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Traveling through France with a party of gay American writers, I recently visited a 12th-century mikve in Montpellier. Reached by a stairway plunging down beneath a building on the rue Barralerie, the ritual bath was used by Jewish women for two centuries, then shut down, sealed, and lost. In the early 1980s, it was rediscovered. (Of the nearby men's mikve, few traces remain.) The bath is a rectangular limestone basin built into the floor. Pale green water passes through from a subterranean spring infused with copper sulfide. Women would disrobe, wade into the pool by descending a short flight of steps, and immerse themselves.

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Our group sat in the adjacent changing room while a guide explained the mikve's history and meaning. The immersion required of anyone rendered "unclean" represented a cleansing at the source of all waters, the holy river that flows from the garden of Eden. In the barrel-vaulted subcellar where we sat, the guide's presentation cued a reverential hush. When a photojournalist's lens cap slipped out of his hand and fell in the pool with a slapstick plink, no one laughed; reaching down to retrieve the plastic disk, the photographer connected us, in a not quite funny way, to ancient rites of purification and renewal.

Our time in Montpellier was arranged by organizers of a gay and lesbian press trip launched by the French Government Tourist Office (FGTO), subsidiary tourist bureaus, and Community Marketing in San Francisco. The journey itself was a kind of purification rite, an immersion in France. Longer, more strenuous, and less bullshit-tainted than the average promotional press tour, it washed away months of political muck.

The francophobe hysteria that swept the US over French opposition to war in Iraq left people on both sides of the Atlantic feeling soiled. The American reaction had a retrograde meanness recalling the chauvinist bile of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1840s. In 1966, when Charles DeGaulle pulled French military forces out of NATO, or, later, when Parisian streets filled with demonstrators protesting US policy in Vietnam, American anger was comparatively restrained.

Francophobia

But in the first quarter of 2003, Americans could not stop bashing France. During that period, the FTGO measured a 19.8% drop in American visitors-- over and above the post-9/11 decline in travel-- and received unprecedented hate mail. Websites like www.notofrance.com urged boycotts. Many hotels lost a third of their business. Some American restaurateurs dumped French wines into gutters; US wine importers experienced plummeting sales. Branches of a California dry-cleaning chain, French Cleaners, were hit by arsonists and vandals. French fries became "freedom fries." A standard zinger hurled at American dissenters was "Move to France!" Borrowing (and misapplying) a line from The Simpsons, Americans called the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys"-- as well as other, less complimentary names.

French President Jacques Chirac may not have vowed to veto a UN authorization of war out of untrammeled altruism, but many view the conduct of France as saner and more principled than that of the US. Pursuing a neocon pipe-dream of empire, waging a fraudulently justified war of plunder, the Bush regime alienated allies, wounded NATO, undermined the UN, and made a mockery of international law. Germany, Russia, and other nations joined France in refusing to rubber-stamp the Bush agenda, but it was France-- twice liberated from foreign occupation with the aid of US armed forces-- that was branded an ungrateful ally and scapegoated by the American public.

But when the French public marched in protest, their primary target was the Bush Administration. Steve, a gay, Paris-based airline employee whose apartment overlooks the Place de la République, has watched antiwar demonstrations roiling through his neighborhood with cries of "George Bush, assassin!" but has personally encountered no anti-American harassment. "They make a distinction," he says, "between US government policy and the American people."

Embarking on a public relations campaign to lure Americans back to France, the FTGO has been insisting that the French really like the American people. In our ten-writer group, however, no one needed reassurance. A lesbian colleague told me that her first encounter with Paris had been "like falling in love with a person." I'd heard that statement before, almost verbatim, from a friend who left the US to remain in France for the rest of her life. The FTGO slogan is "Let's Fall in Love Again," but for most Americans who fall in love with France, the condition is permanent.

Planes, trains, chevaux

For nine days, beginning on June 24, our gay press contingent spiraled through the country from the Mediterranean coast to the English Channel. With relays of guides, we traveled by train, bus, van, car, and horse-drawn cart through Provençal fields of sunflowers and lavender, through Camarguais salt marsh and green Norman forests. We sampled wines at the Papal Palace in Avignon. We visited St.-Paul-le-Mausole, where Van Gogh painted Starry Night. We rode on horseback along the beach past l'Espiguette Light, explored Roman tunnels beneath Arles, climbed to the roof of the Cathédrale de St.-Julien at Le Mans, raced go-carts at Le Mans and Deauville, and sailed up the Seine past tall ships gathered for the Rouen Armada. Our hotels ranged from comfortable to sybaritic; our meals were superb.

The centerpiece of our itinerary was the Paris Gay Pride march on June 28. Additional stops had a queer-specific spin. Montpellier, the capital of Mediterranean Languedoc, is a booming, youth-dominated university town whose tradition of tolerance predates France, and whose ambiance corroborates its claim to be the most gay-friendly French city outside Paris. Le Mans, site of the lesbian-tinged murders that inspired Jean Genet's The Maids, has claimed a more benign position on the gay map of France by crafting an official charter welcoming gay visitors. Rouen, where lesbian icon Jeanne d'Arc was immolated by the English-- and where gay English monarch Richard Coeur de Lion's purportedly lionlike heart is interred-- has a vibrant bar scene.

In some cities, gay community leaders turned out to greet us. Our meetings were cordial, open, and full of repciprocal curiosity. The French treated us as considerately as they treat one another. Relations between French lesbians and gay men seemed notably relaxed. In Rouen, Stephane Leportier, a officer of the national gay business association SNEG (Syndicat National des Enterprises Gaies), welcomes women at his popular men's bar XXL; a contingent of men from our group was warmly received at the nearby women's bar, Miss Marple. Efforts to counteract male or female separatist tendencies seem to prevail all over France.

French gay political concerns echo, but do not duplicate, those of gay Americans. Same-sex marriage, already a reality in Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands, is under discussion, but many French queers seem content with the pacte civil de solidarité, a domestic partnership system for both homosexual and heterosexual couples adopted in 1999. They have other priorities-- employment discrimination, adoption rights, the problem of bigotry, the right of political asylum, sex education, advocacy for people with HIV/AIDS. Long after most American chapters of ACT UP have folded, Paris ACT UP retains some vitality.

In the 1980s, many French activists emulated their American counterparts, borrowing their rituals-- Gay Pride marches, ACT UP actions, political lobbying campaigns-- and some of their jargon. Unaware of the growing conservatism of the American LGBT leadership, some assume the US remains in the vanguard of gay politics globally. One gay Frenchman frowned when I said I thought the LGBT movement in France was closer to the cutting-edge than its American counterpart. "Not at all," he insisted. "You must be ten years more advanced."

They manned the barricades

America may influence the style of French gay politics, but the substance inevitably differs. In 1791, homosexual activity in France reached a level of decriminalization not attained in the USA until 2003. Gays are not excluded from the French military; homosexual activity among militaires has not been grounds for disciplinary action since the '70s. French gay activists care about class; few American gay activists, their pieties about "diversity" notwithstanding, would think of assigning poor or working-class homos a stripe in their rainbow flag. Many French activists are fighting to secure political asylum for foreigners persecuted for their homosexuality-- an issue getting minimal attention in the USA.

Our talks exposed areas of disagreement. When I asked Fabienne Larrivière, the head of Montpellier Pride, what she thought the movement's first priority should be, she said, "To pass a law forbidding homophobic speech. Not only acts, but words which can be disturbing must be forbidden by law." In February 2003, the French National Assembly enacted a hate-crimes law creating stiffer penalties for anti-gay bias crimes. That an anti-defamation law proscribing homophobic expression would be the next step seems to many a no-brainer, though the concept is not universally endorsed.

Assaults on gay men and lesbians are rare in France, but they occur. The most notorious recent incident was last October's stabbing of Bertrand Delanoë, the openly gay mayor of Paris. More typically, homophobia surfaces through casual taunts or surreptitiously applied graffiti-- "pédé suceur" (cocksucking faggot), "sale gouine" (filthy dyke), and other slurs.

Sometimes it appears on the printed page. In her recent memoir Un Cri dans le silence, movie diva Brigitte Bardot, 68, complains that gay men "shake their backsides, wave their pinkies in the air, and whine in little castrato voices about the way they're treated by those nasty heterosexuals." She complains that "transsexuals, drag queens, carriers of AIDS" have lowered the tone of Parisian prostitution. To some French gay activists, statements like these constitute "hate speech" that should be criminalized. "Inciting racial hatred" is already a crime; Bardot, an animal rights militant incensed by the Muslim slaughter of sheep on the feast of Aïd, has been fined for two such transgressions.

Proposed legal curbs on free expression make American First-Amendment advocates (myself included) cringe-- and might have drawn a similar reaction from Voltaire, the French philosophe who reportedly declared, "I detest what you say, but would defend to the death your right to say it." Yet in the age of media monopolies, campus speech codes, the censorship provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, and the speech-chilling efforts of gay organizations like GLAAD, a freer range of expression may exist in France than in the US. Stomping or marginalizing unpopular points of view is, in fact, an American tradition. In 1833, French sociopolitical analyst Alexis de Toqueville wrote, "I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America."

In France, respect for difference means opposing positions passionately held can be passionately argued among people who remain friends. Six principal political parties and countless fringe groups offer a rich range of views. From the Parti Communiste Français to Chirac's Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République to Le Pen's right-wing Front National, French voters encounter a spectrum of choice unknown in the US. While predominantly socialist, the gay movement in France finds room for a multiplicity of political and religious positions, and includes centrists and devout Catholics.

Voulez-vous couchez...?

The influence of Catholics and conservatives notwithstanding, sex is widely available, and so are condoms. The French gay movement manages to be scrupulously devoted to AIDS awareness and sexual safety, and yet unapologetically pro-sex. Phone sex lines, Internet dating schemes, escort services, saunas, and sex clubs abound. Gay publications teem with ads that promise "Des mecs avec de gros paquets!" ("Guys with big packages!") and other delights.

Men still meet near the Tuileries where, in 1724, the Marquis de Sade's father was arrested for propositioning a male stranger. Gay men on the prowl in France need no longer fear police entrapment, though blatant public sex is still proscribed. Cruising in the dunes is forbidden at Cap d'Agde, the beach near Montpellier where American photographer Jock Sturges shoots photos of naturist families. But at the clothing-optional area at l'Espiguette, and other stretches of beach staked out by gay men all over France, there is an ebb and flow of sexual pursuit. From the ramparts of St. Malo to the marinas of St. Tropez, cruising-- la drague-- is a French institution.

Still, France is far from immune to the effects of global sex panic. Olivier, a graphic artist and activist who teaches preschool children at an école maternelle, says, "I'm very careful. I'm never alone with a child. I make sure that any physical contact can't be misinterpreted." Such caution is increasingly needed, though child-molestation hysteria has not reached the pitch it has attained in the US and the UK. The age of consent remains 15, rising to 18 when an authority figure is involved.

Homo-histoire

The homosexual presence in French society has long been taken for granted. For centuries, France has been producing gay authors, artists, and thinkers as disparate as belles-lettrist Madame de Staël and homokitsch duo Pierre et Gilles. In Paris, our press group wandered near the Palais-Royal enclave where Jean Cocteau and Colette were neighbors; past residences where Marcel Proust lived and wrote; through the omnisexual Place Pigalle, site of the Café du Rat Mort where, circa 1873, teenaged genius Arthur Rimbaud attacked Paul Verlaine, his lover, with a knife-- and, decades later, American lesbian anarchist Emma Goldman passed out.

Americans were visiting and sometimes fleeing to France before the USA existed. On a diplomatic mission to Paris in the 1770s, Benjamin Franklin called France "the civilest nation upon the earth." The pull of France is most sharply felt among American outsiders-- artists, writers, scholars, queers.

The Left Bank literary-expatriate scene between World Wars owed its ambience and much of its power to American lesbians: Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes. Gay men from the US, England, and elsewhere have been coming to France for generations. Oscar Wilde died in Paris, where his grave is now a shrine. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky once inhabited a flophouse in the Latin Quarter. In 1948, gay African-American author James Baldwin moved to Paris and stayed to describe the gay milieu of St.-Germain-des-Près in Giovanni's Room. In Baldwin's Another Country (1962), a groundbreaking sex scene occurs between an expatriate American playwright and his French male lover.

Ma première fois

My personal experience of France dates back to the 1960s, when, at 17, I stepped off a ship at Marseille; subsequent visits helped seal my gay identity. My recurring fantasies of moving to France were played out by my friend Judith, a theater artist who went to Paris on a Fulbright, got a job at the Théâtre de Chaillot, and stayed. Early in 1990, after living in France for 12 years, she developed cancer. I came over to see her in the Hôpital Avicenne at Bobigny, and stayed to help with her funeral arrangements.

A group of Judith's friends split the cost of renting one of the bateaux mouches that carry sightseers up and down the Seine, and held a floating memorial service. Just past the Pont de l'Archevêque, behind Notre Dame where the Ile de la Cité cuts into the current, we illegally slipped her urn into the river that to Judith was as spiritually potent as the Ganges. On the eve of Bastille Day, the French magazine Gai Pied holds its popular annual ball on the adjacent Quai de la Tournelle; Judith, a bisexual woman with a lively mix of French and American queer friends, would have approved.

Judith's relationship with her adopted country had rough spots, especially when she fought to obtain a work permit. But she had little patience for American antipathy toward France, an attitude she ascribed to cultural illiteracy, poor language skills, and xenophobia. She also saw that French anti-Americanism is often a direct response to ill manners and presumptions of entitlement.

In France, the strongest anti-American strains are inseparable from anti-Semitism on the far right, and academic Marxism on the hard-line left. A less neatly ideological factor comes from resistance to cultural imperialism and globalization. Devotees of French culture loathe Disneyland Paris; farmer José Bové earned folk-hero status by bombing a McDonald's. On June 25, having lunch along the Rhone at Arles, my colleagues and I peered over our flan de homard and spotted the words U$ GO HOME on a wall on the opposite bank. But the dollar sign suggested that the target was the G8 economic summit held at Evian-les-bains three weeks before, not American travelers.

Nevertheless, some French people do regard Americans as Visigoths. Anyone who has watched a gaggle of US tourists clomp through the Louvre, baying for the Mona Lisa, or stagger drunk down the rue de Rivoli, knows why. Presented with quiet, many Americans hasten to fill it with noise, shattering the atmosphere in spaces like the nave of Notre Dame de Chartres with cries of "HOLY COW! Willya look at that!" Americans in France can be like farts in church-- undermining sanctimony, maybe, but leaving a smell.

French people who swear they like Americans usually mean it, however. Their reputation for brusqueness toward Americans is largely unearned. Answering a tourist's imperfect French with English is largely a wish to cut to the chase. Searching my memory for first-hand examples of unequivocal French rudeness, I come up with one diabolical waitress in Strasbourg. I have, on the other hand, seen more instances of American disrespect toward the French than I care to remember.

The Bush Administration's jibes at "Old Europe" come from stale visions of monocled snobs contemptuous of everything Americans hold dear. The myth has a homophobic subtext. A familiar villain in American movies, especially right-wing films like The French Connection, is the European aesthete, usually French, depicted as warped, duplicitous, vicious, and soft. In American mythology, high culture signifies corruption and sissyhood. One of the more memorable figures in the recent Matrix Reloaded is "the Merovingian," an arrogant, supercilious, Nosferatu-eared Frenchman. Never mind that the character is meant to be a computer-generated simulacrum spun from a stereotype; he's the embodiment of the French-accented faggy decadence American audiences love to hate.

Expecting Americans to be politicized in the same way they are, the French are puzzled by American obliviousness to political contexts. Americans, in turn, think the French overinterpret everything in political terms. But in France, life and politics mesh deeply in ways that large-scale street events like the Paris gay pride march make abundantly clear.

"Parisians," art historian John Russell writes, "are like hand grenades that go off the moment the pin is pulled. Their commitment is total, moreover." On Pride Day, that commitment was reflected in lavender Metro tickets, in lavender tulips in our rooms at the Hotel George V, in the fierce queer visibility that permeated the city.

Bertrand Delanoë, flanked by bodyguards, led La Marche des Fiertés Lesbiennes, Gaies, Bi, et Trans-- a march, not a procession of yuppies with corporate banners-- out of the Place d'Italie. Behind the mayor streamed a crowd of 600,000, walking or riding on sometimes makeshift floats: the choral group Des Voix contre le SIDA (Voices Against AIDS), the local chapter of Long Yang Club, SOS Homophobie, AIDS activists, the Fédération Sportive Gaie et Lesbienne, Air France employees flinging condoms, bare-breasted women and transsexuals, postal workers, men in dance belts and body paint, Communists, the Christian group David et Jonathan, gay parents, disabled queers, Jews, Arabs, men from the Univers bathhouse, boys in sarongs. Knowing that ridicule can be the best revenge, drag queens resembling Brigitte Bardot held up signs emblazoned with excerpts from her homophobic rants.

The crowd surged through the 13th arrondissement via the Boulevard de l'Hôpital; past Salpétrière, the 300-year-old medical facility where Michel Foucault and Princess Diana of Wales died, and where Delanoë underwent surgery after his attempted murder; past the Gare d'Austerlitz and the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle and the Jardin des Plantes; across the Seine; through the Place de la Bastille, site of a vanished prison and a visible, ungainly glass opera house; past the gay Marais; and into the Place de la République.

I followed the march as far as the Pont d'Austerlitz, the bridge I crossed 30 years ago during my first half-hour in Paris as I walked to the Left Bank from the Gare de Lyon. I paused, looked toward Notre Dame, watched the water of the Seine pass over Judith's grave, and imagined its progress as it looped through Rouen, through the countryside, past Honfleur and Le Havre, into the ocean, and toward North America.

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Credit for a bonne fête & planning your own

The June 23-July 3 gay and lesbian press trip was a project of the French Government Tourist Office; regional tourist boards of Languedoc-Rousillon and Provence; tourist offices at Le Mans, Rouen, and Deauville; the Seine-Maritime Tourist Board; the Paris Tourist and Convention Bureau; BLB Tourisme; Les Frères Blancs restaurants; Air France; Rail Europe; the public transportation network RATP; Concorde, Hyatt, Barrière, and Four Seasons hotels; and, in the US, Community Marketing. Our guides and hosts were Christophe Carvenant, Nathalie Poto, Laurent Corre, Frédéric Araldi, Mickael Darthiail, Hélène Vey, Laurent Pélissier, Hussein Bourgi, Claudia Schöttle, Jean-Pierre Soutric, Bruno Ray, Yannick Bugeon, and dozens more.

The sleeping

Our Paris accommodations were the handsome Concorde Ambassador, where we spent our first night; the Four Seasons George V, whose old-money charm is most accessible to travelers with old-money assets; and the sleek Hyatt Regency Madeleine, whose entire male staff appeared to be awaiting discovery by porn director Jean-Daniel Cadinot. In Deauville, we stayed at the vast Hôtel Normandy Barrière, a Hollywood vision of a French resort hotel.

At St.-Remy-de-Provence, we spent a night at l'Atelier de l'Image, a hostelry carved out of a former cinema, with special facilities for photographers (and for well-heeled hedonists, who can book the suite that includes a tree house). In Port Camargue, we were ensconced in the sprawling, comfortable, motel-like Relais de l'Oustau Camarguen. In Le Mans, we stayed at the Hôtel Concorde, where my bed faced floor-to-ceiling mirrors. We were also put up at the Astron in Montpellier and the Hôtel du Vieux Marché in Rouen.

All these hotels welcome gay guests; none specifically caters to a gay clientele. My favorite gay hotel in Paris remains the friendly, convenient, reasonably priced Hôtel Beaumarchais on rue Oberkampf near the Marais.

The eating

We were taken to some memorable restaurants, including L'Arbuci in Paris; the Italian-accented Sette e Mezzo at St.-Remy-de-Provence; the excellent La Péniche at Arles; and the Michelin-starred Carré des Gourmets in le Grau-du-Roi. At La Grande Motte, a beach town near Montpellier, we had lunch at a first-rate seasonal establishment operated in a tent by La Compagnie des Comptoirs. A personal favorite was Chez Marthe at Deauville, where dinner concluded with carafes of Calvados. My last meal in Paris, and one of the best, was at Les Trois Petits Cochons in Montorgueil, the gay area near Les Halles.

The paying & the planning

The dollar-to-euro rate of exchange may have slipped, but France remains a better deal for gay vacationers than any number of pricey American resort destinations.

Brittany-based BLB Tourisme offers personalized assistance to gay tourists. Gay travelers to Provence should consult the membership organization Gay Provence. Travelers to any part of France should seek out regional volumes in the Rough Guide series. Gary Lee Kraut's useful Paris Revisited (Words Travel International Press, 2003) is worth investigating even if the visit is your first.

For detailed information about gay and gay-friendly hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs, and other businesses in Paris, see Bobby Stevens's report in the April, 2003 Guide.