1928). The plot of this novel centered on a gay bar in the 1920s and sketched a realistic picture of the decadent lives of Horace, the middle-aged owner, and Fred, his much younger lover. The eponymous hero of Marcel Guersant's Jean-Paul (1953) dies at 23 after winning the struggle against his homosexual inclinations thanks to his recovered Catholic faith. Despite its moralizing tone, the book included realistic descriptions of homosexual cruising in Parisian streets in the mid-1930s. (For other French literary representations of homosexualities see Robinson, 1995; Summers 1995: 290-302).
As these few examples suggest, most novelists have demonstrated a marked antipathy toward their homosexual characters, often killing them off at the end of the story as if they had to die to atone for their deviance. This changed significantly only after the World War II and especially from the 1960s, when openly gay novelists began to produce a literature that celebrated their own experiences. The voice of homosexuals could be heard elsewhere as well, once they began speaking up, speaking out and speaking for themselves. Arcadie, a politically moderate 'homophile' review that appeared between 1954 and 1982, was the first long-lived gay publication, and dozens of more militant newspapers and magazines started up in later years.
Thus, police reports, newspapers, non-fictional books, novels and gay publications of all sorts offer the historian a wide range of valuable source material. If most Parisian homosexuals have managed to keep their personal life behind closed doors, where historians cannot easily go, surviving documents do make it possible to see how these same homosexuals have used both open public space and closed commercial space in the course of the last 300 years.
Public space
A 1969 'guide to Parisian pleasures' observed that for homosexuals '[i]n the streets, of course, there is every hazard but also every possibility.' Every possibility meant chance sexual encounters with 'young male models from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, workmen in the Métro ... students near the Sorbonne, sailors around the Gare Montparnasse ... North Africans in the Barbés-Rochechouart district, Negroes almost everywhere, and everybody at Saint-Germain-des-Prés.' Police superveillance was the hazard (Rudorff 1969: 298).
For hundreds of years, homosexual men have sought sexual adventure in the streets, squares and parks of Paris, and they have often risked arrest to find it. This, for example, is the advice proffered by a guidebook for the gay visitor to Paris in 1995: 'swimming pools, public parks, the quays along the Seine, train stations and major tourist attractions all have potentials never imagined by their builders. Keep your eyes open' (Vichit-Vadakan 1995: 111). But homosexual 'cruising' is nothing new, as the following comments from 1826 demonstrate:
You can see these disgusting men move about Paris, at the Palais-Royal, in certain cafés, where an exquisite elegance almost always sets them apart.... In the evening, at the setting of the sun, you will notice a good number on the Quai Saint-Nicolas, the Quai du Louvre and the Quai de l'Archevêché; in the Place du Marché-Neuf and the Place de la Sorbonne and along the Champs-Élysées; and everywhere you will see with what assurance and with what shamelessness they dare to make you the most filthy propositions.
(Guyon 1826: 218)
One of the best-known places for cruising today is the Tuileries Garden. According to one recent guidebook, '[a]ll gay life is here, whispering on the benches, leaning against the balustrades, reading under trees, or sauntering around outside the former Orangerie museum — but all following a routine as mannered as anything out of Jane Austen's Bath society' (Phillips 1990: 155).
Parisian gays firmly believe that men have been coming here for centuries to meet other men and sometimes to have sex with them at night in the bushes or under the trees. In the words of one habitual visitor in 1987, 'The Tuileries, it's not even because of the tradition, it's naturally a place for cruising ... you can't keep a guy from smelling it. There are always boys....' As long ago as 1830, a writer observed that one specific corner of the garden near the antique statue of a wild boar (Figure 1.1) was 'the rallying point of our modern Antinouses' (Lamothe-Langon 1830: 20). (Antinous was the famed lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian.) The statue turns up again in a newspaper article of July 1845:
The section of the trees in the Tuileries Garden ... at the center of which a marble statue of a wild boar stands on a pedestal, has for many years been known as one of the meeting places of those immoral creatures whose vice seems to be spreading at a frightful rate in Paris. It is above all on days of public festivities, when the garden stays open rather late at night, that these wretches gather at this spot, where the thick foliage keeps out the light.
And yet the Tuileries Garden's reputedly timeless tradition is almost certainly not an unbroken one. Although the marble boar stood crumbling in place until finally restored and moved to shelter in the Louvre Museum in 1992, it had apparently lost all significance as a landmark by the 1850s. The Tuileries Garden itself almost entirely disappeared from descriptions of homosexual activity until the 1960s, when a Parisian tabloid newspaper called on the police to put an end to 'the scandal of the Tuileries,' which it presented as a recent development:
What goes on there every day, in the heart of Paris, in a place where children come to play, is revolting. The Tuileries Garden has become the number one meeting place for homosexuals in the capital.... They come and go with their effeminate walk. One hears ... their indecent giggling. There are dozens of them. They seek each other out. They wink, accost each other, arrange rendez-vous.... It's appalling.
Between 1850 and 1960, the principal cruising site in Paris was not the Tuileries Garden, but rather the Champs-Élysées. This does not refer to the famous avenue of that name, which was called the Avenue de Neuilly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather the 'Elysian Fields' themselves, meaning the wooded parkland along both sides of the avenue between the Place de la Concorde and the Rond-Point. The Champs-Élysées had been known for both heterosexual prostitution and homosexual cruising since the early eighteenth century. In 1845 a Parisian complained to the police about the 'hideous leprosy' that infected the Champs-Élysées every evening between nine and eleven o'clock: '[H]ere it's women, shameless in every way, who take you by the arm and try to drag you under the trees, further along it's some of those miserable creatures that one still calls men.' An agent with the vice squad explained in 1968 that 'no spot in Paris favors debauchery more than [the Champs-Élysées].' This was because of 'the twisting paths in the shadows of the tall trees which a feeble ray of light barely penetrates' and 'the cafés installed amidst the clumps of trees along both sides of the avenue and which remain open until at least half past midnight.'
One particular tree in the park achieved special renown by the 1880s:
The headquarters of these pederasts in this corner of Paris ... is called the tree of love ... and it is located near the Café des Ambassadeurs [on the Avenue Gabriel]. Every evening around this tree, one can see vile rascals wandering about, easily recognizable by their clean-shaven face, their lifeless gaze and especially the peculiar way they sway their hips as they glide rather than walk over the ground.
(Delcourt 1888: 285)
The public urinals installed amidst the trees and hedges made the park even more enticing to homosexuals. They prowled there nightly until they were scared off in the late 1950s, when, because of the Algerian War, the police tightened security around the Élysée Palace, the President's official residence, which backed onto the site.
As well-known and well-frequented as they may have been since the early eighteenth century, the Tuileries Garden and the Champs-Élysées were just two cruising sites among countless others. The Grands Boulevards — the wide promenade laid out in the 1680s across northern Paris in a vast semi-circle along the line of the city's demolished fortifications and stretching between the Place de la Concorde and the Bastille — attracted pleasure seekers of every kind from their very inception. Pederasts and prostitutes walked these boulevards throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1850, for instance, an angry citizen wrote to the prefect of police that in the course of his evening stroll along the boulevards, he regularly witnessed 'scenes of a most shameful immorality.... I am speaking principally of those offered by those nameless creatures, those hideous hermaphrodites! ... In short, ... the boulevards are now a genuine den of thieves implanted in the heart of Sodom and Gomorrah.'
Then there were the banks of the Seine. In the eighteenth century, pederasts often went down to the river to ogle (and sometimes pick up) the men who commonly bathed there naked. One official complained in 1724, 'It's a horrible scandal that a large number of libertine men swim in the nude in Paris in sight of so many people, principally of the opposite sex.... They also commit abominations with those of their own sex.' Men also went to the river bank at night, sometimes to urinate and defecate (public latrines being rare in those days) and sometimes to look for sex. Nude bathing within city limits ended in the early nineteenth century and the river's graveled shores became paved embankments, but the quays still drew men every evening, as the police noted in 1865: 'The river banks, the arches of the bridges and certain spots relatively rarely frequented will attract, on the pretext of satisfying their natural needs [to urinate or defecate], pederasts who will have an excuse for finding themselves there.'
Changes to the urban landscape in the course of the nineteenth century created new cruising sites without eliminating the older' ones. Among these new sites were the commercial arcades: enclosed galleries roofed over with glass, lit by gas and lined with shops, cafés and restaurants for well-to-do consumers. The first dates from 1791 and the last from 1860, but most were constructed between 1823 and 1846. The arcades provided sheltered public space for window shopping, dawdling and philandering, which brought throngs of idle strollers, including female prostitutes, the so-called suiveurs ('followers'), who accosted passing women, and, almost inevitably, pederasts who came looking for other men. Pederasts frequented three arcades in particular: the Galerie d'Orléans (Figure 1.2), built in 1828-30 at the south end of the Palais-Royal Garden, already a notorious site for debauchery and for male and female prostitution since the 1780s; the Passage des Panoramas (1799), which opened onto the south side of the Boulevard Montmartre; and the Passage Jouffroy (1847), which faced it from the opposite side of the boulevard. Shopkeepers complained that the presence of these men drove away customers, and in the mid-1840s the police began raiding the arcades to arrest 'these suspicious and vile prowlers with which the busiest galleries and passages swarm.'
The public urinals installed in the Paris streets from about 1830 provided hundreds of additional spots for cruising. These vespasiennes (named for the emperor Vespasian who built public urinals in first-century Rome) were freestanding structures of sheet-metal that usually had room for three to six men (Figure 1.3). Paris had 500 of them by the early 1840s and within a few decades they were ubiquitous along the streets and in the parks and squares (Guerrand 1985; Maillard 1967). The police regularly staked out those urinals most used by pederasts. An agent testifying at one scandalous trial in 1876, after he and his colleagues caught municipal councilor Charles de Germiny engaged in mutual masturbation in a public urinal with an unemployed 18-year-old worker, described the scene they had witnessed:
The sixth of December [1876], at 10:40 p.m., I noticed Monsieur de Germiny exposing himself. He went into the same facilities six times. Suspect Chouart entered the same one as Monsieur de Germiny.... Glances were exchanged.... Both of them then went to sit on a [nearby] bench; I didn't see them speaking, but they undoubtedly understood each other and went back in together. Seeing then the unequivocal turn that events were taking, we put our hands on the shoulders of the two individuals [and arrested them].
The police made 200-300 similar arrests almost every single year. It is no wonder that in 1910 an outraged newspaper columnist blasted the city's vespasiennes as 'a school of apprenticeship in the supreme vice' and railed against the graffiti scrawled inside them: 'With what disgraceful things they are covered inside ...! Inverts are not satisfied with making them one of their meeting places, they write in them, using advertising to make converts by contagion.'
An old ledger kept in the Paris police archives adds detail to an otherwise impressionistic picture of late nineteenth-century cruising. It records the names of more than 900 men arrested between March 1873 and March 1879 for offenses against public decency with other males or for solicitation for the purposes of prostitution; it also gives the precise locations where the police arrested them. The ledger probably does not indicate every single place in the city that pederasts went looking for sex, but only those spots that the police chose (for whatever reason) to keep under surveillance. Even so, the data are suggestive. First of all, they confirm the importance of the Champs-Élysées to the homosexual subculture. The police made 26.7 per cent of all their arrests there, and one-third of these occurred in and around one specific urinal located near the Café des Ambassadeurs on the Avenue Gabriel, making it the busiest cruising site in the entire city. The Grands Boulevards accounted for 9.8 per cent of arrests. The three arcades already watched by the police in the 1840s also remained busy: the Passage Jouffroy (8.4 per cent of arrests), the Passage des Panoramas (1.8 per cent) and the Galerie d'Orléans (2 per cent). Many of those arrested on the boulevards and in the arcades were young men whom the police subsequently charged with soliciting. They were presumably prostitutes, like the numerous women who plied their trade along the very same boulevards. That is what a journalist meant when he wrote in 1891 that 'from 11 p.m., sometimes even earlier, the boulevard, along a long stretch from the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre to the Opera House, belongs to the "girls" and, alas!, even to the "boys".' The police made another 11.6 per cent of their arrests along the quays of the Seine, either in the latrines installed there for the men who worked on the ports or under the sheltering arches of the many bridges that spanned the river.
All of these sites had been cruising places for decades, but newer ones also appear in the ledger. For example, the public urinals in the Place de la Bourse, site of the Stock Exchange, now accounted for 13.4 per cent of arrests, probably because the business quarter was conveniently deserted at night and also strategically situated halfway between the Galerie d'Orléans and the Grands Boulevards. As for railway stations, twenty arrests (9 per cent of the total) occurred in the public toilets at the Bastille terminus of the Vincennes Railroad Line, which took commuters between Paris and suburban Vincennes, and another six (0.6 per cent) at the Saint-Lazare Station, the busiest in Paris because of its heavy suburban traffic. On the other hand, the public parks seem to have been significantly less frequented in the 1870s than before 1850. Apart from the notorious Champs-Élysées, only Monceau Park, built in the 1860s, accounted for a significant number of arrests (twenty, or 2 per cent of the total). There were a mere three arrests in the Tuileries Garden, two in the Luxembourg Garden and six outside the city in Vincennes Woods.
The patterns established by the 1870s changed little until the 1950s or 1960s, except that cruising declined in the arcades, while it increased in other places of passage: railway, bus and subway stations, where men could offer police a believable excuse if stopped for loitering. To take a single example: from the 1940s into the 1970s, the Invalides Station, city terminus for the buses to and from Orly Airport, saw intensive homosexual activity. When a friend once spotted Jean Genet there, the homosexual novelist, referring to the international travelers who passed through the terminus and whom he was trying to pick up, remarked, 'I'm doing a tour of the world'(White 1993: 350).
The most obvious change of all resulted from the gradual suppression of the city's vespasiennes. Municipal officials frankly admitted that they got rid of the urinals not only because they were unsightly and malodorous, but also 'for reasons of public order, when the improper use that is made of them [by homosexuals] becomes a real nuisance to the neighbors.' Paris, which still had more than 1,000 public urinals in the 1930s, had about 350 in 1961, 100 in 1980 and only 2 by the 1990s. Many gay men lamented this loss. 'In the Place d'Iéna,' according to a 1969 guidebook, 'we have even seen a wreath laid on the pavement in honour of happy memories on the site of a former vespasienne' (Rudorf 1969: 298).
Gay guidebooks indicate with precision where men have been cruising since the 1960s. There is still always the possibility of an encounter on any street or boulevard, but without urinals to provide focal points, gay men increasingly turned back to the city's many public parks and gardens. The Tuileries Garden was only the busiest among many, and almost any dimly lit park would attract homosexuals looking for a pick-up or for quick on-the-spot sexual gratification. The late Pascal de Duve, a young novelist with a personal experience of Parisian parks in the 1990s, has described what went on there in striking albeit overblown prose:
Parks are Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes in ecological form. There, in the daytime, you see children, the elderly and young mothers with infants. At night, they are haunted by shadowy silhouettes drawing together and moving apart like moths engaged in a strange ballet. Sometimes the silhouettes merge in ephemeral couplings screened by a bush, from which a soft moan rises into the coolness of the night.
(Duve 1994: 47)
The banks of the Seine remain as popular now as in the eighteenth century. Paris has 'a raunchy [nighttime] waterfront scene, like New York,' near the Austerlitz Railway Station on the Quai de la Gare, 'a large, dim boulevard peopled by spectres, hard, dangerous and anonymous,' where men can copulate amidst the concrete pillars that support the shipping sheds overhead. And Parisian gays have dubbed the Quai des Tuileries, the embankment that runs along the edge of the Tuileries Garden, 'Tata Beach' (tata being slang for 'auntie'), because skimpily clad gay men regularly sunbathe there on sunny summer days. They also congregate there year round after dark.
Despite all this activity, evidence suggests that outdoor cruising may have somewhat declined after the mid-1970s. 'Before,' one man explained in 1987, 'there were guys hanging around every Parisian bush. Now, it's over. AIDS scares us much more than the police do.... The Tuileries aren't what they used to be.' But disease was hardly the only factor, any more than the marked increase in assaults by 'fag-bashers.' City Hall began fencing off the parks, installed bright lights in some spots to dispel the shadows and even instituted a special brigade to patrol the gardens in 1980. Of at least equal importance has been the growth of alternative ways for gay men to meet each other. The gay press, especially after the magazine Gai Pied was launched in 1979, has featured personal advertisements by men seeking sexual partners for a night or a lifetime. The 1980s also saw the introduction of the minitel, a simple home-computer wired into the national telephone system and offered at minimal cost to every customer. The most successful commercial servers have been 'erotic' ones, which enable subscribers to post messages, communicate and eventually arrange intimate encounters (Duyves 1993: 193-203). Finally and most significantly, the development of an extensive network of bars, nightclubs and bath-houses has not only given men comfortable places to socialize, but also encouraged the formation of gay enclaves within the city and provided the infrastructure for a new gay community.
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