‘A different kind of ghetto’

Today’s Marais is perhaps best known as the gay hub of Paris, though this is a comparatively recent phenomenon; the first gay bar opened in 1978. Jewish texts, notably by Jacques Lanzmann, do figure in this chapter, along with a couple of minor works set in the Marais which allude to it as neither a Jewish nor a gay quartier, but the stress is predominantly on the neighbourhood’s now all-but-universal reputation as the centre of today’s ‘gay Paris.’ The extravagantly hedonistic autofictions of Guillaume Dustan and the graphic novels Le Mariage de Roberto and Bienvenue dans la Marais offer a highly-seasoned view of the area, replete with nostalgie de la boue, while literary and cinematic evocations (not invariably gay-focused) likewise figure.