The election this March of an openly gay Mayor of Paris--the Socialist Bertrand Delanoë--would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. That's one reason the American edition of Frédéric Martel's The Pink and the Black (it appeared in France five years ago) is so pertinent: It's the first attempt at a history of the modern French gay movement, without whose achievements the victory of Delanoë would not have been possible. It all began on March 10, 1971. Radio star Ménie Grégoire was moderating her enormously popular chat show before a live audience in Paris's famous Salle Playel. The broadcast's theme that day: "That Painful Problem, Homosexuality," with experts from law, medicine and the Catholic Church. Suddenly interrupting some priestly condescensions, a group of homosexual women rose from the audience, yelling, "It's not true, we're not suffering! Down with the heterocops!" The lesbians stormed the stage, and the control room cut off the microphones and switched to recorded music. The militants' message: "Homosexuals are sick of being a painful problem." The Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), and with it the modern French gay movement, had been born.

The youthful activists who formed the FHAR had their political coming-of-age in the turbulent student-left rebellion of May 1968 that turned into a nationwide general strike in all walks of life, a gigantic outpouring of social protest against the suffocating atmosphere of de Gaulle's France. And while the young far-left soixante-huitards ('68ers) were initially hostile to "supposedly bourgeois homosexuality," as Martel writes, the May rebellion "contained, in embryo, all the ingredients of sexual liberation, for which it was a dress rehearsal." While the FHAR was initiated by women, it quickly admitted men as "objective allies."

One of the first men to join the FHAR was Guy Hocquenghem, who rapidly became the nascent movement's undisputed star. Hocquenghem's political itinerary was fairly typical of the soixante-huitards. After an "apprenticeship" in the Union of Communist Students when he was a brilliant philosophy student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he was a leader of the National Union of French Students and--rejecting the heavy-handed Stalinism of the French Communist Party--became by turns a Trotskyist and then a Maoist. By the time of the FHAR's founding he was a prominent member of Vive la Révolution (VLR), a libertarian split-off from the orthodox Maoists that was led by Roland Castro (later a prominent architect and adviser to French President François Mitterrand on urbanism).

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