I always thought of France as such an accepting and progressive country, and while it is, it’s been interesting to see where there’s a divergence between their political progression and social progression. While they are ahead of the US when it comes to protection and equality laws for the LGBTQ community, there still seems to be large pockets where being gay isn’t accepted. Or like in the past, technically being gay was legal, but they’d attempt to create different types of laws to combat it anyway.
When we went to the LGBTQ center in Lyon, I expected it to be more of a space for people within the community to hang out and just have a good time, a place to get together with people who understand you, and maybe that was ignorant of me, but the amount of people that clearly just come in needing to talk and needing support, even just in the short time we were there surprised me.
After seeing that I was no longer surprised when Scott Turner Schofield told us of the reception that first play he was in received in Avignon where the audience literally booed them. But then when he came back as an established actor with his less extreme one man show they suddenly loved him. It just seems that there is some hypocrisy or again too much of a focus on french universalism and the “we accept you but only if you act like us” mentality. I’m curious what, if anything, will break through that.
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