“One day, my parents took me to a demonstration,” wrote Louis (last name withheld), in a post on Twitter back in 2018. “I shouted slogans that I didn’t understand. I was 12-years-old. That day, my parents took me to demonstrate against my own rights. Every time I think about it, I feel sick.”
“So you who cause your children depressions, anxiety or whatever else that’s devastating, you who insult them, reject them, turn them onto the street, you who can’t love them, don’t come along and explain to us how a child should be brought up.”
It was the first time that Louis had publicly spoke up about his participation in the demonstrations in 2012 and 2013 that drew hundreds of thousands onto the streets in France to protest at the then socialist government’s proposed legislation to allow people of the same sex full marriage rights, including the right to adopt children. The legislation was finally approved by Parliament on April 23rd 2013, and promulgated the following month, on May 13th.
Dubbed “marriage for all” (le mariage pour tous), the legislation, presented before Parliament by the then justice minister Christiane Taubira, was fiercely opposed by Catholic associations, many among the conservative Right, including former prime minister François Fillon (who promised that his party would repeal the law if it was returned to power), and the far-right, who joined together in the mass street protests in a movement called “the demo for all” (Le Manif pour tous).
Amid the marking this month of the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the legislation, some have said publicly they regret having opposed the bill and would today vote in favour of it, including current interior minister Gérald Darmanin, and the former chairman of the conservative UMP party (now renamed Les Républicains), Jean-François Copé. Commenting on their regrets during an interview this weekend on radio station France Info, Christiane Taubira said: “One would want to reply ‘all that for that!’, except that I think it is [rather] for those people who were wounded by the injurious speeches, and their galvanising effects on the most aggressive among the ‘demo for all’, to say what they feel.”
It was in 2018, the same year as his Twitter post, that Louis, then aged 17, told his parents for the first time that he was gay. “My father said something homophobic to me, I got angry,” he recalled, meeting Mediapart in a café in the Marais district of central Paris. His five siblings are all heterosexual. “Ironically, because I was the youngest I was the most exposed,” he said.
Now aged 22, Louis, a student at the life sciences and agronomy school AgroParisTech, clearly remembers the chants heard in the protests against the same-sex marriage legislation; some were homophobic, while others, racist, were aimed at Christiane Taubira, a black politician from French Guyana. “There was a lot of hate towards Mrs Taubira, jokes using the Banania [chocolate drink] slogan, people who called her monkey names,” said Louis, smartly dressed in a polo-neck sweater and shirt top, his nails painted blue. “Obviously, there were also comparisons about homosexuality and paedophilia.”
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He also recalled how, in 2012 when he was aged 11, his parents presented the ‘Demo for all’ to him: “There were the nasty ones who wanted to destroy the family, and the nice ones who were fighting for it.” He was told by them that the vast majority of French people were against the bill – although opinion surveys reported the contrary. He also remembers how it was fun to join the marches, where he would meet with families who he came across when attending mass. “It was playful, because to go out into the street and make noise when you’re 11-years-old is funny. We had little flags and balloons.” The latter remained for a long while in the entrance hall of the family apartment.
The young Louis had no idea what homosexuality was. “It didn’t come into my head that I could be one of ‘those people’. I really mixed up that caricature with the word.”
He said that later, for a long while, he felt a heavy feeling of guilt about his homosexuality, while his parents chose to ignore the subject. He said that after he told them he was gay, they never really spoke about it again. He recounted a discussion with a female friend who was brought up in a similar family environment. “We have the impression that several years were stolen from us. I live a lot with a feeling of being tardy. We went through all the lycée [final secondary school] realising that we had to question all that had been taught us, in order to perhaps discover who we really were, and I still continue to discover who I am.”
While he doesn’t feel anger against his parents, he is annoyed at the hypocrisy and ignorance of some of those who opposed same-sex marriage. “I know families where the parents are separated, others who pretend to represent the perfect model, very Catholic and going to mass every Sunday, but who were profoundly dysfunctional, where the father was violent.” He cited the example of “a mother who spoke about the violence she was submitted to by her husband, the priest who told her that it was a form of purgatory on Earth which had to be suffered – but the ‘problem’ was the homosexuals who wanted to have children!”
“The protection of childhood is a pretext,” he added. “It’s a form of fear and compulsive hatred of what is different, combined with a refusal to inform oneself through dread of realising that one is wrong.” He cited the recent attacks in France, notably by the far-right, on readings by drag queens at cultural events where the children present are supposedly put in danger. “But how many drag queens have been arrested for paedophilia, and how many priests?” An independent commission set up in France to investigate sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the CIASE, has estimated the number of victims since the 1950s to total around 330,000.
Along with his experiences of the ‘Demo for all’ protests, Louis said one of his biggest “traumas” was his time at a private boarding school run by priests, where he said he and others suffered “physical and psychological violence”. He said showers were allowed “once per week” when a monitor would decide when the water would be switched on and off, along with being forced to run races in the rain, and having to recopy the mass in Latin. There was also the “captains’ council, where we remained standing up through the night until we said ‘yes, it was me who did it’”. Louis said he spent two years in the institution until his parents realised that there was something wrong.
They continue to attend mass every Sunday, while he describes himself as “deist” but with a conflictual feeling about religion.
A few years back, when he was still living in the family home, his parents went to a gathering of the ‘demo for all’ movement which continued after the same-sex marriage legislation was introduced – a movement now renamed as the Syndicat de la famille. “At the end of the demonstration, I received a message from my mother who told me ‘We’re coming home, heat the water for the tea please’,” he recalled. “I found myself having dinner with my parents and friends of theirs who had come up from Aix-en-Provence especially for the event, so, naturally, I was a bit huffy. They were annoyed with me for a week for not having been pleasant to their guests.” In fact, the same day as his parents and their friends attended the ‘demo for all’ event, Louis had taken part in a counter-demonstration. “My parents didn’t know about it, I never told them.”
His parents read the hard-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles, and Louis guesses that his father voted for Marine Le Pen or her far-right rival Éric Zemmour in the first round of last year’s presidential elections. Louis voted for radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. But he said he is nevertheless grateful to his parents, who refrain from homophobic talk in his presence. He recently presented a boyfriend to them, who they welcomed to their home.
“I see that they’re making efforts,” he said. “For example, when I had my ears pierced they weren’t pleased about it but they ended up offering me earrings. It was their way of saying ‘do what you want to do’.” To his eyes, their homophobia came above all from a fear for his future.
He said he hopes to benefit himself one day from the same-sex marriage legislation. “I want to get married to show my parents that one can be homo and happy.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse