Before 1982, the memories of homosexuals embarked on the “salad basket”

Who knew, among the Nantes cinephiles of the Katorza? Who could have imagined that Jean-Serge Pineau and Henri Le Callonec, the managers of the arthouse cinema on Place Graslin, had known prison before living more than forty years side by side? Their lives could have inspired one of the films in their programming, but their past was not one to show off. Almost twenty years after the death of his uncle Henri, Alexandre Le Callonec, 39, reveals to the World this love story from another age. Since the death of Jean-Serge, at the end of 2020, this nephew is much more than the official heir of the disappeared couple: the legatee of a poignant family secret.

The story takes place before August 4, 1982, the date – largely unknown – when a text carried by Robert Badinter, keeper of the seals of François Mitterrand, abolishes a law promulgated during the war by Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval. By authorizing relations between two consenting people of the same sex from the age of 15 – as for heterosexuals –, and not at legal majority, the new law will align the rights of homosexuals with those of others.

But, in the meantime, homosexuals between the ages of 15 and 21 risk fines and even prison sentences. So goes the France of the “glorious thirty” : them “fags”, as our witnesses call themselves, are outcasts steeped in denial or unease.

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Mischievous eye, brown mustache, Jean-Serge Pineau is the son of a Nantes family of luxury car dealers who became cinema operators. He was 27 when, at the end of 1959, he took over the management of the Katorza, a fine set of rooms where Pierrot Gourmand lollipops are sold and whose usherettes wear white gloves. The city runs there to discover the latest Rivette or, in preview, the next Antonioni; the 1,400 seats on the floor, the balcony and the orchestra fill up around Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras or Jacques Demy, who willingly agree to participate in the smoky debates proposed by Jean-Serge and Henri, who became an accountant then director the cinema.

Their meeting dates back to November 22, 1960: a day that remains inscribed in the intimate memory of the couple. That Tuesday, in front of the main post office in Nantes, Jean-Serge Pineau meets a young man with blond curls and the false air of Marlon Brando. Henri Le Callonec was to celebrate his 17th birthday four days later and then learned “accounting” in a boarding school in Saint-Nazaire: he “knows” that he is homosexual and wanted to run away from his family. Jean-Serge, ten years his senior, first thought that his tastes could change. He presented several “friends” to his parents, like so many decoys, and agreed to follow a treatment based on “bites”since his family says so ” sick “. Without results, of course.

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