Above all, we send all our heartfelt and devastated thoughts to the victims of these last days. Far from being just a succession of “news events”, the outbreak of violence which is currently affecting LGBT people is the expression of a deep hatred and a visceral rejection firmly established in all layers of society. French society, despite the recognition of our rights and our condition as full citizens.
Today we cry out our dismay and our anger at the indifference or even resignation that we too often observe after each beating, ambush, attack of which homosexual, bisexual or trans people are victims. Not a day goes by without news that a young gay man was lynched while leaving a nightclub, that a couple was beaten after kissing in the street, or that a schoolboy, harassed because of his gender expression or his supposed sexual orientation, killed himself…
After each tragedy, reactions of indignation and support rarely go beyond the small circle of LGBT+ associations and the rare political leaders aware of the issues of equality and the fight against discrimination. The rally initiated by SOS Homophobia on March 28, in support of a 20-year-old gay man who was violently attacked in a bar in Paris, did not bring together more than a hundred people on the Place de la République. The homophobic chants that regularly rise from the stands during football matches are not repressed and are presented to us as “folklore”. LGBT centers and their activists are the subject of repeated attacks, immediately forgotten, as if the condition of our visibility was to tolerate the suffering we suffer.
We plead for a Republican surge
The silent majority of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people can only feel abandoned today. It is clear that the Republican promise of equality, freedom and security has not been kept. Fear is slyly spreading in people’s minds, which has not escaped those who today engage in a form of shameless “pinkwashing”, to convince as many people as possible that only the hard right will be able to protect us against a threat reduced to homophobia from “Islamized neighborhoods”.
This anxiety of recovery by the far right also paralyzes most left-wing LGBTQI+ activists, associations or politicians, who participate in spite of themselves in this harmful strategy, ignoring LGBTphobic violence which risks being presented as being the resounding demonstration that the far right is right. The cure here is worse than the disease. This awkward silence that we still observed after Current Value revealed that a 15-year-old boy was kidnapped, kidnapped by a gang of 5 minors and beaten up in a cellar on April 4, in Grenoble, further reinforces this feeling of two-speed activism, for which there would be good and bad homophobia.
Today we are pleading for a Republican revival. Let us not be silent that the religious sources of hatred and homophobic rejection are a reality, particularly among the youth of our country. Just like the fight against sexist and sexual violence, let us decide to make the fight against homophobic and transphobic hatred a truly great national cause, by integrating in particular the rehabilitation of secularism within our school.
Our lives are at stake.
Fiertés Citoyens is a non-partisan LGBT+ association which mobilizes within the framework of universalism and the principles of secularism, equality and solidarity.