She would have liked it to be simpler but was faced with incomprehension, disappointment, denial, violent rejection from those close to her. Eléonore testifies to the difficulty of being LGBT in 2021 (article originally published in October 2021).
The Interceltic Festival of Lorient 2022 –
Eléonore prefers to conceal her name to protect her family. A family, who rejected her after she came out. A violent coming out imposed on him.
Eléonore was born in Versailles in 1997. She is the second in a family of 5 children. While she was still small, her family moved to Nantes. She grew up in an environment “Catho tradi”. “Not just Catholic. Traditional Catholic.” Eléonore has eleven years of scouting on the clock, without ever having really liked it.
Educated in a private Catholic school, she takes advantage of recess time to read Harry Potter, forbidden at home because it is considered “satanism”. Every Sunday, she attends mass in Latin.
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At home, the word “homosexual” forbidden. She still remembers the day she said “lesbian” to his little sister… “I got screwed by my parents”.
When you don’t name a thing, it doesn’t exist
Thus, the existence of homosexuality was hidden from him for a long time. It’s only towards the end of middle school that she discovers that… not everyone is heterosexual.
In his world, in his norm, “It’s the Manif pour Tous, great”. Participating in this mobilization of 2012 fighting against the law authorizing marriage and adoption for same-sex couples comes down to “leaving by bus with friends and family to walk in the capital with signs”. This is “fun”.
Cold shower on her return to high school, dressed in her new sweatshirt “Demonstration for all”. “Uh… you are homophobic”, support his comrades. She falls from the clouds. “Well… no, I’m just for the family.”
She exchanges with her friends, comes out of her bubble “catho tradi” and begins a long process, that of questioning. “That alone is already a sin”. Later, she will realize that she has “manifested against itself”.
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Eléonore understood that she was not straight towards the end of high school: “ I took time to accept that what I felt inside me: my thoughts, my desires. I have long repressed and condemned them”. In the first year of studies, she begins to assume them with her friends.
“I started by defining myself as bisexual”. A constantly evolving label. Today she prefers the word “queer”, which defines a person whose sexual orientation or identity does not correspond to the dominant models.
The years passed, she left to study translation at La Roche-sur-Yon, then in Angers. She has a girlfriend, but it is impossible to talk about it to her family circle, whom she blocks on social networks. Until her world changed on September 11, 2020.
“How come you kiss girls?” she receives, by SMS, from her mother, while she is shopping in Nantes, with her girlfriend.
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Someone there “balanced”. She’s not trying to deny. A very brief conversation ensued: “I answered that I would have preferred that we discuss it differently, she asked me ‘how do you want to talk about it?’ to which I said I hadn’t planned to talk about it. She replied ‘let’s not talk about it then’”.
Eléonore never knew who had it “out”. She prefers not to know.
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Three weeks go by without his mother calling him. Her mother, with whom she feels close, with whom she regularly spends long periods of time on the phone. Not this time.
And when they reconnect comes the time to “ l’explication”, from “justification”. “I tried to make him understand the suffering that this silence represented, the moments in my life when I had wanted to die and when the only solution had been to run away. She replied that I was mentally unstable. Hearing that from your mother’s mouth is something.”
At that time, only his mother “sait”. When they are both watching a movie and two girls are kissing, her mother gets up to hide the screen. “She lives in her homophobia, by my side”.
Talk to his father? No way. “I was afraid for my safety. It is particularly hard. He lives in an extremely homophobic environment.” An environment that has not spared her. She has been harassed by young people in her parish before on the pretext that she posted photos “shocking” on social networks. She then lives in fear that at any moment, someone will come “annoy him physically”.
“When you come out, you have a choice of words and at the time, I had no choice”
Anguish, fear. Then she discovers that he is telling each other nonsense about her in his family.
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She didn’t even know who knew, who didn’t: “I had been outed, I had no control over anything. So I wanted to regain control by testifying in an interview Konbini video on the Manif pour Tous to say who I am and what I went through”.
I grew up knowing that one day they were going to reject me
This video is from February 2021. She sees it today as an act “radical but necessary to move forward”. Eléonore grew up knowing that one day she would “cut ties” with his family, that the latter “would never end up accepting it”.
This moment has come sooner than expected.
His father saw the video. He has never heard from her since. She no longer has the right to return home. Not even for Christmas. She still hasn’t seen her little sisters.
Still studying, Eléonore found herself homeless, without money, without parents. Her grandparents took her in for a month, without mentioning her homosexuality, suggesting that she apologize to her father.
It is only by being around other people, from other backgrounds, that she realizes the violence of her surroundings. “Homosexuality has always been described to me as a disease, a perversion. I was told that I was going to burn in hell, that it was a sin”.
Accepting one’s sexuality also means accepting to question one’s entire upbringing. “And it’s so hard that if you don’t need to do this job, you won’t make it. And you will only need it if it concerns you”, considers Eléonore. That’s why she tries not to hold any grudges against her family. “It’s so much easier to consider that the Church is right.”
Eléonore, 23, has obtained a permanent contract in the field of translation, in Paris.
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She does not know yet where she will spend Christmas but she does not regret: “To confuse me in excuse, to give up, it would have been to accept to ignore who I am. Me straight, it doesn’t exist.”
And she’s not the only one. Several people from her background came to her to come out, after she testified on Konbini.
Today, Eléonore is no longer alone. And neither do they.
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