Sat 30 September 2023
Reset — Space ERG — 19:30
Second session of the festival’s exclusive book signature sessions, in collaboration with bookstore Tulitu. The socio-anthropologist Laurent Gaissad, with his book “Hommes en chasse. Chroniques territoriales d’une sexualité secrète” (Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2020), offers a best seller and a fine reading of the sexual territories of men among themselves. It is in line with his previous work that led him to study, among other things, the discourses, places and practices related to male North African prostitution (Gaissad, 2010) or gay party circuits (Gaissad, 2013).
Last but not least, our very own King Baxter will sign copies of their book Traverser le Nocturne (Les Editions de la Trémie, 2022): a temporal location, their writing is of a therapeutic sort and traverses the life of a gender non-conforming person, King Baxter.
Laurent Gaissad
Hommes en chasse. Chroniques territoriales d’une sexualité secrète — (Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre) — 2020
It is clear that “cruising places”, single-sex sexual territories if ever there was one, have not disappeared from our cities and countryside. We can of course be surprised when we think of the municipal planning or repressive policies which have sought everywhere to eradicate them, the urban development of businesses “reserved” for gay sexuality, and the preventive morals in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. And we are all the more surprised in the face of the latest achievements in legal equality such as marriage for all, or with the recent advent of sexual encounters mediated by the internet. The virtuality of public spaces where our desires and our sexualities find expression today, in the law as in online statuses, has however not eliminated these real locations, these secret and notorious places at the same time, accessible to all men, straight and gay, but separated from the world. A long-term ethnographic journey between Marseille, Toulouse and Barcelona, Men on the Hunt traces its lasting impermanence, revealing in passing the transitory transformations of the self at work in these short-lived sexual experiences.
King Baxter
Traverser le Nocturne — (Les Editions de la Trémie) — 2022
Crossing the Nocturne is a temporal place: “what is written here, stays here”, his writing is of a therapeutic kind and crosses the life of a gender non-conforming person: King Baxter. Traverser le Nocturne tells and weaves links between current thoughts and memories of yesteryear, whether music. or activism, everyone meets here to heal. Crossing the Nocturne is a glimpse of his long initiatory ritual, a magical journey where everything can reappear.
