Queer Sites
Chapter One
Paris
Michael D. Sibalis
`Refugees from Sodom. — We know that the biblical tire did not destroy all the
inhabitants of this corrupt city. Scattered over all the earth, they proliferated in
Paris....'
(La Petite Revue, 15, October 1864)
Space, visibility and the gay identity
In 1895, André Raffalovich drew public attention to the clandestine homosexual
subculture of Paris and other European urban centers with the warning that
`[e]verywhere ... Sodom exists, venal and menacing, the invisible city' (Raffalovich
1895: 447). One hundred years later, on Saturday afternoon, 24 ,June 1995,
80,000 Parisians celebrated la Lesbian and Gay Pride — the international commemoration
of the Stonewall riots of June 1969 in New York City — with a parade
along the boulevards of the Left Bank. Banners and placards raised high,
balloons and flags afloat overhead and music blasting from at hundred loudspeakers,
the ... read full excerpt from Queer Sites ebook
