Hide those gays straight people can’t see. This could have been the title, a bit provocative of the documentary by Julie Delettre and Caroline Halazy broadcast this Monday at 9 p.m. on France 5. The co-directors opted for The Invisible Man. In both cases, it is always a matter of perspective. Many eyes didn’t want to see in The two friends, canvas signed by Tamara de Lempicka in 1923, something other than a friendly relationship between two women. Many ears did not understand that The extraordinary garden by Charles Trenet speaks in reality, in a colorful way, of sexual encounters between men in the Jardin des Tuileries…
The documentary thus retraces more than a hundred years of representations, more or less explicit, of homosexuality in artistic creation. A captivating exploration that recalls the evolution of mentalities and laws: it has only been forty years since homosexuality was decriminalized in France or, more precisely, that the legislators lowered it to 15 years, as was the case for heterosexuals, the age of sexual majority, then set at 21 for homosexuals.
How should we understand the title “The invisible homo”?
Caroline Hallazy: It is a title that allows us to tell the conquest of visibility. Homosexuality has long been invisible in society. Homosexuals and homosexuals had to live in a very clandestine way since it was considered a mental illness [L’Organisation mondiale de la santé a retiré l’homosexualité de la liste des maladies mentales en 1990]. Homosexual men, in particular, were hunted down as early as the 19th century. This is what we show in the documentary: we went to the police headquarters to take some pictures of these people on file. The artists stuck to this state of affairs. Their works are the mirror of this clandestinity: they use the subtexts, the parade, the dissimulation because it is the situation of the homosexuals at the time. And it is these little touches, one after the other, that allow visibility. At first, these are signs that you only notice if you yourself are concerned. It is typically the couple Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais: not everyone “saw” that they were together, but those who had to see it saw it.
Julie Delettre: In painting, we can take the example of Tamara de Lempicka and her canvas The two friends. It clearly represents two lovers, but the title does not present them that way. At the time, female homosexuality was almost impossible to think about, so we talked about friendship to talk about close relationships between women. Tamara de Lempicka was one of the first to suggest more in her painting, where Gustave Courbet or Toulouse-Lautrec before her had also titled paintings The two friends by representing two naked women quite close to each other. But where there may be doubt with paintings painted by men, there is very little doubt about what Tamara de Lempicka represents.
In your documentary, it is said that this “clandestineness” brought a particular genius to artists…
JD: This is indeed something that came up in the mouths of several of our specialists. Clandestinity could stimulate creativity, the imagination, because you had to find parades, play with metaphor. We give the example of The beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau. It is also Trenet’s genius to have talked about cruising spots in Paris through the metaphor of Extraordinary garden. It’s a piece that was very little understood at the time.
Eddy de Pretto and Suzane are among the witnesses who intervene in the documentary. Do you think these two gay artists represent the contemporary issues of visibility?
CH: It was important for us to emphasize that this was not a closed story, that it was still being written. We also had to focus on contemporary works to show that there were always things to say and battles to fight. Eddy de Pretto, for us, it was obvious. His first album was very strong in terms of words, themes – which are not necessarily directly linked to homosexuality but which are around like virilization, the fact of fully assuming oneself. The documentary ends with Serious, a song that seems extremely strong to us to uninhibit the teenager or the young adult who begins to feel homosexual feelings. Suzane and he are extremely important artists today. They also say they ran out of performances and that’s perhaps what surprised and shocked us the most.
Part of the public struggles to understand the issue of the representation of homosexuals in cinema, in series, in literature, etc. If we don’t show it, it doesn’t exist?
JD: It’s exactly that. Suzane says that the first time she saw two women kissing on television was in More beautiful life. It will still have been necessary to wait a long time before being able to see that and in a rather uninhibited way, as if it was not a subject. She also explained to us that what was important to her in her songs little guy and Anouchka, it was to say “Me, I was 15, I had no role models to grow up with. I wondered if I was abnormal, if I had a problem…” In the first song where she talks about a young gay man who comes out to his family and in the second where she makes her declaration of love to her friend, she says to young people: “It’s normal, actually. You are normal. You can love someone of the same sex. And all is fine. »
CH: There is a double stake on the representation. It concerns people who grow up having an attraction for someone of the same sex and who question themselves, who seek representations in art. But there is also an issue in society: the less homosexuality is represented, the less tolerant society is, the less it accepts difference. It’s an issue that everyone can see gay people in art so that, in life, it’s no longer a problem or a question.