Hélène Hazera

Hélène Hazera was born in 1952 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris into a bourgeois Catholic family, the youngest of three children. Her parents had both been in the French Resistance: her father joined London and her mother was a liaison agent. As a teenager she secretly borrowed her mother's clothes and make-up and discovered Genet, Rimbaud, Verlaine and situationist writing in the family library. At 17 she was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and went through a suicidal period. She later credited the poetry of Omar Khayyam with helping her through those years. Her father's gaze when she began to live as a woman was painful, and sharing the family table became unbearable.

Estranged from her family and without resources, she prepared for the entrance competition of the IDHEC, the Paris film school that preceded La Fémis. By her own account, the director blocked her admission. She turned to sex work and lived through precarious housing. She began her gender transition in 1973.

In the early 1970s she joined the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) and became the central figure and political voice of the Gazolines, the group founded in 1972 within its orbit. Her slogan "Prolétaires de tous les pays, caressez-vous" became one of the emblems of that era. In the mid-1990s she joined Act Up-Paris, where she created and led the trans commission, often described as the Trans and AIDS commission. She defended trans people, sex workers and people living with HIV, wrote for Le Monde libertaire, called herself a libertarian and belonged to the CNT, where she worked on the situation of freelance journalists. In 2006 she took part in an occupation of Socialist Party offices to press the party on trans rights, and she remained a regular presence at the Existrans march.

In 1978 Michel Cressole, whom she had met at the FHAR, brought her into Libération as a television columnist. She signed "HH", sometimes "Mlle HH" or "Mlle HH 007". In February 1984 she travelled to London to interview the leading producers and directors of music videos. She became the paper's specialist in French-language song and stayed until 1999, a pioneer among openly trans journalists at a major French daily. She also wrote the preface to Brigitte Fontaine's song collection Genre humain.

From the early 2000s she produced radio for France Culture, first Les Chansons dans la nuit and then Chanson Boum, a weekly hour on French-language song in which she welcomed artists live. France Culture dates the show from 2002 to 2017, and she recorded her final edition in July 2017. She was passionate about Arabic and Arab-Andalusian music and poetry. In 2017 she recorded five À voix nue interviews about her life and activism. France Culture's director Emelie De Jong called her "une femme libre" who carried that freedom onto the station with her voice, her tone and her personality.

She acted in Adolfo Arrieta's Les Intrigues de Sylvia Couski (1975) and Tam Tam (1976), and appeared uncredited as Hélène, Isabelle's friend and flatmate, in Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). She performed on stage in an adaptation of Arthur Miller's After the Fall by Jean-Louis Jorge. In 1985 she conceived Jean Painlevé au fil de ses films, a series of eight 26-minute documentaries directed by Denis Derrien, and in 2003 she made a portrait of the singer Nicole Louvier with Raymonde Couvreu. She was photographed by Nan Goldin and worked with the photographer Emil Cadoo.

Hazera was openly trans from 1973 and learned she was HIV-positive in 1996. Many of her friends, including Michel Cressole, died of AIDS, and she wrote a tribute to him in Libération in 1995. She was a close friend of the singer Marie France, the writer Abdellah Taïa and the filmmaker Judith Abitbol. When she retired in 2017, French social security refused to count the years she had contributed under a female social security number, and she only obtained the change of gender on her civil status in 2023, aged 71.

She described herself as a libertarian and an anarchist and was close to situationist ideas, while also criticising sectarian attitudes and nostalgia for May 1968 within her own camp. She argued that trans women who matched social expectations of appearance received more respect than others, and she spoke out about the danger of sending trans children to school under the wrong name. She stayed loyal to sex workers throughout her life.

Hazera is remembered as the first openly trans journalist in France, a founding voice of trans activism in the Gazolines and at Act Up-Paris, and a passionate guardian of French-language song. Giovanna Rincon of Acceptess-T called her death an extremely important loss for the trans community. Judith Abitbol's documentary Hélène Trésore Transnationale (2025) and Lou Bossis's 2025 book chapter on her in Trans et militant·e preserve her story.

In 2020 the Scam (Société civile des auteurs multimédia) awarded her its prize for her body of audio work (Prix pour l'ensemble de l'oeuvre sonore). In 2025 she was invited by the Chéries-Chéris festival for the premiere of the documentary about her life.

Hélène Hazera died in Paris on the morning of Monday 5 October 2026, aged 74. Her death was announced by her friend Judith Abitbol to Agence France-Presse. The cause of death has not been made public. Tributes came from France Culture, Act Up-Paris, Têtu, Les Inrockuptibles, the Chéries-Chéris festival and many activists and artists.