Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 13, No. 3, July 2004 © 2004 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 326 Building a More Stately Closet: French Gay Movements since the Early 1980s SCOTT GUNTHER Wellesley College Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea! —Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Chambered Nautilus” IN THEIR MYTHES FONDATEURS most contemporary gay organizations in France have sought to portray themselves as heirs of the revolutionary ideas introduced by the gay political groups that were formed in the after- math of the events of 1968. However, this teleological interpretation of the period since 1968 is misleading in at least two respects: it does not recognize the magnitude of the disruption to French gay organizations that occurred in the early 1980s, and it fails to account for the ethos of assimilation that now prevails in many of France’s active gay groups. In the early 1980s the French government eliminated any explicit legal dis- tinction between heterosexual and homosexual acts through the repeal of two laws: the first law, promulgated in 1942 and repealed in 1982, had established a higher age of sexual majority for homosexuals than for het- erosexuals; the second, dating from 1960 and annulled in 1980, had doubled the penalty for public indecency when the people involved were of the same sex. Immediately following the repeal of these two laws the The title for this article was inspired by a presentation by Donald Doub of San Francisco State University entitled “Building More Stately Closets,” given on October 11, 1998, at Queer Theories: A National Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies, held at the University of Nevada, Reno. It is used here with his permission.