How will a meeting on an app ultimately lead two boys down the many paths of the history of LGBTQIA+ struggles and culture? This is the starting point of Queer resistance – a history of LGBTQI+ culturesthe very successful comic strip designed by Antoine Idier and Pochep.
The first is a lecturer in political science and already the author of numerous works on LGBT+ history, the second a recognized comic book author. This challenge of telling the history of homosexuality from the origin of the word to the most current struggles of a plural community, Antoine Idier and Pochep rise to it with flying colors and we take immense pleasure in discovering the major stages using provided texts but also inventive drawings.
It is both well-documented and often very funny, informative, full of anecdotes and encounters with literary figures and activists from the past… and the present. Without forgetting the big moments like the interruption of Ménie Grégoire’s show on RTL devoted to homosexuality by mainly feminists, future Red Gouines, the “French Stonewall”.
For Komitid, the two authors agreed to describe their working methods and their choices of major figures in this fresco still under construction.
Komitid: Concretely, how did you work? Together, first on the texts, then on the illustrated plates?
Antoine Idier: I wrote the screenplay, which Pochep then adapted, cut, sometimes amended or completed. And the work was done back and forth between us, right down to the printed plates… Not so many back and forths, it seems to me: the discussion was fluid, due to an understanding, a shared sensitivity , of attention to what the other wanted to express.
Pochep : The first stage was initially editorial and documentary, and it was Antoine who worked for the first months before I began to take on the subject and worked on shaping our story. All the same, during our first discussions, we immediately established the principle of embodying this story through a few recurring characters who would accompany the reader throughout the story and act as structuring reference points. When I started drawing, Antoine and I started a fairly intense game of ping-pong. It immediately became apparent that in the space given to us (140 pages) we could not keep everything that Antoine had written and that we were going to make cuts and choices. For my part, I was thinking about giving enough space to my drawing in the face of this dense, precise and well-documented text. We worked very well together and I also have the benefit of having learned so many things while making this album. It’s a story that I knew very little about.
What was the most difficult thing in choosing the themes covered?
Pochep : No doubt to propose fairness and equality of representation of the different categories of the LGBTQI+ sphere, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, as lesbians or intersex people were perfectly invisible during this period. What we could not find in medical or police reports, we looked for in literature, for example.
Antoine Idier: Beyond the constraints of the format, the fact that it was not possible to say everything, there was no real difficulty for me, I think! But, obviously, there are points that I would have liked to explore in more depth, for example urban geography, the history and location of different places, etc. Or also be able to get out of Paris.
Antoine Idier : “It was about showing multiple aspects of LGBTQI+ culture, in the sense of social and cultural practices of resistance”
What guided your choices of authors, artists and other personalities present in the book?
Antoine Idier: Due to the period covered by the book, there were a number of obligatory passages, themes and personalities that stood out – for example the appearance of the terms “homosexual” and “homosexuality”, the criminal and judicial repression of homosexuality, deportation during the Second World War, the 1970s, the trans movements… Other themes seemed major: for example the relationship to literature and culture, the search for representations and similar, hence the pages on Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Violette Leduc… There are very subjective choices: adding this or that point which seemed important to me, or which seemed to me to echo contemporary concerns. It was also about showing multiple aspects of LGBTQI+ culture, in the sense of social and cultural practices of resistance: in language, through attitudes, through songs, etc.
Pochep : As I said above, a concern for equality and balance in representations. Otherwise, Antoine has a much broader knowledge of this story than me and I completely agreed with his choices. I have only added from time to time to the landscape of drawing personalities or “refs” borrowing from a more immediate history (cinema, series, comics, etc.)
What is quite exhilarating about this book is that you show a very diverse and plural community today and that you seem to rejoice in it when others are more in the “it was better before”…
Antoine Idier: THANKS ! For a sociologist, tensions between social groups, between world views, are fundamental, inescapable and inescapably necessary. It was important to us to show that the history of LGBTQI+ movements is crossed by tensions and disagreements, sometimes deep and violent, at the same time as alliances, just as deep, have been built. These frictions may have particularly concerned marginalized groups or identities, left aside: for example, in the 1970s, lesbians found their place neither in the feminist movement nor in the homosexual movement. It is also about struggles (which have not disappeared!) to know what homosexuality would be, what it would mean, the way in which it should be lived: 40 years earlier, between Colette and Radclyffe Hall, in the 1930s, two incarnations of lesbian subjectivity faced each other. This is again the relationship of certain activist speeches to commercial places, as embodied by the sauna in the comic strip…
Pochep : It’s a story that is still being written. The interest was also to show how things and reflections never cease to agitate this environment. Generations succeed one another, assist each other, associate or oppose each other, formulate ideas, develop ways of life, build actions.
From what archives and what documents did you work, and in particular for the graphic part?
Pochep : Antoine will know how to answer this question better, but I was very demanding of documents throughout the album’s construction to feed our pages. And it seemed important to us to make regular and direct reference to articles, book covers, posters, police reports, buildings… to make this story more alive and concrete.
Antoine Idier: After several books on the history of homosexuality, including one devoted to LGBTQI+ archives, and curating an exhibition around the Chomarat collection in Lyon, I had material on hand! But, moreover, I relied heavily on the research carried out by others: the book is also a synthesis of multiple works. Since the release, it has been common for readers to tell us that they were unaware of this or that point about LGBTQI+ history. This can be explained by the weakness of the places and institutions supporting the transmission of this history and this sometimes ancient research.
Pochep : “The choice of the title was not easy and “queer” was not in the first proposals”
You devote several pages to questions related to identity, the terms used and how they have evolved. Did you hesitate before choosing the word “queer” for the title?
Pochep : The choice of title was not easy and “queer” was not in the first proposals. At first I had a preference for more outdated terms like “Invertis” but we quickly realized that this spoke to too few people or that it created misunderstandings. “Queer” has the advantage of undoubtedly being more identifiable to a greater number of people and of bringing together a large part of the identities of this community today. Afterwards, the single word “Queer” cannot express everything and the word “resistance” was added which places it in a long-term societal and political positioning.
Antoine Idier: The characteristic of the history of homosexuality is the extreme attention paid to words, in particular to words to name oneself: either to reappropriate the insult or the stigmatizing word, or to assert a new identity, a another look, another way of being in the world, wanting to go beyond existing identities, or go beyond their limits… It’s a constant that has greatly preoccupied many activists and authors! Over the 150 years that the book covers, the terms have continued to evolve and transform: from inverts to gays and butches, from homophiles to LGBTQI+, from crazy to queer, from hermaphrodites to intersex, from the “third sex » from Magnus Hirschfeld to transgender, etc. Choosing a single word for the title was necessarily anachronistic: it amounted to freezing under a single term a multitude of identities, forged in different contexts. The advantage of the word “queer” is that it is vague and encompasses these debates: both “queer”, as an insult and reappropriation, and “queer” in the sense of overcoming identities desired by some; as much a reference to queer theories as “non-heterosexual” as it is sometimes used broadly today. It allowed you to get around the problem. But “queer” is no less problematic, as has already been widely discussed (and as the comic strip evokes): it too is too narrow a word, partly erasing history, the singularity of social relations, etc.
“Queer resistance, a history of LGBTQI+ cultures”, by Antoine Idier and Pochep, Delcourt editions, 144 p., €22.95
“Queer resistance, a history of LGBTQI+ cultures”
2023-12-28 01:37:02
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