He maintained that "homophobic prejudice" could not be defeated through "reformist" means, but "like racial prejudice, only by an anti-authoritarian revolution." Homosexual liberation "will be total and irreversible only if it is achieved within the context of social revolution."

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Guérin published dozens of books and hundred of articles on such topics of vital concern as fascism and capitalism (which he believed linked), racism, militarism, and colonialism. He also wrote favorably about anarchism, the American labor movement, the revolutionary ideas of Rosa Luxembourg, the African-American fight for equality, and the Kinsey report on human sexuality. He even brought out autobiographical work, including Autobiographie de jeunesse (1965), Le feu du sang: autobiographie politique et charnelle (1977), and Son testament (1979).

Yet Guérin considered his most important work--the one worth remembering after his death--to be a two-volume historical study of the popular movement in the French Revolution, The Class Struggle under the First Republic, published in 1946. Guérin saw the political and social agitation by urban artisans and wage-earners during the French Revolution as the forerunner of the proletarian revolutions of the twentieth century. The historical profession greeted the book with little enthusiasm.

Guérin is remembered today chiefly for his uncompromising stand as a political, labor, and gay militant.

In 1975, Pierre Hahn, another pioneer militant, wrote to Guérin: "More than to anyone else, homosexuals are grateful to you . . . for everything you have done for them. . . . The most valuable thing you have done is a life's work that is both political (in the traditional sense) and sexological: it's [your books like] The Brown Plague [on fascism] plus Kinsey [on the Kinsey Report]; it's Fourier [on the nineteenth-century radical thinker] and the texts against colonialism: finally it's you yourself."

France, the second largest nation in Western Europe, has a rich, if markedly ambivalent, relationship to glbtq people and cultures.

The French gay liberation movement was born during the early 1970s on the foundation of a courageous, if conservative, homophile movement and the thrust of a massive wave of social activism.

The contributions of gay men and lesbians to twentieth-century French literature have been closely intertwined with the course of mainstream literature.

The Gay Left refers to a cluster of positions on the political spectrum that has existed within the lesbian and gay rights movement at least since the Stonewall riots.

One of the world's most iconic cities and an influential hub of Western culture, Paris is also a major international glbtq center.

French writer and public intellectual Jean-Paul Aron is widely credited for giving a human face to AIDS and thereby changing the public perception of the disease and those who suffered from it.

One of the earliest gay militants in contemporary France, Pierre Hahn also received the first doctorate in France for work in the history of homosexuality.

Leftist Guy Hocquenghem produced a considerable canon of queer theory and experimental fiction, much of it still unknown outside France.

The most important sex researcher of the twentieth century, Alfred C. Kinsey contributed groundbreaking studies of male and female sexual behavior in America.

One of France's leading lesbian theorists and political activists, Geneviève Pastre is a writer and publisher who has made lesbian feminism the root of her political and literary work.