Why in Paris

by Harry F. Rey

For Claude, all great histories were littered with the untold stories of our homosexual forbearers. When we took flight through the Tuileries, arm in arm, he would recast the entire foundations of Western civilization in a lavender hue.

“The Pope said Ivo’s slander had no basis in fact. Rodolfo had the King appoint their favorite boy Giovanni as bishop of Orleans, where he ruled for forty years, by the way. And Rodolfo continued to be a well loved and respected figure in France to whom young men would line up outside his Church, hoping to be cast as the next sexy Jesus. So don’t let anyone ever tell you us queers have no history. We are history.”

If love for men like us was as straightforward as love for men like them, I have a feeling so many of the stories Claude told me, would never need to be told. We queers are, like it or not, living history.

We were all outsiders. All of us feeling that little bit of difference, and that pressure and tension maligning itself into the most wonderful creativity, or fiercest tongue, or insatiable appetite for the flesh.

Jean’s gaze was enchanting, and I longed to be spell-bound. Giovanni’s could have been full of the men of my surface-level dreams, but next to him, I did not care to turn and look.

“But that’s the beauty of France,” Claude said. “We’re all Frenchmen. I’m French, you’re French, he’s… Well he’s Austrian but never mind. The Republic values absolute equality before the law, blind to color.” “Don’t you see? That’s exactly the problem. Refusing to acknowledge difference, in class or creed or skin, makes matters worse. We don’t all stand equal before the law. I stand as a Black Frenchman, you as a white. What color is the magistrate? What color is the officer who arrests me for soliciting because I’m walking through the park, but allows you, a known prostitute, to cavort freely around the hotel lobbies of Paris?”

Why did shame follow only me? Why did I insist on living my life behind the curtain, trapped in the shadows, watching all the other players dance?

There could have been a mountain of praise heaped upon the pictures, but a slice or two, from a name people knew, was enough for the critique to be lodged forever in my mind.

“So as a goose always knows how to fly south for the winter,” Cocteau told me, “so a homosexual’s erection will always know where to lead him.”

Gay, straight, Black, white, French, German; men look at satisfaction in terms of volume. How many women, how many boys, how much money, how high a rank, how many kills. How odd that in a world run by and for men, the very thought, the very notion, of two or more of these creatures choosing to love each other could cause such a rip in the fabric of society it must be stamped out and disavowed lest… lest what, exactly? That men decide to start collaborating instead of competing? What a world that would be.

In that moment, I understood everything Claude, Jean, and the rest of the boys went through. How it felt to lie with your body, to make a man fall for you in order to keep food on the table, a roof over your head, and breath in your lungs.

What if the time came when Eilas would hand me a gun and tell me to shoot my own mother? Whenever that day came, perhaps I would have my gun, and hopefully enough bullets for every Nazi in that room.

And here was I, always the outsider. An Austrian among the Germans, a queer among the straights, a Jew among the gentiles. Perhaps the life I should build was with vagrants and the whores and the outcasts, the only people who had ever shown me any kindness. The ones I’d spent my life in Paris photographing, setting their features onto paper. The immortal vagabonds, the real aristocrats of Paris, covered in her soot, sapped by her modernity, resting nightly in her concrete bosom.

I realized in that moment, sitting in the center of more Nazis than I could ever shoot, exactly what these people were. Cold-hearted bullies. It seemed so simple I wanted to burst out laughing. These were the boys on the schoolyard I’d never cared about being friends with. These were the boys so terrified of being labeled a fag, a Jew, a sissy, a traitor, a communist, a Catholic, or whatever else the insult of the day was, they’d march off to genocidal war to prove their manliness in front of their friends and fathers.