10 years ago the “Manif pour tous” invaded the streets of France to express its hostility to marriage for all. Processions made up of families and their children, like Maëlle, who confided in franceinfo.
Just ten years ago, the law giving people of the same sex the possibility of marrying was enacted. But it’s another memory that some have in mind: that of the hate slogans and the pink and blue flags of the Manif pour tous. Processions in which children and adolescents participated at the time, this is the case of Maëlle (the first name has been changed).
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She went to church all her youth and comes from an evangelical Protestant family. Maëlle was 13 when the Manif pour tous movement emerged. “They started talking to us about it in catechism, telling us that if we were attracted to people of the same gender as us, it was bad, that we could talk to the pastor about it and that it could be cured.
His parents take him in processions
It is in this context that his parents, undecided at the start, finally take him to Lyon in one of these family processions. There was “blots of kids and I mostly remember the sermons because that’s mostly what it sounded like.” sermons”very vindictive”who said “that we had authorized adoption, that it was dangerous for the children”.
“The atmosphere of the Manif pour tous was not ‘Love your neighbor’. It was: ‘Punish your neighbor if he is not like you’.”
Maëlle continues to tell her memories: “PGradually I realize my attraction to girls.” Her memories are still marked by what she saw. “There were always these words that resonated: ‘It’s not normal!’ Over time Maëlle realizes that “It’s a pretty intense personal violence.”
“I knew deep down that I was bisexual”
The years pass and Maëlle rejects the church. She rebels against her parents. “I realized the homophobia in which I bathed, she explains. It ended up gradually putting the question of the Manif pour tous back on the carpet. So I asked them why and I got a mea culpa from my dad who said, ‘Well yes you are right! We should never have gone there in fact it is against our values! We thought we were doing the right thing, but it wasn’t..”
AT 23 years old, today Maëlle has reconciled with her parents, especially with her father. “Jhad a very nice discussion with him; he told me : ‘We don’t make children to be like us.” Maëlle has reconciled but not necessarily with herself. “JI still have this shame today, not so much of the Demonstration for all in itself, as of having believed what I had been told even though deep inside me, I already knew, a little, that I was bisexual.”
“Often, I didn’t feel legitimate in LGBT circles because I came from a religious family, and I participated in the Manif pour tous. Who am I, after all?”
For several years, Maëlle has not returned to the church. “Dn the Bible it says that God loves everyone, but I don’t see why he wouldn’t love LGBT children because he created them.” Maelle concludes:I no longer believe in the God that was sold to me.”