French Books on Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Archives

Three recent French publications examine the history of sexual minorities through an archival lens, challenging narratives of sexual liberation. Alain Naze critically reviews these works in artpress, highlighting their political stakes. Sarah Schulman's "La Gentrification des esprits" (translated 2018) argues that the AIDS crisis and urban gentrification in East Village, Manhattan, led to a "gentrification of minds" and the erasure of queer subculture. She founded the ACT UP Oral History Project, conducting 128 interviews over nine years. Guy Hocquenghem's "Race d'Ep!" (reissued 2018) uses images from 1860 to 1979 to argue that homosexuality's revolutionary potential is lost when it becomes a fixed identity. Antoine Idier's "Archives des mouvements LGBT+" (2018) compiles documents from 1890 to the present but cautions against projecting contemporary identities onto historical images. The review critiques Idier's approach, favoring a Benjaminian montage that lets the past erupt into the present. All three books share a concern with preserving marginalized histories but diverge on how to engage with archives.