The Belgian lesbian undertones of French songs
By Marian Lens
Les dessous lesbiens de la chanson is a four-handed book written by journalist Léa Lootgieter and singer-songwriter Pauline Paris . Julie Feydel’s drawings illustrate each of the forty chapters devoted to a singer.
The book is a rich compilation – a true goldmine – of lesbian, or even bisexual, songs, so seldom openly declared, yet mainly diffuse. It is published by the highly experienced feminist and lesbian publishing house iXe .
In a very spirited style, the research is based on a revealing text that the singers have either interpreted or written. The reviews, stories and anecdotes are punctuated with interviews with primary sources – female singers, performers or those close to them – or with very detailed testimonies, both contemporary and more recent. All these interpretative or revealing approaches allow for an enlightened re-reading of the often famous songs, confirming the feelings or underground interpretations made of the songs at the time of their release.
A very nice commented list of bars, nightclubs, cabarets, clubs, music halls and lesbian or so-called ‘interlope’ places, completes the picture of a unique musical Parisian century.
Les dessous lesbiens de la chanson sheds light on “a century-long history, from the 1920s to the present day”. In establishing it, the authors wanted to “first of all multiply the insights into the vast and still under-explored landscape of lesbian song today. {And thus} allow us to discover it in its diversity, with its stretches of tenderness and melancholy, its zones of darkness and secrecy, its labyrinths where erotica intersects with desires and pleasures declined in the feminine plural form.”
As the publisher iXe points out at the launch of the book, “depending on the era, female homosexuality was in turn or simultaneously opprobrious, denied, and made invisible. But whether clandestine or not, whether covert or crude, this reality has found a way to express itself through song {…} from Suzy Solidor to Chris, via Barbara, Brigitte Fontaine, Marie Paule Belle, Juliette Armanet and many others.”
The preface is a genuine introductory research by the legendary pairing of Catherine Gonnard and Elisabeth Lebovici . It talks about how the singers restore “history and destiny in a way that is both acute and attentive, {…} the interwovenness of women, the affects, desires, pleasures of togetherness with the nostalgia of those lost moments. They do so sometimes in the form of an enigma, sometimes in a thunderous declaration. Ever since the song was introduced in the music hall and cabaret, there have been texts and singers who have accompanied each generation and who speak more specifically about us and them: about those we love, those we encounter throughout our lives, but also about our common history with its double meanings and multiple prohibitions.” Further on, “one writes ‘with the left hand’, admittedly, ‘the one we have always kept hidden’, but to break free from ‘the straight path’ by singing about free love with Messia and seeing Léa Pool’s film Anne Trister for the millionth time.”
For us, it also constitutes a springboard towards a history that transcends borders. We wanted to shed some light as to the Belgian underside brought to the world of song, which is still barely disclosed in Belgian and international historiography.
Is it really a coincidence that the book’s foreword and the introduction of the digital version both start with the evocation of Gribouille and her Ostende, an ode to a very beautiful story of sapphic love experienced by the author-songwriter in this mythical Belgian seaside town: “We didn’t choose this strange love/Which you must hide, when the dawn breaks”.
Through men, too, some of them homosexual
The authors point out that “at the beginning of the 20th century, men still had exclusive rights as lyricists and women simply had to interpret the works they had created .” At the dawn of women’s right to vote, creative professions remained a male-dominated prerogative.
Just as with homosexual men, revealing one’s “love for the same sex” was risky business. But this danger for women, assigned as such, is even greater as it’s associated with other restrictions, those reserved for these social sub-beings ‘under male domination’. It was forbidden or impossible for them, as beings, to compose, write, edit and work on subjects, among others.
Half a century later, in 1953, the writer Marguerite Yourcenar used the process of autobiography by proxy and revealed her “inclinations” by publishing the Memoirs of Hadrian, a homosexual Roman emperor. A subtle way of defying and circumventing the forbidden.
Nicole Louvier will thus courageously pay a “vibrant tribute” to Louis of Bavaria and his homosexual love affairs. But she dares to go even further by affirming her own: “The same love has struck us”. The authors point out that this love, ‘both for the arts and for people of the same sex, nevertheless places them on the margins of society. In the nineteenth century, the response to this ‘deviant’ behaviour was often imprisonment or institutional care” .
Passing – The code of a lesbian neutral as a sometimes blurred ‘masculine’ identity
Nicole Louvier is being honoured because she “loves women and has never tried to hide it”. She is also known as a writer with her book Qui qu’en grogne which “tells the story of her love affair with Gabrielle and denounces the lesbophobia of passers-by who stare at them {…likewise} her songs carry many allusions to sapphic love, even if the artist sometimes casts doubt on the subject by referring to her lover as ‘mon p’tit copain’ (my boyfriend).”
In her article Femmes des sixties (Women of the Sixties), Léa Lootgieter interviews Eve Pascal who talks about the lesbian scene in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the lesbian songs and singers of the time . “In showbiz, some stars were lesbians, but it was completely under wraps, we didn’t talk about it. The only one who dared to speak directly to lesbians, even on the radio, was Nicole Louvier {…}. She was definitely our icon! She sang about our lives, misfortunes and romances in poetry. When she sang Mon p’tit copain perdu, we all knew she was talking about a woman. Despite the writing of most of her texts being neutral, she played with ambiguity.”
This art of so-called dodging is also practised by the singer Mick Micheyl, whose songs have been covered by famous singers such as Josephine Baker (bisexual) or Yves Montand (heterosexual). She sang for a “lesbian audience” who “used to read between the lines”, “went off on a tangent”, “like someone who had always learned to dodge”, “I gently play my part” .
The book wonderfully decodes this law of the double life: the underground and forbidden one evoked by innuendos.
And contrary to what might sometimes be reinterpreted now, it was still a lesbian neutral, even when it had a ‘masculine’ connotation – ‘a boyfriend’ – as he was ‘passing’ in the sense of ‘pretending to be’, a trick that was and still is widely used in our underground lesbian culture or to protect our identity choices. Isn’t this what Mick Micheyl also implies when she addresses the camera live in 1959: “You. You who pass by me, who watches me, listen to me. You are my source, my contribution” .
Or would it be a ‘non-female’ neutral lesbian?
It’s also a heterosocial society that views ‘women’ so poorly when they act strong and independent, especially when they do not try to be ‘feminine’. A society which, in order to continue to be able to control them, only aims to lock them into shackles, adding new prohibitions or stereotypes to the already strict existing norms. The boyish look of La garçonne, as Colette Mars sang in 1957.
Is it really a question of ‘masculinisation’? Isn’t it more like beings who live freely, with a specific identity and appeal? Indeed, ‘lesbians’ will manage to detect and recognise the identity gap of those who are ‘different’, like themselves. The pleasure of discovery or confirmation, “that’s one”. Free gestures and clothing that defy restraint, that are socially read as ‘masculine’, and that should be neutralised instead, as belonging to just anyone.
They reveal this new found freedom in small doses by singing and chanting it. They also show it: “Their way of standing, singing, their often borrowed and clumsy way of wearing certain clothes denounce another freedom of the body, the sudden abrupt gestures do not ‘match’ the expected femininity.”
Bisexuals… an entire chapter between ‘passing’ and heterosocial conventions, or simply a choice among others?
Both a reality by choice or heterosocial pressure, bisexuality, which is to live in one’s personal trajectory of relationships with people of “both sexes”, is the majority of human relationships, as the reports of sexologists and sociologists Mc Kinsey and Shere Hite have long demonstrated.
The book thus abounds with these singers, who fluctuate between a half-closeted bisexual and/or a half-concealed ‘lesbian’ identity. Most of the ‘women who love women’ known to the general public are those who opt more or less openly for relationships with both sexes.
Singers, or those who have honoured them, such as Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker, Barbara, Tamara de Lempicka, Suzy Solidor or Françoise Mallet-Joris, are remembered in a story or anecdote throughout the book, or presented in one of the four sections dedicated to them.
However, calling oneself ‘bisexual’ can also be a way of camouflaging oneself, as Catherine Lara claims in Autonome: “For a long time I hid my cards under the table”, “Free to love a woman or a man”. She prefers the more diffuse identity term of “homosensual” .
A truly Belgian lesbian underneath herstory as well – Brussels as a publishing or artistic springboard
Alongside Léa Lootgieter and Pauline Paris, we have Julie Feydel, who graduated from the Graphic Research School in… Brussels. The Belgian graphic and artistic schools are renowned, and attract a very international audience. Indeed, many come from France to pursue their studies there.
Many artists from the world of music have also evolved in Belgium and in Brussels in particular. We reveal a few facets of this through this inspiring book.
When it comes to the publication of licentious or political writings that are banned in foreign countries, Brussels has long held a prominent place. It was in Brussels that the poet Verlaine published several poems under a pen name at the end of the 1860s, notably sapphic ones such as Les amies .
The singer Susy Solidor, who plays a leading role in the book, had her autobiography La Vie commence au large published in Brussels in 1944 by Editions du Sablon .
As for the magnificent Barbara, it was in Brussels that she married, lived and launched her very own singing career.
At the dawn of May 1968, the love story of the singers Gribouille and Marie-Thérèse Orain on the beaches of Ostende
The lesbian bookshop Artemys announces, in its autumn 2001 literary programme, the literary meeting it’s organising with Marie-Thérèse Orain in Etterbeek:
“Marie-Thérèse Orain is coming to present the book she has just published on Gribouille Je vais mourir demain, with the complete texts of Gribouille.
A legendary figure of the French sixties, Gribouille died at the age of 26, in January 1968, after a dazzling five-year career. She left behind iconic songs such as Mathias and Ostende, a true love song for the singer. A collection of writings of extraordinary strength, stunning poetry, a lot of tenderness, but also of despair, ‘despair in its most seductive form’ (Françoise Mallet-Joris).”
In Les dessous lesbiens de la chanson, the authors explain in detail the context of the singer’s era. The theme of forbidden love is a recurring one in French music, whether in the context of adulterous relationships or between two lovers of different social classes, religions or ages. For lesbians, it is all the more poignantly relevant because even though female homosexuality has never been penalised by French law, unlike male homosexuality, it has been suppressed in a roundabout way. Many girls and other ‘jules’ were arrested outside lesbian cabarets for cross-dressing or forcibly committed to psychiatric hospitals, as Mylène Farmer’s Maman a tort (1984) recalls. Sapphic passions are often expressed in half-truths, as in Damia’s La chaîne (1911) or Gribouille’s Ostende (1968).”
Intimate links and artistic collaborations between women – Marie Paule Belle & Françoise Mallet-Joris
It was no less than Françoise Mallet-Joris who wrote the foreword to Marie-Thérèse Orain’s biography of Gribouille. Thanks to the authors of Les Dessous lesbiens de la chanson, we discover the particularly romantic reasons for this: “The love affair between Françoise Mallet-Joris and Marie Paule Belle began in Paris in 1970, the year in which the singer performed at the cabaret L’Écluse, in the programme of Marie-Thérèse Orain, who was a star there.”
Marie-Paule confided to the authors: “Our story, which everyone knew about even if we didn’t mention it by name, became a model for homosexual women, like that of Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais for gays. {…} At the time, we heard people say that it was a disease, a perversion. We tried to prove the contrary simply by living our love story naturally, which happened to be both very beautiful and simple.”
The female creators in the world of song also had a very professional relationship with each other. As the authors point out, Françoise wrote “almost two thirds of Marie Paule’s songs (166 out of 250!), and continued to be her lyricist even after they separated”. Further on in the book, we learn that the singer-songwriter Catherine Lara wrote mainly for other women, including two songs for Barbara.
And in a rather difficult Belgium, a true lead weight shrouded Soeur Sourire (The Singing Nun, ‘Smiling Sister’ in French)
In Belgium and around the world, it was a nun, “The Singing Nun”, who launched a new global phenomenon in the world of song, making the tune Dominique nique the first international ‘hit’.
When the composer, under her real name Jeannine Deckers, left the religious orders only a few years later in the mid-1960s, she caused quite a scandal. This scandal was quickly buried under a genuine lead weight that hung over everything that was ‘different’ in conservative Catholic Belgium.
In 1985, her suicide with Annie Pécher sent shock waves, thus revealing their love affair to the Belgian public. But even more so the real scandal that drove Jeannine Deckers to commit this act: the extent to which she had been manipulated and robbed by the Fichermont convent and the Philips record company, who alone had pocketed all the profits from the world-famous song Dominique nique.
She was relentlessly harassed by tax authorities, who were complacent with those who had taken advantage of her, to make her pay taxes on the millions of records she sold, although she only started to receive royalties at the end of her life, after bitter legal battles which were still going on at the time of her death.
Her death revealed the existence of a diary in which her homosexuality, although still often denied, even in recently released biographies, could be read for the first time with certainty.
She never publicly acknowledged her homosexuality. Like most homosexuals, who lived in secrecy or had difficulty defining themselves as such. This being said, a few of us in the community did know that she was “in search of an identity” towards homosexuality, but wasn’t necessarily at ease about it.
Being lesbian or gay was considered “shameful” by the dominant Catholic religion, “unnatural” by various sciences, “abnormal” by psychology and psychiatry, and “amoral” by society.
The revenge – In the limelight – launch of Les dessous lesbiens de la chanson in Belgium
It is Soeur Sourire who will be the bridge between the authors, Léa Lootgieter and Pauline Paris, and myself, through Carole Vidal, who suggests contacting me for the chapter on Soeur Sourire. Carole is in charge of the Archives Recherches et Cultures Lesbienne in Paris, and upon reading all that has been revealed since the death of Jeannine Deckers, deciphers an excerpt from her song “On the road of my life/ I halted my steps/ Deep in my heart/ Someone was waiting there”, as a reference to the “joy”’ of her life, Annie Pécher.
Very symbolic. The book could thus only be launched in Belgium by a profiled lesbian organisation, L-Tour , as well as by and in a modern lesbian and GBTI+ café-bar-concert, the ‘Crazy Circle’ . The setting of the event will be the one intended for the LGBTI+ community, as well as for a very large audience, as the singers would have loved, that of the PrideFestival (cultural and event concept launched by the RainbowHouse in Brussels).
This article is the first one to be published in Belgium on this wonderful research by researcher Léa Lootgieter and singer-songwriter Pauline Paris. In the magazine of the Suzan Daniel Fund (“Fonds Suzan Daniel”), just as symbolic to put our herstory and history in the spotlight. The singers mentioned, by revealing their lesbian and bisexual and plural loves for women, even if they often still did it in a coded or subdued way, have really opened up many avenues and possibilities. We can only honour and pay tribute to them in such a beautiful way.
The book, Les dessous lesbiens de la chanson, is a true celebration of lesbian voices singing tunes of resistance, passion, and the victories in love that have so successfully defied the prohibitions of such sweet inter-womanhood.
The love songs are like poems. In her diary, in May 1970, Jeannine Deckers – alias ‘Soeur Sourire’ – addresses a love poem titled Renaissance: “you have placed love under my feet {…} happiness {…}, {My life} your love has planted flowers in it, {…} your fire in me has brought happiness.”
Marian Lens, Sociologist – November 2020
(Translated from French by Brussel Onthaal vzw, supervised by the author and Tamara for L-Tour – With the support of Equal.Brussels, Equal Opportunities for the Region of Brussels) {activer l’hyper-lien d’Equal.Brussels}
*Originally published under (references to quote the article): LENS Marian, Les dessous lesbiens belges de la chanson française, in : Het ondraaglijk besef / La notion insupportable (Fonds Suzan Daniel), n°26, december/décembre 2020, pp.12-15.
[i] Les dessous lesbiens de la chanson, Editions iXe, 2019. Léa Lootgieter a notamment cofondé la revue lesbienne Well Well Well, été vice-présidente de SOS Homophobie et coprésidente de l’Association des journalistes LGBT. Pauline Paris est une chanteuse-compositrice qui se place dans la lignée de la nouvelle chanson française. Elle puise son inspiration dans la folk, le jazz, le rock, le blues et la bossa-nova.
[ii] Julie Feydel, illustratrice, graphiste et photographe indépendante, collabore avec de nombreuses revues et publications.
[iii] La maison d’édition iXe (https://www.editions-ixe.fr/) poursuit la lancée de la collection Bibliothèque du féminisme (1991-2009) des éditions Harmattan, en se spécialisant depuis 2010 sur les études féministes, de genre et sur la sexuation.
[iv] Catherine Gonnard est un pilier du milieu lesbien, homosexuel et queer en France. Ses recherches approfondies sont régulièrement publiées sous forme d’articles ou de livres. Elle a notamment été rédactrice en chef de Lesbia Magazine de 1989 à 1995. Elisabeth Lebovici est historienne et critique d’art, et couvre en particulier les études de genre, les politiques queer, l’activisme LGBT et les arts contemporains.
[v] Introduction à la troisième rubrique. p.104.
[vi] Extraits p. 52.
[vii] Ce livre publié à La Table Ronde était encore disponible en 1985 et vendu par la librairie lesbienne Artemys à Bruxelles, qui fera redécouvrir cette auteure lesbienne en Belgique.
[viii] Lootgieter Léa, Femmes des sixties. Dans : Well Well Well, – la revue lesbienne, (2014)1, p. 94.
[ix] Extraits pp.82,83.
[x] Extrait p. 82. Merci à Léa et à Pauline de donner avec ce livre une telle source d’inspiration et de nous permettre grâce à cette compilation multiforme de nouvelles possibilités de décoder ce qui est très probablement ou assurément écrit ou dit entre les lignes.
[xi] Préface.
[xii] Extrait p. 101.
[xiii] Les amies, publié par Verlaine sous le pseudonyme de Pablo de Herlagnez en décembre 1867, chez l’éditeur bruxellois Auguste Poulet-Malassis, connu pour publier des écrits alors considérés comme licencieux, comme Les Fleurs du mal de Baudelaire. (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Amies ; dernière modification le 19 avril 2013).
[xiv] Susy Solidor, La Vie commence au large. Bruxelles-Paris, Editions du Sablon, 1944. Repris dans Carbonel Marie-Hélène, Susy Solidor : Une vie d’amours. Gémenos, Editions Autres Temps, 2007, p.20, note 41.
[xv] Rue de la Madeleine.
[xvi] Publicité pour la soirée organisée par Artemys le samedi 22 septembre 2001 au Centre Culturel d’Etterbeek. Référence du livre : Orain Marie-Thérèse, Gribouille : Je vais mourir demain. Paris, Christian Pirot, 2001.
[xvii] Extrait p.62.
[xviii] Extrait p.90. Voir aussi sur cet aspect : Lens Marian, Françoise Mallet-Joris (1930-2016). Dans : Het ondraaglijk besef – La notion insupportable (Fonds Suzan Daniel), (2016)22, december/décembre, pp 9-12. Elles vivront ensemble onze ans, et continueront une relation d’estime jusqu’au décès de Françoise Mallet-Joris.
[xix] L-Tour, https://www.l-tour.be/archives/ (19 septembre 2020)
[xx] Ixelles, 19 septembre 2020.
[xxi] Everaert Henry, Sœur Sourire : Une voix sans visage. Journal, Bruxelles, Didier Hatier, 1988, p.79.
