"Rightwing" Gays: The French Exception?

The Pink Swastika is one of those amusing little books that fails to convince with its central thesis (which is basically that fascism = poofterism) but which nonetheless constantly entertains - nay titillates! - with its wealth of little known facts and circumstantial evidence. As such, it is very easy to dip in and out of it. Like everything on the Internet, what it has to say has to be double- and triple-checked (in other words "googled to death"), but a surprising amount of it stands up.

As I say, what the authors have to say about Nazism wears somewhat thin at times. The National Socialist German Workers Party did indeed have it roots in the barmier imaginings of a group of shell-shocked Bavarian veterans of the Great War. And apart from the fact that they were all ex-soldiers there was nothing particularly "rightwing" about them - at least until they were infiltrated by the security forces (in the person of a former Austrian corporal by the name of Adolf Heidler) and had their ideology re-modelled along the lines of Prussian Imperialism. But the presence of the notorious pervert Ernst Röhm amongst the luminaries of the early Nazi Party does not imply that the Party was a "gay" political movement, nor do its early meetings in gay nightclubs. Nor, for that matter, does Heidler's (a.k.a. Hitler's) former sideline career as a Viennese rentboy!

Where the authors are on more solid ground is with the modern "Far Right", not to mention the modern "gay rights" movement. Although the "Gay Movement" has clearly drifted towards the Left in recent years, it has in its time had a significant following on the Far Right - and conversely there is hardly a single Far Right political party in Europe today that has not had more than its fair share of gay sex scandals.

As it happens, for a long time I had assumed that the honourable exception (if that is the right phrase) to this general rule was France. Whatever one may think of Jean-Marie Le Pen (and I'm not terribly keen, I have to say) he is at least a man's man - or rather a lady's man, if you see what I mean. Unfortunately the French Right, albeit less so than the French Left, is hilariously split: monarchists here (split into legitimists, Orleanists, and ooh-la-la!), nationalists there, Gaullists and republicans and who-knows-what, pro-Americans, anti-Americans, McDonald's-bombing farmers and cinema-bombing Roman Catholics - and even the odd integrist and traditionalist kicking around. It takes all sorts!

Where the really funny stuff happens, apparently, is on the Nouvelle Droit. David Irving, who is always good for a laugh, has an old news story about a young French student called Michael Caignet in his archive.

ON January 29, 1981, Michel (Miguel) Caignet, a 26 year old doctoral candidate in English-German linguistics, was just leaving his residence in Courbevoie to attend the university when he was accosted by four individuals in the vicinity of his apartment. He was at once knocked to the ground and held down while one of his four assailants poured sulphuric acid over his face and his right hand.

Mr. Caignet had once belonged to FANE (the Fédération d'action nationale et européene) and been a revisionist. He had been denounced by the daily VSD.

As a result of the acid attack his facial features were so hideously disfigured that only two newspapers dared to publish a photograph. The identity of the main participant in the attack, Yves Aziza, a medical student and son of Charles Aziza (a pharmaceutical company employee at Montreuil) was known to police within one hour of the assault. But the French police, and French justice, allowed Y. Aziza, in circumstances of which the outrageous details are well-known, sufficient time to flee to Germany and then Israel.

At the Justice Ministry, a Mr. Main, (a director attached to the Office of Criminal Investigations headed by Raoul Béteille), adopted a sarcastic tone as he explained why it took all of 14 days before a criminal investigation into the matter finally began. ... Among Y. Aziza's accomplices one noted the name of Daniel Ziskind, son of Michèle Ziskind and sister of Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, and the son of Jean Pierre-Bloch himself.

[David Irving's Action Report]

OK, most of those Jewish names don't mean much to me. But Michel Caignet was to go on to further notoriety by becoming the founder-editor of Gaie France - which, as the title perhaps suggests, was a rightwing French nationalist gay magazine. Which promoted pederasty!

 

In 1998, a gay newspaper in Amsterdam reported on the sorry fate of Gaie France:

Last spring the case against French publisher Michel Caignet was finally brought to a close. A Paris court barred him for life from ever publishing again, and sentenced him to serve two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in selling gay videos that allegedly showed actors under the age of eighteen, but over the age of fifteen having sex. Caignet's license to distribute his magazine Gaie France was already revoked in 1993, but Caignet ignored the censors' warnings and continued publishing under new titles. The convictions brought to a close an investigation that began with nation-wide raids in April 1996 against people on Caignet's mailing list. The day the trials opened there were more raids, this time involving some 2500 French police, who conducted 710 searches around the country. Of the 673 persons whose home were searched, 210 were charged with a crime, and 20 were kept in jail. The involvement of Caignet with porn with minors doesn't surprise someone who's familiar with the history of Gaie France. The magazine has always been controversial because the editors used the philosophy of right-wing authors as Hans Blüher to sanction their own interest in very young boys. 

[Gay News Amsterdam, #77, January 1998; Martijn.org]

So what's the connexion? Alisdair Clarke on his Aryan Futurism blog explains:

The [Euro New Right]’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus [Alain de] Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary. ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations.

Ummm, Okaaay! It's interesting to read that Judeo-Christian "moralism" is "unnatural" - whereas having it off with little boys is apparently just fine.

Who are we to disagree?