Hélène Hazera was 74 years old. She will be remembered as a journalist, activist, radio presenter, actress and a true connoisseur of French chanson. We shall recall that she was a pioneer, one of the first openly trans journalists in a major French newsroom; that she joined *Libération* in the late 1970s; that she campaigned with the FHAR, with the Gazolines and later at Act Up-Paris, and that she took part in struggles which today may seem obvious to some but which, at the time, required considerable courage. All of this is true. All of this deserves to be told. But all of this is not enough to tell Hélène’s story.
Because Hélène Hazera was not just an activist’s CV.
She was a presence.
She had lived through an era when being oneself could come at a very high price. She had experienced the stares, the humiliations, the precariousness, the AIDS years, friends disappearing, the battles fought simply for the right to exist without asking permission. She could have come out of it embittered. Instead, she had drawn from it an almost defiant freedom. A way of no longer wasting her time on social conventions and the petty compromises of respectability.
And above all, she had kept her sense of humour.
That sharp humour – sometimes vicious, sometimes tender, often devastating – which also said something about her way of resisting. For Hélène, laughter was never far removed from a fight. She could hurl a magnificent dig at you, then launch into a passionate conversation about a singer who’d been dead for fifty years, whose discography she probably knew better than the singer’s own family. She possessed a kind of erudition that didn’t overwhelm but opened doors. She knew. A great deal. An enormous amount. But above all, she knew how to pass it on.
Song was one of her worlds.
On France Culture, with *Chanson Boum!*, she approached radio just as she lived her life: without clear-cut boundaries between the scholarly and the popular, between stars and the forgotten, between Paris and the rest of the world. She loved voices, life stories, and songs that carry with them a slice of existence. She could hear, in just a few minutes of music, an entire era, a wound, a lost love, a vanished city.
There was something profoundly precious about her: she remembered.
She remembered the people whom the times had decided to forget. Artists erased from programmes, songs no longer played on the radio, activists whose names vanished behind the major official figures, those who had died of AIDS, of whom sometimes all that remained was a photograph and a few memories. Hélène knew that memory is not just a matter for the archives. Memory is a way of keeping those who are no longer with us alive.
That is perhaps why her passing hurts so much.
Because with her goes a living library. Hundreds of memories, anecdotes, names, songs, Parisian nights, outbursts of anger and bursts of laughter. A certain kind of France, too. The France of the margins, which created culture before culture took an interest in them. The one where you could be a journalist, an activist, a film buff, a music lover, excessive, erudite and utterly undisciplined without feeling the need to turn all that into a ‘brand identity’.
Hélène had lived several lives, and none of them seemed content to sit quietly within the previous one.
She also possessed a quality that has become rare: she wasn’t polished.
She could be irritating. She could be provocative. She could be unfair, as we all are at times. She could be sharp-tongued. But even her excesses had a certain vitality about them. Hélène didn’t go through a conversation leaving the atmosphere exactly as it was before. Something had happened.
Of course, we could turn Hélène Hazera into an icon today. That would be almost too easy. And it would probably do her yet another small injustice. Icons end up hanging on the wall, silent and perfectly well-behaved. Hélène was neither silent nor well-behaved. It is better to remember her for her energy, her contradictions, her bursts of laughter, her outbursts and that way of never quite accepting the role others sought to assign her.
A few months before her death, Judith Abitbol’s documentary *Hélène Trésore Transnationale* had set out to tell the story of this extraordinary life. There was something joyfully over-the-top about the title. It suited her well. Because there really was something of a treasure in Hélène: not something you lock away in a safe, but something you discover, something you pass on, and whose value you sometimes only realise when you risk losing it.
Today, many will speak of her as the trans activist. Others as the journalist at *Libération*. Still others as the voice of *France Culture*, the lover of song, the embodiment of French counter-culture. Everyone will have their own piece of Hélène.
But those who crossed paths with her will probably remember something else.
A laugh.
A phrase.
A mischievous glance just before she said something outrageous.
That way of talking about the dead as if they were about to walk through the door in five minutes’ time.
And perhaps that, ultimately, is what a successful life is: leaving something in others’ memories other than a list of dates. Leaving a voice. A way of laughing. A few outbursts of anger. Songs. Memories that we, in turn, will pass on, beginning with: ‘You know what Hélène once said…’
So yes, Hélène Hazera will be missed by the trans rights movement. She will be missed by journalism. She will be missed on the radio, in music, and by all those who believe that culture is far more interesting when it comes from the margins rather than the drawing rooms.
But above all, she will be missed by this world because she was one of those people who prevent it from becoming completely boring.
Since yesterday, there’s one less voice. One less laugh. One less bit of cheek.
And in an age that sorely lacks these things, that’s no small matter.
Bye, Hélène. We’re going to miss you terribly. And somewhere, we hope that wherever you are, someone has already said something stupid enough to make you laugh.
