They were born between WWI and WWII, they live in the rural south of France and they are miles away from anybody’s stereotype of a ‘gay lifestyle’; actually, they are living proof that - just like heterosexuals - LGBT people have lives, rather than ‘lifestyles.’ They talk slowly and intimately, and their stories of living through decades of prejudice are raw, involved and tenderly explored: the times when everything and everybody told them that being gay was unnatural and dirty; when they had to fight for the idea that their sexuality was inscribed in their DNA, rather than a matter of choice; when they reached the point where they temporarily lost any desire to live.
But the positive stories prevail. Sébastien Lifshitz is a film-maker who knows how to give his subjects room to breathe, reminisce, have a good laugh or even gently offend the most prudish of viewers. The candour of the confessions does not exclude politics: Les Invisibles also traces, through marvelous archival footage, the moments when the lives of an apparently apolitical individual intersected with the gay liberation movement (‘bourgeois hetero-pig,’ anybody?) and the feminist movement, or when circumstances such as a centre-spread photo in Paris Match forced one of them to ‘come out.’
This is a graceful, engaging and deeply humane picture of eleven normal lives that happen to have homosexuality inscribed onto them: “People keep asking me why I am a homosexual. I not asking any of them why they like wine. Well, I like men.”