Looking Forward / Looking Back

Abstract

This chapter talks about men having sex with other men in France that regularly found themselves in front of officers of the king's justice. It likens eighteenth-century Paris to London, which had a well-developed subculture wherein men attracted to other men could find each other, socialize, or go for gens de la manchette (cruise for sex). It also details how these French men lived under constant surveillance by the police, ever ready to move in to make an arrest. The chapter looks at transcriptions conserved in the archives of the Bastille that resulted from interrogations wherein the question of same-sex marriage appears several times. It recounts the case of a man named Gobert, who says he has lived in a house with a young man for four years and refers to another good-looking boy with whom he had lived like man and wife.