French gossip magazine Closer caused a storm of protest from the political class earlier this month when it published photos of far-right Front National (FN) party vice-president Florian Philippot in Vienna in company of a man presented as his boyfriend.
Left and Right joined in denouncing what FN leader Marine Le Pen called “a grave intrusion” into the private life of Philippot, who on Monday goes to court to sue Closer for violation of privacy. He is demanding 50,000 euros in damages, that the magazine’s website remove the photos, and a ban on any further use of them.
Philippot, who is effectively the far-right party’s number two, a close political advisor to Le Pen, has never publicly commented on his sexuality.
On December 12th, just days after the report in Closer, a founder of the right-wing French LGBT rights group GayLib, Sébastian Chenu, held a joint press conference with Marine Le Pen to announce he had joined her party and would serve as an advisor to her on cultural issues and will stand as a FN candidate in future local elections.
The GayLib group, which was previously affiliated to the conservative UMP party, and now the centre-right UDI, denounced Chenu’s move to a party that opposed the same-sex marriage law adopted in 2013. Chenu said he was drawn to the party by Le Pen’s views on social issues and sovereignty.
Far-right magazine Minute has regularly denounced a “gay court” at the top of the party which has isolated Le Pen. It has claimed that Le Pen’s proximity with gays in the FN was the reason she opted not to take part in the numerous mass demonstrations against the same-sex marriage law, which was finally adopted in 2013, despite her party’s outspoken opposition against gay marriage.
Commenting on Minute’s attacks on the party’s “gay lobby”, Philippot, in a January 2013 interview with regional daily Le Républicain Lorrain, described them as “worthy of far-right plot-mongers of the period between the wars” when, he added, “one didn’t say gay, one said Jew, but it’s on the same level”.
Minute’s campaign and Philippot’s comments underline a degree of tension between Marine Le Pen and the old guard of the party who identify themselves more with the party’s founder and former president, Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described homosexuality as "a biological and social anomaly" and whose notorious anti-Semitic comments landed him in court on several occasions.
In 2012, Didier Lestrade, founder of gay militant rights group Act Up Paris, published a book entitled Pourquoi les gays sont passés à droite (Why gays moved to the Right). He argues that increasing numbers of gays are attracted to the far-right, in part through disenchantment with the frosty reception they receive from mainstream parties where they have few chances of being offered posts of responsibility.
In the interview below, he argues that Marine Le Pen is seeking “to try and enroll minority struggles in her fight against Islam”, and underlines that “people like Chenu and Philippot are not only symbols that can set an example, but also they arrive with networks”.
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[Bracketed notes in italics are editor’s explanatory notes]
Mediapart: Sébastien Chenu, one of the founders Gaylib, a movement that brings together LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) supporters of the Right and centre-right, recently announced that he is joining the Rassemblement Bleu Marine, a far-right coalition founded by Front National party leader Marine Le Pen. Earlier this month, the Front National’s vice-president and key aide to Le Pen, Florian Philippot was reported to be in a homosexual relationship by weekly gossip magazine Closer. Has the Front National become gay-friendly?
Didier Lestrade: If someone said to me, 15 years ago, that Marine Le Pen would manage to so profoundly modify the manner in which her party dealt with the homosexual question, I would not have believed it. Le Pen the father [of Marine and FN leader until 2011] was a homophobe and I remember that during the FN’s [traditional, annual] May 1st march, with all the skinheads, I, who lived then not far from the [Paris] Opera [venue for the march], would not have taken the risk of being outside. But Marine Le Pen has made it a political issue and set a dividing line with the party’s hardliners.
On the one hand she uses the fight for [rights of] women and gays to attack Muslims and to try and enroll minority struggles in her fight against Islam, on the model of what, in the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn and Geerts Wilders did. On the other, she’s demonstrated a political choice by lending attention to homosexual questions and by choosing to have gays among her closest entourage, even if taking a political risk because she’s criticized for that by those on her Right. If certain gays go to the FN, it is also because they believe, legitimately, they find there a better understanding and place than in the Socialist Party or the [conservative] UMP [party]. On the questions of society that represent euthanasia or homosexuality, Marine Le Pen succeeds in interesting lots of people who don’t feel understood or represented by the old, sclerotic parties of government.
Mediapart: In what might they find a better understanding and place within the FN?
D.L.: If gays go over to Marine Le Pen, it’s because they are deserting the Socialist Party and the UMP. On the Right, they take stock, all the more so since the return of Nicolas Sarkozy, that societal questions will be used as a marker of right-wing values, and that apart from [UMP conservative moderates and Sarkozy rivals] Bruno Lemaire and Alain Juppé, the tendency is to adopt homophobia. On the Socialist Party side, they clearly see that apart from [justice minister and high-profile campaigner for now-adopted same-sex marriage law, Christiane] Taubira, nobody took to the fore to defend gay marriage and that they have barely any chances of reaching posts of responsibility.
Taubira, who is not a member of the Socialist Party [but of the socialist-affiliated Walwari party of her native French Guiana] was brilliant, but she cannot alone make up for the lack of leadership on the Left about this issue. We saw no member of parliament, no young talent, gay or not, take a political risk, reply to all the insults that we suffered and see their name forever associated with this law, in the way we saw [Green EELV party MP] Noël Mamère take a stand. As for access to [posts of] responsibility, we are always given the example of [gay socialist former Paris mayor, Bertrand] Delanoë, but he is so hung-up on these issues that, out of fear of being accused of proselytization, he did very little whether that be about [gay] health, rights, culture. It is flagrant if you compare his track record on the matter with, for example, Berlin.
Meanwhile, Marine le Pen gathers up, because the FN is not officially for gay marriage, which can satisfy conservative gays or those who believe this demand is not necessary – but she doesn’t take part in the ‘Manif pour tous’ [‘Demo for all’ movement of national marches against the same-sex marriage law, widely dubbed as‘marriage for all’].
And concerning places, even if Chenu doesn’t represent very much in terms of numbers, he unfortunately translates a feeling that you find more and more often among the gay community, which is that there is no place for gays in the upper echelons of the Socialist Party or the UMP, whereas a career is possible with Marine Le Pen.
How can one explain why people who belong to a minority join political parties that stigmatise others?
D.L.: LGBT political thinking, since it exists, has always been on the Left, and has never succeeded in catching on that there exists a right-wing gay political current. The gay press has never interested itself in what might signify to be at the same time gay, right-wing and Catholic. For years, the de-complexed right-wing, hard and racist line reaches society in its entirety, and so also gays and lesbians.
Gay community newspapers and associations carry a heavy responsibility in this dissolution of a common front of minorities. They didn’t place issues that can cause upset in the open, like religion or Islam, and didn’t undo this use of the gay question in Islamophobic campaigns. And they didn’t get stuck in during all the time when [former French president, Nicolas] Sarkozy was in power, on the basis that nothing was doable. It was, however, at that time that gay marriage should have been much better prepared for, so that we didn’t get so much thrown at our faces, [along with] the transgender condition, or school education. But nothing was done, neither by the Socialist Party nor by the LGBT associations.
Your book, published two years ago, is entitled ‘Why gays moved to the Right’. Are those gays who are today on the Right, or the Right of the Right, more visible or more numerous?
D.L.: I believe they are much more numerous, and it should not be underestimated that people like Chenu and Philippot are not only symbols that can set an example, but that also they arrive with networks.
But if they are much more numerous, it’s also because the Left has lost them, and for a long while. The gay marriage [bill of law] had been so badly prepared that it brought us more disillusionment and insults than reasons to rejoice. We could, however, have looked at the way that things happened in foreign countries where similar laws were adopted.
On the Socialist Party side, in its Universalist and republican tendency, there is a total miscomprehension of gays or Blacks, whose demands are only understood as being partisan. I will never again vote for the Socialist Party or the Greens, me who for years was a good little soldier of the Left. So imagine what this disenchantment can produce among homosexuals who are less concerned than me about community and minority questions and who do not feel profoundly on the Left. To take a strong and symbolic line on LGBT questions would not have strained the state budget, it doesn’t cost much.
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The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse