Elula Perrin, real name Huguette Ellul, born March 31, 1929 in Hanoi and died May 22, 2003 in Paris, is a French writer and nightclub owner, a figure in the world of lesbian nightlife in the 1970s and 1980s.
Queer Places:
Kathmandu, 21 Rue du Vieux Colombier, 75006 Paris, France
Cimetière de Pierrelongue
Pierrelongue, Departement de la Drôme, Rhône-Alpes, France
Elula Perrin, real name Huguette Ellul, born March 31, 1929 in Hanoi and died May 22, 2003 in Paris, is a French writer and nightclub owner, a figure in the world of lesbian nightlife in the 1970s and 1980s.
Elula Perrin was born on March 31, 1929 in Hanoi (French Indochina, now Vietnam), to a Eurasian mestizo mother and a French father. She returned to France in 1946, at the age of 17. After obtaining a law degree, she married and accompanied her husband to Morocco where she discovered his homosexuality. In May 1968, Elula Perrin opened Le Yéti, a lesbian nightclub located in Saint-Tropez that she closed four years later. She founded Kathmandu in Paris in 1969 with Aimée Mori. She became famous by publishing in 1977 an autobiographical book, Women Prefer Women, and participated in television shows to testify unapologetically to her attraction to women. She wrote other books in the same vein: Tant qu'il y aura des femmes (1978) and Mousson de femmes (1985). After the forced closure of Kathmandu in 1990, she opened Le Privilège, in the basement of the Palace. Finally, she managed several other discotheques such as Le Rive Gauche. She wrote two detective novels with Hélène de Monferrand. Catherine Gonnard co-directed a documentary on her life in 2000 for Canal +, entitled Elula, les hommes on s'en fout. She died on Thursday, May 22, 2003 in Paris, after a long illness. She was 74 years old.
Elula Perrin spoke out in 1977 (in Philippe Bouvard's show L'Huile sur le feu) with the aim of giving visibility to lesbian women and providing a media frame of reference far from the cliché of the butch. Her commitment is moderate: she refuses to join the MLF, preferring Arcadia, a group sometimes challenged for its claim to a discreet and reserved homosexuality. Towards the end of her life, she declared that she voted for the right, disappointed by the governance of François Mitterrand for whom she had nevertheless voted in 1981, "since none of the promises made by the left had been kept," she said. Blase Provitola calls Elula Perrin a defender of the principle of colonization ("colonial apologist") for her many exotications of non-white women, her nostalgia for the Vichy regime and her apology for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in Women Prefer Women (1977). She also reproached him for his praise of American and French imperialism in Mousson de femmes (1985).
My published books:
