All I wanted to do in Paris was have an affair, go to the Louvre, and see the catacombs—the underground labyrinth that snakes beneath the city and has served many purposes, most famously as a crypt containing the bones of over five million Parisians who’d been buried in the hideously overcrowded Les Halles cemetery in the eighteenth century.
Finally becoming a health hazard, the city disinterred the remains in 1785 and carted them through the city each night, a process which took fifteen months. I’ve seen pictures of the rooms, stacked floor to ceiling with the skulls and bones of peasants and aristocrats, commingling forevermore beneath the bustling streets of Paris. I can’t believe my good fortune that less than a week after arriving the affair part has already occurred, and the catacomb segment is looming, because Antoine, who I’d been wanting to make out with for days, and finally did, on the couch in the basement of a queer bar as the DJ played Bauhaus, is a cataphile, meaning an individual obsessed with Les Carrieres de Paris, the quarries of Paris, or the catacombs.
The famous, skeleton-packed tombs are only one small part of an intricate underground world that trails for miles beneath the city, and as the officially sanctioned and heavily touristed area, they’re fairly ignored by those whose true joy is the forbidden exploration of a subterranean maze that contains many clandestine activities, most of them benevolent, some not. Antoine is going to lead us all into the catacombs on Monday night, but first we have to get through Sunday night, where the queers in Paris are gathered at a monthly event called Butch Is Beautiful.
A butch/femme revolution is shaking up Paris’ otherwise sedate gay and lesbian culture; during my visit the lesbian magazine Muse runs a cover story on the phenomenon, with interviews and photos with all my new friends. Apparently, the article is awful. They called me a sexy worker! moans Judy, outraged. I said I’m a sex worker! What is a ‘sexy worker’?! In San Francisco and probably throughout the United States, butch/femme culture—in which feminine queers girls dress like little drag queens and masculine queer girls are essentially boys—is no big whoop, but here in Paris it is provocative and new, and the queers involved in creating the artistic, philosophical and sexual space for it to flourish are totally revved up about it. The energy is similar to the San Francisco queer scene I moved to in 1993, everyone totally excited to have sex with each other and flaunt their newly understood genders
Tonight’s edition of Butch Is Beautiful (which is the brother club to another party called Femme is Fabulous) is being called Buche is Beautiful, as in Buche du Noel, which is a log-shaped cake decorated with chocolate gnomes and marzipan mushrooms and is very popular at Christmas, just days from now. At Butch Is Beautiful DJ Wet, handsome in a flannel shirt and yellow aviator glasses with scribbles and scrawls tattooed on his elbows, plays a great, weird collection of music—96 Tears morphs into Kate Person shrieking Why don’t you dance with me! morphs into MIA letting you know what you can get for ten dollars, the Beastie Boys’ antifeminist anthem Girls, Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control and Beck’s Loser. No one in Paris knows what music is cool so people spin whatever they want, someone explains. Everyone goes wild when a song by Deborah Degout, who earlier warped the lyrics to traditional French holiday songs and set them to the music of her blues-punk guitar, is played. The chorus goes Je suis bonne! which people tell me is hard to translate into english. It’s sort of like, I’m hot, but also like, I’m good, like better than hot, like I’m the shit, I can’t fucking believe how amazing I am. Everyone in the basement of Le Soeffleurs nightclub—which is cramped, with a low curving ceiling and stone walls, a cave, really—is jumping up and down screaming Je suis bonne! Earlier there was a burlesque show, and an American expat named Louise de Ville did a Mrs. Claus routine, faux-sodomizing a butch in Santa Drag. They both had glass Christmas bulbs dangling from their strap-on dildos, like testes. Louise resembles a the burlesque star Dita von Teese, and makes money both teaching English and as an international jewelry model for Christian Dior. At their private parties across Europe she dons a black leotard, ballet shoes and a black mask and pantomimes stealing the diamonds off the unbearably rich clientele. Before she shook her rump to Madonna’s Santa Baby, I read from Valencia in English, alternating with Judy, who read from her French translation. When she translated the thump, thump, thump of a fisting scene into a bump, bump, bump, I couldn’t stop laughing. Later I’m on the couch making out with Antoine, who is tugging my shirt up to my collarbone. When I try to dig under his Sun Records t-shirt I encounter the impenetrable fortress of a medical binder, which most of the butches and trans guys wear to keep their chests in line.
Everyone says Antoine can speak English but he won’t because he thinks his accent sucks. These people don’t understand that English sounds way better when it’s completely mangled by a hot French accent. I met Antoine a couple nights ago at a dinner party. He started the evening as Antoinette with a female pronoun but ended it as Antoine and male, though people seem to call him both. Everyone was excitedly discussing how earlier he’d passed for an eighteen-year-old boy, but the only real surprise was that he passed for eighteen. I would have guessed sixteen. His eyes are huge with the slightest droop and he’s got Snow White’s coloring—milky white skin that looks soft as a baby with pink cheeks, clumpy dark hair and a mischievous grin. He also has great style, sporting chunky sneakers and interesting tattoos, black squares on his thumbs that lock up when he brings his hands together. Since everyone was making out with everyone at that party, and then at another party the following night, I had my fingers crossed that it would only be a matter of time before someone made out with me, and was thrilled that it was Antoine.
