Sex, profit, and political power : California and its influence on Paris’s queer business, press and politics in the late 1970s and 80s

Abstract

In late 1970s Paris, San Francisco Nights and Far West, popular institutions in the city’s new queer nightlife, helped fashion new sexual norms. They were part of a constellation of California-inspired places that stimulated new imaginings of how queerness could be expressed and embodied. Indeed, large Californian cities, San Francisco in particular, provided a profit model based on queer consumption that participated in the creation of a new queer Paris. As the decade came to an end, the mobilisation of a gay vote in California also fed Parisian activists with the inspiration to organise a queer voting bloc in Paris to influence national elections and lobby for an end to discriminatory, anti-gay sections of the penal code. These re-imaginings of politics and urban economy challenged cherished French universalist ideals. As such, opposition accompanied the embrace of California-inspired visions of queer life. Both support and resistance attested to the growing global power of California, and of the United States. Drawing upon archival research, this paper explores California as a cultural reference, commercial brand, and political aspiration in the construction of a new queer Paris at the end of the 1970s and the dawn of the 1980s.