Invisible Archive # 7 is a collaboration between the artists V. Jourdain and Hugues Jourdain and the association Mémoire des sexualités. V. Jourdain works on her experience as an artist and cultural worker. She invited Hugues Jourdain, an actor and director who graduated from the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris. Mémoire des Sexualités is an association which provides a documentary fund, organises public debates and fairs, and participates in the construction of the militant LGBTQI+ movement. The Marseille branch has gathered, from LGBTQI + communities in Marseille (and elsewhere), important documentation over a period of 40 years of archives, fanzines, periodicals, posters, audios, videos, books etc. Its exceptional documentation covers nearly 40 years of homosexual history and will be used by V. Jourdain and Hughes Jourdain for Invisible Archive.
Archival activism. Member of the Homosexual Liberation Group (GLH) from 1978 to 1987, Christian de Leusse is caught by the archives fever. He accumulated leaflets, posters, free magazines, audio and video cassettes, fanzines, books and journals and founded in 1989 in Marseille the association Mémoire des Sexualités. Associations like the gay group of AIDES Provence or the film festival Reflets donated their funds. Former activists did the same: the writer Daniel Guérin entrusted his homosexual library, Maurice Chevaly his collection of Arcadia, and many others.
In the 1st arrondissement of Marseille, in Belsunce, several tens of linear meters and some 300 gigabytes of memory document the Emergency Committee for Homosexual Repression (CUARH), Homosexual Liberation Groups (GLH) in Marseille and elsewhere, Summer Universities of Homosexualities (UEH 1979-1987, then UEEH since 1999), Pride marches, etc. In April 2018, a new collective was formed around the desire to continue bringing this place of community and autonomous LGBTQI + memory to life. Ideas germinate and projects develop: a weekly permanence, edu-pop training and workshops, self-archiving, aperitif-boxes, landscaping of the archives’ garden, and an oral history project.
After their first session of working with the Mémoire des Sexualités archives, V. and Hugues Jourdain began to direct their research towards the history of the first three decades of the Universités d’Été Euroméditerranéennes des Homosexualités (Euromediterranean Summer Universities of Homosexualities, which became Rencontres autogérées Féministes LesBiGayTransQueerInterAsex, LesbianBiGayTransQueerIntersexAsexual (LGBTQIA) Gatherings), which took place at the l’École des beaux-arts de Luminy in Marseille. The iconic image of Christian De Leusse (the man with the beard) shown here was taken by Paris Match without his permission at a party during the inaugural edition of the UEEHs. A legal and political battle against the magazine ruled in Christian’s favour, and indeed in favour of an entire community that was a victim of the homophobia and transphobia of a reactionary society. Ironically, this event led to the creation of Mémoire des Sexualités. To this day, France has neither initiated nor supported any site for LGBTQIA+ archives, research, or creation.
