Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS - Hardcover

"A work of exceptional erudition, originality, and insight. It not only restores the most important French homophile movement to history in all its complexity; it also uses that history to make a powerful revisionist argument for the intelligence, savvy, courage, and, indeed, dignity of the people who founded and guided it. As one of the most important studies of the pre-Stonewall homophile movement we have, Living in Arcadia represents a major new contribution to both gay history and French history." - George Chauncey, author of Gay New York"

In Paris in 1954, a young man named Andre Baudry founded Arcadie, an organization for 'homophiles' that would become the largest of its kind that has ever existed in France, lasting nearly thirty years. In addition to acting as the only public voice for French gays prior to the explosion of radicalism of 1968, Arcadie - with its club and review - was a social and intellectual hub, attracting support from individuals as diverse as Jean Cocteau and Michel Foucault and offering support and solidarity to thousands of isolated individuals. Yet despite its huge importance, Arcadie has largely disappeared from the historical record. The main cause of this neglect, Julian Jackson explains in "Living in Arcadia", is that during the post-Stonewall era of queer activism, Baudry's organization fell into disfavor, dismissed as conservative, conformist, and closeted. Through extensive archival research and numerous interviews with the reclusive Baudry, Jackson challenges this reductive view, uncovering Arcadie's pioneering efforts to educate the European public about homosexuality in an era of renewed repression. In the course of relating this absorbing story, Jackson offers a startlingly original account of the history of homosexuality in modern France.