Gouines rouges

The Gouines Rouges ("Red Dykes") are a French radical feminist lesbian movement.

The Gouines Rouges were founded in April 1971, out of a wish to assert themselves within both the feminist movement and the homosexual movement, and the fear that lesbians were in danger of disappearing.

In April 1971, the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF, "Women's Liberation Movement") had existed for two and a half years. Three hundred women who were coming regularly to its general meetings at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts then launched a campaign for free abortion and birth control.

The Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR, "Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action"), a radical movement rejecting reforms in favor of homosexuality that they deemed inadequate or timid, had been created a month earlier on the initiative of MLF activists and some members of the homophile organization .

The "alliance between the MLF girls and the FHAR gays" seemed so obvious that no one questioned the FHAR's gender-mixing. Members of both movements felt victimized by "phallocracy" and wanted "the free disposition of [their] body. " Anne-Marie Fauret, in issue #12 of the leftist newspaper Tout, sums up this position: "Our place is at the intersection of movements that will free women and homosexuals. The power that we claim is our self-realization."

But the appearance of Tout #12, in which gays and lesbians publicly spoke out in a far-left newspaper for the first time, tipped the balance between the sexes over to the male side. With men flocking to the FHAR, the lesbians felt marginalized, their number remaining substantially the same. Feminist activists felt dispossessed by the FHAR.

Finally, the militant lesbians held a meeting against the FHAR's "misogyny" in the Beaux-Arts auditorium. Some fifty activists, aged between twenty and thirty-five, founded the Gouines rouges. The name was taken from the invective of a hostile passerby during a demonstration.

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