story“The Clandestine Years” (1/5). Forty years following the repeal of the “offense of homosexuality”, “Le Monde” returns, in a series of articles, to a time when gays were treated as pariahs. One of the victims of this repression, Bernard Bousset, remembers his ordeal, before 1982.
On the bell, two letters: « BB ». You have to listen carefully to Bernard Bousset unfolding his life ” very busy “ to understand the very personal snub contained in the choice of these two initials. Simple, warm, the former bar owner sits at the bottom of one of the sofas in his apartment on rue des Archives, in Paris, just above the gay bar he has owned since 1996. “When I tell young people that I went to court only because I slept, at 23, with a boy who was 18, they look at me as if I were a dinosaur, he says without fuss. They tell me: “But it’s not possible, are you 100 years old?” » No, Bernard Bousset is only 80, but he grew up far from Paris, “at a time when…” He adjusts his round glasses and smoothes his gray hair: « You have time ? I’m going to tell you regarding my queer life. »
He was born at the start of the war, in Dax, to a hotel manager father from Landes and a Basque mother, whom he lost at the age of 12. Of her, he remembers his bicycle, his cork platform shoes (this wartime material), the high-pitched hairstyle of the elegant women of the time… She worries regarding his fragility, spoils him and pampers him. “She found me a little pale, and I remember that she put pink on my cheeks before going to the cinema. » Mourning for his mother. Endless sorrow.
His father travels too much to take care of him and his older brother, who has just entered the seminary. Bernard cannot live alone in Villa Solitude, the family home close to the sub-prefecture. The Franciscans of the Jeanne-d’Arc school in Dax agreed to welcome him outside of class hours and despite the absence of a boarding school: “Out of Christian charity, and because my father wrote checks. » The child follows mass with the priests at dawn, dines with them, spends the weekends alone in their company.
“And that’s where one day, well, as we say today, I was raped. When my father came to pick me up for the holidays, I said to him: “Dad, there is a priest, he comes to my cell at night, he touches me, he fiddles with me, in the mouth and everything.…“I didn’t know what it was, I just understood that it wasn’t natural. In response, vlan, vlan, I received two slaps. » Double trouble. “I was necessarily a liar, or even a culprit. I never forgave him. I didn’t go to his funeral. »
“We weren’t talking regarding that”
Bernard Bousset enters adolescence in the mid-1950s, those of the Gaullist yoke, where morality tries to put a lid on the extravagance of mores. “I didn’t know what homosexuality was, or even sexuality, for that matter. I didn’t know how children were made. The first time I saw television was for the coronation of the Queen of England in 1953, but anyway, we weren’t talking regarding that. I was aware of being different, but I did not understand. I mightn’t confide in anyone, since even my father had slapped me. People like me were let loose among the beasts. It was the start of an ordeal that lasted until I was 21. »
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