Jokes aside.
You can now not only read Shlimazl but also listen to — and, dare I say, even touch it.
Shlimazl is launching a new project — “Queer Apéritif.”
It’s something between a bar-hopping night and a walking tour dedicated to the queer history of Paris.
Paris has left a deep mark on the lives of LGBTQ+ people.
Before the French Revolution, sodomy (a term interpreted much more broadly than today) was punishable by death.
However, in the first Penal Code of the young French Republic, this article was already gone — homosexual relations were, legally speaking, decriminalized.
Public condemnation, though, persisted. There were also other laws — for example, against “indecent behavior” in public places.
As a result, “the love that dare not speak its name” could develop relatively freely, yet always under the shadow of judgment.
And that judgment wasn’t limited to disapproving looks — sometimes it led to real violence.
In the 19th century, the main meeting places were the quays of the Seine, the parks, and the bars around the Bastille.
By the turn of the century, Montmartre became the central hub, where the first gay and lesbian bars appeared.
In the 1920s–30s, the scene moved to the Left Bank, around what is now the café Les Deux Magots.
In the 1960s — to the Opéra Garnier district, where Rudolf Nureyev, Yves Saint Laurent, and Karl Lagerfeld hung out, along with Jacques de Bascher, the man who famously came between the two great couturiers.
Le Marais became the heart of Parisian gay life only in the late 1970s–80s, when France finally rid itself of homophobic laws and adopted measures against discrimination.
The project “Queer Apéritif” is dedicated to this complex history of the LGBTQ+ struggle for rights.
It’s a conversation about difficult topics — held in bars and around them.
The journey begins near Palais-Royal and ends in the oldest operating gay bar in Le Marais.
(If the project proves successful, the next one will be “Hemingway Apéritif” — same idea, but tracing the bars where the great writer once drank.)