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France's Gais retraités: Questioning the ‘Image of the Closet’

This article examines how life stories from members of France's Gais retraités – an association of elderly French gay men – challenge the image of ‘the closet’, an image that became hegemonic in France during the 1990s. According to this image, life for gay men and lesbians prior to the modern gay movement of the 1970s and 1980s and its injunction to ‘come out of the closet’ was marked by internalized homophobia, with deceitful and furtive relationships the rule. Through an analysis of life stories from older gay men, many of whom came of age prior to the 1950s and 1960s, a richer, more diverse and less predictable narrative of French gay history emerges. Finally, the article discusses the role AIDS activism has played in this construal of the past, especially given French historians' customary reluctance to undertake research on what they perceive to be subjects based on ‘identity politics’.