There are two letters on the doorbell: BB. You have to listen carefully to Bernard Bousset's account of his "eventful" life to understand the personal meaning behind the choice of these initials. An uncomplicated, warm-hearted man, the former bar owner sits comfortably on one of the sofas in his apartment on Rue des Archives, Paris, just above the gay bar he bought in 1996. "When I tell young people that I went to court just because I slept with an 18-year-old boy when I was 23, they look at me as if I were a dinosaur," he says matter-of-factly. "They said to me: 'But that's not possible, are you 100?'" No, Bousset is only 80, but he grew up a long way from Paris, "at a time when..."

He adjusts his round glasses and smoothed his gray hair. "Do you have the time? I'm going to tell you about my queer life."

He was born in Dax, in southwest France, at the start of the Second World War, to a father from the Landes, a hotel manager, and a Basque mother, whom he lost at the age of 12. He can remember her bicycle, her cork platform shoes (a wartime material) and the high-piled hairstyles of the elegant ladies of the time. She worried about his frailty, spoiled and pampered him. "She thought I was a bit pale, and I remember her putting pink on my cheeks before going to the movies." Mourning his mother was a source of endless sorrow.

His father traveled too much to look after him and his older brother, who had just entered the seminary. Young Bernard couldn't live alone at Villa Solitude, the family home near the sub-prefecture. The Franciscans at Jeanne-d'Arc school in Dax agreed to take him in outside school hours, despite it not being a boarding school: "Out of Christian charity, and because my father wrote checks." The child attended mass with the priests at dawn, dined with them and spent weekends alone with them.

"And that's when one day, well, as they say today, I was raped. When my father came to pick me up for the vacations, I told him, 'Dad, there's a priest, he comes into my cell at night, he touches me, he fondles me, in my mouth and everything...' I didn't know what it was, I just knew that it wasn't natural. In response, wham, wham, I got two slaps." It was a double punishment. "I had to be lying, or even guilty. I never forgave him. I didn't go to his funeral."

'We didn't talk about that'

Bousset became an adolescent in the mid-1950s, a time of stifling conformism, when morality tried to put a lid on extravagant lifestyles. "I didn't know what homosexuality was, or even sexuality, for that matter. I didn't know how babies were made. The first time I watched television was for the queen of England's coronation, in 1953, but, anyway, we didn't talk about that. I knew I was different, but I didn't understand. I couldn't confide in anyone, because even my father had slapped me. People like me were let loose among the wild beasts. That was the start of an ordeal that lasted until I was 21."

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