It's about time - Delanoé has also done a great deal to promote sustainable transport (trams, dedicated bus lanes, bicycle paths) in Paris - where car pollution has become quite dreadful. French attitudes (except in Strasbourg, with its Germanic cast) about ecology were not any better than about homophobia. I hope I see his autobiography soon.
I liked his rebuttal to Sarkozy:
In 1998, while he was a relatively obscure city councilor, Delanoe came out in a television interview, breaking and unwritten French law that a politician's private life should remain private.
He writes that his friends urged him not to go public, but that he overruled them because of the good he felt it would do to advance gay rights. "Would not my intervention help even if only in a small way to lighten the burden of secrecy borne by so many people," he writes.
France's powerful Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy recently accused Delanoe of "confessing" his homosexuality as a political ploy ahead of the Paris elections.
"In reality I am extremely modest when it comes to my private life," he writes in the book. "Can one say the same of Nicolas Sarkozy? ... You spend the whole time not just confessing your heterosexuality but putting it on parade, conniving in the lavish media coverage of your family life," he writes.
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In general, I most fervently agree with the French attitude that politicians' private life should be private, but that traditionally applied as much to the straight (faithful or not to their legitimate spouses) as to gays. Sarko is one of the worst villains in terms of displaying his attractive young wife and young children to show how "youthful" and "dynamic" he is. Delanoé simply has a healthy attitude of openness about his partner; neither would want to have their private lives on display.
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posted 22 September 2004 03:20 PM
