| Jean Le Bitoux | |
| Birth Date: | 16 August 1948 |
| Birth Place: | Bordeaux, France |
| Death Date: | 21 April 2010 (age) |
| Death Place: | Paris, France |
| Resting Place: | Père Lachaise Cemetery |
| Occupation: | Journalist |
Jean Le Bitoux (16 August 1948 – 21 April 2010) was a French journalist and gay activist. He was the founder of Gai pied, the first mainstream gay magazine in France. He was a campaigner for Holocaust remembrance of homosexual victims. He was the author of several books about homosexuality.
Jean Le Bitoux was born on 16 August 1948 in Bordeaux, France.[1] [2] His father was an admiral.[3]
Le Bitoux worked as a substitute music teacher.[3]
Le Bitoux founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) in Nice in the 1970s.[1] [2] By 1978, he ran for the National Assembly as a "homosexual candidate" alongside Guy Hocquenghem; they lost the election.[1] [2]
In 1979, Le Bitoux founded Gai pied, the first long-running commercially published gay magazine in France.[1] [2] Its name, coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, literally means "gay foot," but constitutes a multilayered pun in French: The two words pronounced together sound like "guêpier" (hornet's nest), while the word "foot" also evokes a "kick in the ass" ("un pied au cul") and sexual pleasure ("prendre son pied," equivalent to "to get off").[3] Le Bitoux resigned from the publication in 1983 due to the magazine's increasingly consumerist orientation.[4]
Le Bitoux joined AIDES, an HIV/AIDS awareness non-profit organization, in 1985.[4] [5] He co-wrote many HIV prevention documents.[4] He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal du Sida, a publication about HIV/AIDS.[2]
In 1989, Le Bitoux founded the Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a nonprofit organization for the remembrance of homosexual victims of Nazi Germany9.[1] [2] Initially, the organization was met with homophobia from some Holocaust survivors, who wrongly feared they were being smeared.[6] In 1994, Le Bitoux co-authored the memoir of Pierre Seel, a French homosexual who was deported by the Nazis for being gay.[1] [2]
By the 1990s, Le Bitoux argued that anti-homosexual legislation in France harked back to laws devised by François Darlan of the Vichy government to end same-sex prostitution in 1942, not Nazi Germany.[7] However, Marc Boninchi, a Law professor at the University of Lyon, has argued that the first instance of legal discrimination dates back to prosecutor Charles Dubost's 1941 recommendations.[7] Meanwhile, Le Bitoux's 2002 Les oubliés de la mémoire led President Jacques Chirac to acknowledge the homosexual victims of persecution under the Nazi Regime.[2]
Le Bitoux was a co-founder of the Centre LGBT Paris-Île-de-France in 1991.[8]
Le Bitoux was openly gay, and was rejected by his family for being gay.[1] Drawn to Maoism in his early twenties, he also left due to homophobia.[1] He contracted HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s.[2] [4]
Le Bitoux died on 21 April 2010 in Paris, France.[1] A memorial service conducted by Patrick Bloche was held in his honor at the city hall of the 11th arrondissement of Paris, with a performance by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.[2] He was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.[4]