Hélène Hazera, the French cultural journalist, radio producer and transgender rights advocate, has died. Her career spanned decades across print and broadcasting, establishing her as a pioneering figure in national media and the AIDS advocacy movement.
She is widely considered to have been the first openly transgender journalist to work for a major French daily newspaper. Hazera spent more than twenty years at the national daily Libération, initially reviewing television before moving to the music and chanson desk.
Journalist Christophe Martet, a former activist with the AIDS advocacy group Act Up who knew Hazera since the late 1990s, remembered her apartment as a place where visitors had to navigate around towers of books. Martet said reading material was absolutely everywhere, and visitors needed to set aside plenty of time once they sat down.
Hazera possessed a vast and varied knowledge base, moving effortlessly in conversation from 1950s Egyptian melodrama to gossip concerning the French music industry. Martet described her as highly erudite and funny, noting that she always had incredible anecdotes to share. He recalled a direct woman who was capable of getting into a serious shouting match and then making the entire table laugh thirty seconds later.
Early years and radical activism
Born in 1952 into a family of resistance fighters, Hazera grew up in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. She was heavily influenced in her youth by the subversive literature of French writers Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.
She transitioned in the early 1970s and became involved in radical politics. Hazera joined the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action, a militant Parisian gay and lesbian rights movement, before aligning with the Gazolines. The Gazolines were a small, provocative queer group that preferred disruptive public happenings to traditional organized leafleting.
Martet said the group would attend protests with the specific goal of causing chaos. Hazera viewed this type of disruptive laughter as a legitimate political weapon. She is credited with coining two famous protest slogans from the era, telling leftists to loosen their buttocks and urging proletarians of all countries to caress themselves.
However, Hazera told the prominent French LGBTQ publication Têtu earlier this year that she did not want her entire life reduced to the brief period when she acted crazy.
Breaking barriers at Libération
Her transition into mainstream journalism began in 1978 when the writer Michel Cressole brought her into Libération, the left leaning national newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. She built a lasting career there as a cultural critic.
As the AIDS epidemic emerged, Hazera faced the crisis personally and politically. She was HIV positive and watched her friends die around her. In the 1990s, she joined Act Up Paris, the French chapter of the international AIDS advocacy coalition, where she took up the megaphone at protests.
Within the organization, Hazera helped create the trans commission. She focused particularly on the needs of HIV positive individuals and sex workers. Hazera had engaged in sex work during her youth and remained a steadfast defender of those in the profession throughout her life.
Martet said that younger generations of activists owe her their gratitude, noting that she initially spoke out when very few people were listening. He recalled her as a campaigner who connected transgender rights to feminism, the broader fight against HIV, and highly practical issues such as securing access to medical treatments.
While Martet hesitated to label her a pioneer because Hazera hated being placed in any kind of box, he acknowledged that it is difficult to avoid the term when looking back at the path she cleared.
A voice on national radio
Beyond her political organizing, Hazera built a dedicated following as a broadcasting specialist. After leaving Libération, she established her voice on France Culture, the national public broadcasting network for cultural and intellectual programming.
She produced the radio program Chanson Boum from 2002 to 2017, following an earlier show titled Chansons dans la nuit. Her programming helped listeners discover and rediscover extensive catalogs of French music, alongside deep explorations of Arab and Arab Andalusian musical repertoires.
The French professional authors organization Scam recognized her entire body of audio work with an award in 2020. Martet said she loved her radio work deeply and was profoundly sad when she had to leave the airwaves.
Writing in the French newspaper of record Le Monde this spring, the journalist and historian Laure Adler summarized Hazera's unique broadcast style, stating that she had invented a new tone and an entirely new way of conducting interviews.
Cinema and final years
Hazera's cultural curiosity extended beyond the radio studio into cinema. She acted in films by the Spanish independent director Adolfo Arrieta and the pioneering French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. She appeared opposite the acclaimed French actress Isabelle Huppert in Godard's feature film Sauve qui peut (la vie).
Her complex life was recently documented on screen. The filmmaker Judith Abitbol released a documentary titled Hélène Trésore Transnationale on April 1, attempting to capture Hazera's many facets in a 94 minute runtime.
Hazera faced declining health in her final years. Martet noted that her eyesight had deteriorated significantly, eventually preventing her from reading as she once did or spending time on social media. Despite the physical setbacks, he said she never pitied herself.
When asked how to best remember Hazera whether as a journalist, an activist, a music specialist, a cinephile, or a provocateur, Martet said no single label could summarize who she was.
Instead, he recalled a story from his own wedding. Despite a strict ban on throwing rice at the venue, Hazera arrived with rice anyway. Martet said she threw it almost directly at people's faces with such force that it bordered on painful.
Laughing at the memory, Martet said that was exactly who she was. He described her as a bit of a headache, adding that this difficult nature was a major reason why her friends loved her so much.
