Didier Lestrade, Legendary French Zine Queen, Serves Us

In a recent interview with Butt magazine, Didier Lestrade, who founded and ran a hugely famous french fagzine called Magazine (and then Tetu and ACT UP, too), told young gays to do their queer homework. How bewildered do you feel after reading this excerpt? I lost about an hour Wiki-hunting for explanations.

Billy Miller: I remember being very impressed when you published an interview with Brion Gysin, and you always featured the crème de la crème of international homo personalities of the 20th century. Can you relate any anecdotes about working on any of those pieces?

Unlike many young fags today, we knew our gay history. We were learning all the time about all kinds of stuff and we were always eager to lean more. OK, I admit we were snobs. We wanted to rub shoulders with those names, and we loved the idea of how it looked on the cover. For each cover, we simply put the title Magazine and then listed all the names of the people we interviewed for that particular issue. Just listing some of those prestigious names in effect created a brand for us. When you put Raymond Voinquel next to Paul Bowles, it looks good, and there’s no denying it. And at age 20, I was so excited to have my name related in even a remote way to someone like Brion Gysin! Even in the ’80s, we had the feeling that the gay world of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s was vanishing. A part of me was happy about that too. It was like, good riddance to all that, and make way for us, bitch! But then the other part of me was fascinated by all that and we were trying at the same time to hold onto something from that era before it all passed away, which it did! It freaks me out to think how quickly we went from creating our own history to not caring about gay history anymore! It happened so fast. No one has even begun to collect and preserve all the material from the Paradise Garage, The Saint, etc., and now gay people don’t seem to even care. I don’t wanna sound tired and typical when I bitch about the young gays, but let me put it this way, they don’t go to gay bookstores in Paris anymore and they’re simply aren’t interested in learning about their own history. For instance, English queens were in the closet forever until people like Jimmy Somerville came along and were brave enough to be out there and strong and insisting on being themselves in spite of the consequences, but nobody give him his dues nowadays. That kind of thing bugs me.