France: #MeTooGay, testimonials poured out on Twitter

Many Internet users have expressed themselves with the hashtag #Metoogay on Twitter to denounce the sexual violence they have suffered (illustrative image).

© Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP

Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow

3 min

A few days after the keyword #MeTooIncest and three years after #MeToo, thousands of testimonies are pouring out on Twitter lifting the veil on the sexual violence suffered by gay men.

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This liberation of online speech which is currently taking place in the gay community in France with the

#MeTooGay movement

appeared Thursday, January 21 on Twitter.

A hashtag that was literally taken by storm after a first moving testimony: that of a young man of 20, who accuses a public figure, Maxime Cochard, an elected member of the French Communist Party on the Council of Paris and his spouse , rape and sexual assault.

The tweet triggered a real shock on social networks, immediately thousands of equivalent testimonials and messages of support then flooded the Web.

Many men as adults report that their first time was rape, others report being harassed or forced into unprotected sex.

And more sinister, we no longer count the number of testimonies concerning crimes perpetrated by pedophiles on minors, crimes of sexual abuse and rape for which obviously the question of consent does not even arise.

The end of an omerta?

Three years after the #MeToo movement, the keyword #MeTooGay frees the voice of men and may make it possible to put an end to the omerta that reigns around this taboo subject in homosexual circles, believes Romain Burrel, managing editor from

Têtu

magazine

 :

The strength of these testimonies is that they allow us to understand the ramifications of what must be called a certain culture of rape within the LGBT community and in particular gay.

For a long time, the struggles were made on the conquest of rights and that was kind of the only thing that mattered.

And then there was also the fear of giving arguments to homophobes who already stigmatize enough our community which would be supposedly hypersexualized.

In order not to lend a flank to criticism, the reflex was to avoid

"washing your dirty laundry in public"

.

Maybe this hashtag the start of a healthy conversation that will allow this youth to come out on top of something that is a phenomenon of magnitude.

"

This widespread phenomenon described by Romain Burrel also concerns marital rape.

And for LGBT people living as a couple who are " 

exposed to sexual and physical violence

 " from their spouses, the shame, the fear of playing the game of rampant homophobia in France or of being rejected by their community, encourage them rather to silence reveals the National Institute of Demographic Studies.

Its survey called Virage

pour “

 VIolences et RApports de GEnre 

” which was carried out in 2015 but republished in November 2020, indicates that one homosexual or bisexual man in 25 is the victim of sexual violence during his life.

►Also listen: Round the world of correspondents - The #MeToo movement is digging its way into Greece, South Korea and Chile, Japan stutters

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