Porn, Pedophilia, and Paganism: The Transnational Far-Right European Imaginary of Gaie France Magazine (1986–1994)

On July 11, 1992, eighteen years after the Carnation Revolution ended the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the Portuguese public broadcaster ran a news story about the launch of the first ever gay magazine to reach Portuguese newsstands, one that was written in Portuguese despite still bearing the title of its parent publication, Gaie France. Five years earlier, on July 13, 1987, however, a petition had been signed at the Homosexual Summer University of Marseille denouncing Gaie France’s fascist politics. In this article, we offer a critical picture of Gaie France’s peculiar place in the landscape of late 20th-century homosexual media in Europe. We show how the magazine advocated a complex ideology that mixed paganism, pederasty, and far-right ideology, trying to spearhead a radical conservative European homosexual movement while having to deal with the view of homosexuality as degeneracy shared by the main ideologues of the European far-right. Rejected by political actors both in the organized homosexual movement and in the “New Right,” Gaie France forged a peculiar ideological path that can help us gain a more nuanced understanding of both the European homosexual movement and of Europe itself at the turn of the new millennium.