Gregory Woods: the influence of homosexuality on Western culture

This excerpt spotlights the glorious Parisian nightlife of the 1920s

Natalie Barney, left, and Romaine Brooks, both notorious lesbians, were lovers for 50 years. Collection Jean Chalon (Collection Jean Chalon)

Like many other English visitors, the artist Robert Medley found the atmosphere of Paris distinctly relaxed: “There were no parents to worry about, and under French law nobody had the right to interfere with our relationship.”

When he and his new lover, the dancer Rupert Doone, went there in May 1926, Medley found that Doone was already well known. He had been a lover of Jean Cocteau’s, a status with which limelight came as a compulsory extra (the affair had ended in 1924).

Doone introduced Medley to Djuna Barnes and to another of Paris’s gay, expatriate denizens, Allan Ross “Dougie” MacDougall, who had once been the secretary of Isadora Duncan.

In the spring of 1928, Rupert Doone turned down the chance to tour as Anna Pavlova’s partner; but this left him free, in July of the following year, to accept an invitation to join Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes as a soloist.

Diaghilev had never been particularly effusive with compliments, so Doone treasured the occasion when the great man said to him, even after watching a performance in which Doone had suffered a slight slip, vous ne dansez pas mal. It was, of course, through Doone that Medley met a succession of the great homosexual ballet dancers and choreographers.

When introduced to Serge Lifar, he was especially impressed by “his spectacular maquillage, the gold bangles and the varnished crimson fingernails”.

Vincent Bouvet and Gerard Durozoi have written that, in Paris, “homosexuality and bisexuality were treated with relative tolerance in moneyed, cultural and artistic circles, and almost came to be regarded as a badge of modernity during the 1920s”.

This was to change. During the 1930s, the attitude of tolerance and even permissiveness was gradually eroded, however, and records identifying “deviants” were established – giving rise to repressive laws under the Vichy regime.

In the meantime, there was a gay scene in Paris, to which middle-class men and women had relatively easy access.

In Georges-Anquetil’s 1925 novel Satan conduit le bal, the owner of one Paris bar is quoted as lamenting patriotically: “Isn’t it shameful for Paris to be so far behind: in Berlin they have 150 establishments like this one, and here there are barely ten!”

In fact, Paris enjoyed a wide variety of gay and gay-friendly spaces, even if not in such a spectacular abundance as in Berlin. The most famous of the gay venues, although not generally spoken of as such in histories of Modernism, was Le Boeuf sur le Toit on the rue Boissy- d’Anglas.

It opened in January 1922, taking its name from Darius Milhaud’s ballet, based on a scenario by Jean Cocteau, which had been staged at the Theatre des Champs Elysees in February 1920.

Among those who performed there were openly lesbian singers such as Dora Stroeva, Yvonne George and Jane Stick. Beverley Nichols reported having come across Cole Porter late one night, sitting alone in a corner of Le Boeuf sur le Toit – “which in those days was a sweetly scandalous institution” – trying to think of a rhyme for “duck-billed platypus” for inclusion in his lyric “Let’s Do It”.

Gay venues in Montmartre included La Petite Chaumiere, a drag cabaret; Chez Bob et Jean, run by the dancer Bob Giguet and drag artiste Jean d’Albret; and the Brasserie Graff on the Place Blanche, a restaurant that became gay only late in the evening.

On the night of the annual drag ball, the Magic City Ball, the Place Blanche would fill with onlookers who wanted to see the drag queens going into Graff ’s after the dance. Hustlers plied their trade on the rue Germain-Pilon, the Passage de l’Elysée-des-Beaux-Arts and the Boulevard de Clichy.

The rue de Lappe near the Place de la Bastille was jokingly known as the rue de Loppe (Queer Street, in effect) because one of its dance halls (bals musettes) was gay friendly.

Across the river, in the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève, both lesbians and gay men were welcome. A favourite lesbian haunt, Le Monocle, in Montparnasse, had an all-woman band.

The English painter Edward Burra had a particular affection for the Place Pigalle, of which he wrote, in May 1931: “The people are glorious. Such tarts all crumbling and all sexes and colours”.

Rupert Doone, Robert Medley, Burra and other gay friends used to congregate at the Select, a cafe in Montparnasse.

The Hungarian photographer Brassaï took many atmospheric photographs of the Parisian underworld in 1931 and 1932. Among his nocturnal shots of marginalised subcultures are those of “Sodom and Gomorrah” – the brazen but somehow also secretive social environment of sexual inversion.

Some of his written descriptions of what he observed are almost as resonant as his visual images. Of Le Monocle, on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, he wrote: “From the owner, known as Lulu de Montparnasse, to the barmaid, from the waitresses to the hat-check girl, all the women were dressed as men, and so totally masculine in appearance that at first glance one thought they were men. A tornado of virility had gusted through the place and blown away all the finery, all the tricks of feminine coquetry, changing women into boys, gangsters, policemen . . . Even their perfumes – frowned on here – had been replaced by Lord knows what weird scents, more like amber or incense than roses and violets.”

Brassaï also noted that "these women, their passions slower to ignite, generally looked for more devotion and fidelity in their love affairs than do pederasts, most of whom cruise a lot and are often content with a quick trick". Of the broader nocturnal underworld he photographed, Brassaï said: "I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic."

This is an important point, often overlooked. As we shall see in the case of Berlin, there is an important distinction to be made between venues catering to a local, working-class clientele and the more bohemian and/or touristic venues, more likely to be frequented by foreign visitors.

Even Germans who had sampled the delights of Berlin could be taken aback by what the French capital had to offer. When Klaus Mann went there in the mid-1920s he compiled a list of the reasons for his love of Paris, among them "the many pissoirs – they are so convenient", but he did not specify the nature of the convenience.

In almost the same breath he praised the atmosphere of the city because "all things concerning sex are handled with that perfect casualness which is the proof of real civilization".

He meant, in part, the casualness of casual sex. By contrast, Berlin was more self-conscious and more purposive. More frantic, even.

Besides, it was important for Mann to travel in Europe, and thereby to become an active internationalist. For his generation, he would later write, "to be a young European intellectual – it was an attitude, an ambition: it almost became a programme". The concept of European was meant, and accepted, as a protest against German nationalism, while the term intellectual defied the fashionable idolatry of "blood and soil".

Back in Paris again in the spring of 1926, Klaus Mann met René Crevel, a committed internationalist for perverse reasons: "He spent his days with Americans, Germans, Russians, and Chinese, because his mother suspected all foreigners to be crooks or perverts".

Sitting on Mann’s bed, Crevel read out the early chapters of his novel La Mort difficile, with their "venomous" portrait of his mother. On this trip, Mann also met Jean Cocteau ("The hours spent in his company assume in my recollection a savour both of burlesque show and magic ritual"), Eugene McCown, Pavel Tchelitchew, Julien Green, Jean Giraudoux and others.

In the same year, 1926, Klaus’s father Thomas Mann was surprised to find that the whores on the streets of Paris were predominantly male; and he observed striking new evidence of homosexual internationalism on the same streets.

That this development should take place in Paris – the home of "Proust and Gide, that friend of Oscar Wilde" – was, he felt, apt. Other young European intellectuals who returned home were less eager than Klaus Mann to sing the praises of Paris and thereby claim the benefits of its cosmopolitanism for themselves.

Witold Gombrowicz, for one, was damned if he would admit to having been significantly bettered by his visit. Returning to Poland in 1928, he deliberately toned down his enthusiasm: ‘It was important to me that people shouldn’t say Paris had changed me – it seemed to me to be in the worst possible taste to be one of those young people who returned from the West civilized.’

Whereas Klaus Mann deliberately travelled against the grain of German nationalism, Gombrowicz was unwilling to replace pride in his own national culture with the self-serving adulation of a scene that most other Polish intellectuals had not had the opportunity to sample.

He felt the adoption of a more sceptical tone was better suited to Polish cultural aspirations. Warsaw was just as civilised as the French capital.

Although Berlin later took the laurels, for much of the early part of the century Paris shared the honours as the joint sodomite capital of Europe.

Marc-Andre Raffalovich had published an article on "Les Groupes uranistes a Paris et a Berlin" in 1904, mentioning Les Halles as a particular centre of activity.

In an article entitled "Invertis et pervertis" (Le Journal, 2 March 1910), Lucien Descaves expressed strong worries about the extent of male prostitution in Paris.

Unlike women who became involved in the flesh trade, according to Descaves, the men developed habits of idleness, that most unmanly of conditions. Descaves was especially concerned about the proliferation of vespasiennes, the graffiti in which offered clear evidence that, far from being mere public urinals, these odoriferous constructions had become ‘disgraceful trading posts’.

Andre Gide cut out this article and added it to his own store of evidence, to be collated in the polemic of Corydon. The homosexual magazine Inversions ran for a year – "a few, earnest numbers that dealt with pressing issues and tried to elaborate a homosexual literature" – before it was suppressed at a complex and humiliating trial in 1926.

The annual Magic City drag balls in Paris were said to be comparable with those in Harlem. In 1933, BrassaÏ attended the last of them: "Every type came, faggots, cruisers, chickens, old queens, famous antique dealers and young butcher boys, hairdressers and elevator boys, well-known dress designers and drag queens . . . Mature men accompanied by youths in drag were the rule. With hair by Antoine, clothes by Lanvin or Madeleine Vionnet, the great couturiers of the period, some of these ephebes on the arms of their rich protectors were extremely beautiful and elegant".

In the Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb’s 1937 Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág), Paris is said to have had a reputation in Budapest of being "full of perverts".

Erzi, who eventually lives there, apparently finds that its reputation is true, but is at ease with it: ‘it all seemed perfectly natural’

This is an extract from ‘Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World’ by Gregory Woods. Published by Yale University Press, £25