” Good evening everyone. It is The Gay Hour! ”
I will never forget that moment when, not without tremolos in my voice or emotion in my heart, I said these words for the first time at the microphone of the Quebec City radio station CKRL.
It was 1979, 42 years ago now, at 7 p.m. on a rainy Thursday in September. A year-long adventure began of which we were quite proud: the world’s first gay radio show in French!
My greetings to Jean-Guy Deschamps and Jean-Louis Tremblay, as well as my thanks to Suzanne Ouellet in this other world where she is now.
Tolerant Quebec
The show was reviewed in The sun and The duty under the title ” The Gay Hour, an integration experience ”. It was pointed out that the affair had hardly aroused any negative reactions, but, on the contrary, sympathy.
This convinced me for good that Quebec society was one of the most permissive and tolerant there is, at a time that many today foolishly describe as obscurantist.
The Gay Hour was a program more socio-cultural than political, more jubilant than claiming or activist, one of our motivations being to touch for the first time this magical medium that was the radio. The objective was to finally reveal the existence of the marginalized that we were and that we accepted to be.
It was before the tragedy of the “gay plague”, this initially fatal AIDS which would primarily attack homosexuals. It was before the gay marriage revolution.
The latter’s idea would have seemed ridiculous to most of us: why mimic the straights, as we said then? Civil union between people of the same sex was enough for us, as was the end of discrimination and annoyance against us in certain circles.
It was only later, in a café in the Gay Village in Montreal, that I realized that we were entering another world where the marginalized would accept less and less to see themselves as such.
At a nearby table, a young man was telling a friend about the meticulous preparations for his union with another guy: the engagement, the wedding, the reception, the honeymoon. Exactly as if it were a traditional marriage between a man and a woman.
It was the start of a process which, 40 years later The Gay Hour, will lead the very concept of marginality to be gradually devalued, then relegated to oblivion. All under the guise of a disembodied theoretical vision of equality which comes to consider all the differences between individuals and groups as systematically discriminatory.
Eternal victims
I will always have sympathy for the excluded and marginalized of all kinds who take responsibility, from gays, of course, to trans people and everyone else.
The rest of my 15 years when we were sometimes called “fif” and “fagot”, I have always found and will always find odious the contempt for outcasts that all societies seem to need at one time or another. other.
Hence my defense of the scapegoats on which a Quebec frightened by COVID-19 recently felt the need to hit, from touristatas last winter to the unvaccinated today, with the complicity of these well-meaning people who are blowing their noses. always in the direction of the wind.
While since the beginnings of humanity, the majority of great works of art and great discoveries have been made by the marginalized, the cracked, the enlightened, it is disturbing that almost no one wants to be today. considered a marginal.
Few people now accept to be really different, the sacrosanct diversity poorly camouflaging the standardization of points of view and behavior favored by the digital revolution.
All of them resolutely want to be mainstream, which does not prevent many from keeping keen on remaining eternal vindictive victims.
Women and men
Fantasy of omnipotence of a humanity in loss of contact with its inescapable animal anchorage, we have reached the point where some are offended that we still say that there are men and women.
Yet is there anything more beautiful than a woman? Yet is there anything more beautiful than a man?
The new and sad reality is that some representatives of minorities turn out to be as stupid and intolerant as those whose oppression they denounced in the past, with the complicity of institutions, corporations and universities whose cowardice appears limitless and on which he do not count to counter what sometimes looks like a new fascism on the rise.
Goodbye Rimbaud, goodbye Frida Kahlo, Caravaggio or Christine of Sweden. The days of the proud and the beautiful marginalized are over.
Now it’s time for the victims, it’s time for normal people.
What do you think? Express your opinion