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Après les étudiants, les grandes entreprises et les administrations, la police et l'armée voient, à leur tour, l'apparition d'associations homosexuelles. Malgré le devoir de réserve, les fondateurs du Flag ! assurent que leur initiative, qui vise à briser l'isolement des policiers gays dans les commissariats, "fonctionne bien". Chez les militaires, Patricia, fondatrice de l'AFMGL, veut mettre "un coup de pied dans la fourmilière".
Le devoir de réserve contraint leurs responsables à la prudence. Attenter à l'image de leur profession signifierait encourir des sanctions disciplinaires. Avec les journalistes, les contacts sont donc encore rares et prudents. Ils sont même conditionnés, en ce qui concerne Flag !, à l'obtention d'une autorisation de la préfecture de police de Paris. Fondée à la mi-octobre par un homme et une femme, tous deux policiers à Paris, sur le modèle des associations de policiers gays existant déjà en Grande-Bretagne, aux Etats-Unis, au Canada ou en Allemagne, Flag ! compte trente adhérents et une cinquantaine de sympathisants recrutés grâce à des affiches placardées dans les bars gays de Paris et de plusieurs villes de province.
"On recherchait à être entre policiers pour pouvoir parler d'homosexualité librement", explique Alain. Il s'agit évidemment de "lutter contre toutes les formes d'exclusion et de discrimination". "Dans la police, les homosexuels se sentent isolés, complète Sophie, qui a été cuisinière avant d'intégrer la police, il y a onze ans. Beaucoup d'entre eux, notamment des femmes, vivent cachés. Il est important qu'ils sachent qu'ils ne sont pas seuls dans la profession, qu'un lieu d'écoute existe."
Après que la LEFH, association des fonctionnaires lesbiennes et gays, a développé en son sein une commission de la défense, de l'intérieur et de la justice (pour les militaires, policiers, pompiers et gardiens de prison), se créait fin novembre une association spécifique, l'Association française des militaires gays et lesbiens (AFMGL), destinée aux militaires, pompiers, gendarmes et CRS. Elle ne compte qu'une dizaine adhérents pour l'instant, essentiellement dans l'armée de terre, et ne s'est fait connaître que sur les sites gays d'Internet et dans la presse spécialisée.
Destinée à développer "l'entraide entre les membres, la défense des droits, et à combattre l'homophobie", l'AFMGL apparaît comme une réponse aux propos du général Revel, en mai 2000, dans le mensuel gay Têtu : le chef du Sirpa Terre (service d'information et de relations publiques des armées) avait affirmé haut et fort que les homosexuels avaient toute leur place dans l'armée (Le Monde du 4 mai 2000).
Pascale Krémer
" ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 27.12.01
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On Monday, Dec. 10 -- the 53rd anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- a groundbreaking ceremony for the Pink Triangle Park Memorial will take place at 11:30 a.m. The park is located at the western side of the intersection of Castro, Market, and 17th streets.
The memorial will be made of 15 granite pylons cut in Minnesota and set in Pink Triangle Park by artists Robert Bruce and Susan Martin. It commemorates the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender victims of Nazi Germany's World War II-era concentration camps.
Formerly a lot overgrown with weeds, Pink Triangle Park now contains a rose garden. The transformation of this city-owned parcel has been a joint project of neighborhood residents and businesses, the Department of Public Works, and the Mayor's Neighborhood Beautification Fund.
For more information, visit http://www.evpa.org/ or e-mail .
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Spain's parliament on Wednesday pledged to erase the criminal records of gay people wrongly imprisoned on morals charges under the regime of former dictator General Francisco Franco.
The Guardian reports the government also pledged to study relief packages that would offer partial compensation for the years of torture and imprisonment experienced by thousands of gay Spaniards. For four decades, from 1935 to 1975, thousands of gay men were jailed, put in camps or locked up in mental institutions under Franco's repressive and virulently homophobic regime.
Prison terms of up to three years were imposed under laws covering "public scandal" or "social danger." Gay people, all but a handful of them men, were imprisoned in mental hospitals and subjected to electric shock treatments and other forms of behavior modification experiments. The decision reached means prison sentences for homosexuality will be stricken from law enforcement files on the local and federal level. The government also pledged to meet with representatives of the gay community to discuss redress. One of those demanding compensation is Valencia resident Antonio Ruiz, who was sent to prison when he was just 17 in the early 1970s. He told his mother that he was gay and she went to a nun for advice. "The nun went straight to the police, and I was arrested and sent for trial," he told the Guadian. Ruiz spent the next three months in prison at the mercy of the prison guards and other prisoners. "I was raped there and in the police cells and psychologically tortured by both the guards and the prison doctor," he told the newspaper. When stopped by police during a traffic violation, he discovered the authorities were still in possession of his arrest record. "Watch out, that one's queer," one of the police officers said. It took Ruiz four years to get his record formally destroyed, and he is demanding compensation. "It is not a question of money, but of moral restitution for someone who was brutally persecuted," he said. Historian Pablo Fuentes estimates that at least 1,000 gays were jailed during the last decade of Franco's rule.
"A lot of [those arrested] do not want to recall what happened," said Fuentes. He adds that the repressive measures were most often used against the poor and middle class. "It is not uncommon to hear gays from the upper classes and the aristocracy speak about the Franco period as a great time." When Franco died and thousands of political and other prisoners were pardoned the following year, gay men were left to serve out their sentences.
They could still be jailed until 1979 by the courts under what was termed the "social dangers" law. Pedro Zerolo of Spain's Federation of Gays and Lesbians welcomed parliament's decision, but wants more to be done. "What we want is a declaration of moral rehabilitation for those people who had part of their lives stolen by the state," he said. The Franco regime and its Falangist supporters considered gay men a threat to their fascist masculine ideal. "Any effeminate or introvert who insults the movement will be killed like a dog," General Queipo del Llano, Franco's favorite broadcaster, once threatened.
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France : premières associations gay au sein de la police et de l'armée
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