For instance, a doctor who provide fertility treatment outside of heterosexual couples who've been together for at least two years can be fined 30,000 euros and be sent to jail for two years. Now, of course, a law like that is nearly impossible to enforce, especially since lots of fertility procedures can be written off as preparing for a future pregnancy.

Well, most of them. Artificial insemination can't be.

So that's why this month's issues of Têtu gives step-by-step instructions on how to do artificial insemination yourself. It actually doesn't look all too hard (if it were complicated, I suppose there wouldn't be so many accidental inseminations); just remember to avoid getting air bubbles in the syringe and not to use lube!

It comes to mind as a much less dangerous form of back-alley abortions, but much the same principle - women who don't have a legal right to a medical procedure must find a way to do it themselves. And who knows what can go wrong when asking your local gay boy to help out with your insemination. Seeing the spread, with the instructions, really makes this country seem years behind the US in terms of fighting homophobia.

The right to do what one wants with his or her own body isn't the same sort of positive right as the right to anti-retrovirals through the national health care plan or the right to a civil union. It's hard sometimes to look at movements and culture outside of the Western epistemology of constant development, enlightenment, and progress towards an Platonically abstract goal of an ideal society, being as ensconced in it as we are, but slippages like this reiterate for us again that progress isn't simple and linear, nor is it something, as Edward Said once said, found or not found like Easter eggs are.

So getting back to the original question of just what we want, Thomas Doustaly wrote in the Têtu editorial:

When, how, where will we again have, among homosexuals and in and organized fashion, this fundamental debate about our future, the one that re-opened completely after the arrival of anti-retrovirals; is the protection of one another a superior value for gays to the freedom to do as one wants, each according to his or her circumstances, his or her level of information and his or her financial and intellectual means?

It's a lot of what I call the "French blah-blahs", but either direction for the LGBT movement is going to have us arrive at different places. Andrew Sullivan's idea of queer liberation is very different from Urvahi Vaid's; Gabriel Rotello's is nothing like Judith Butler's; and even here at the Project I think that most contributors would differ on either the details or the main ideas of what a non-homophobic society looks like.

Someone like me can be mystified by the fact that a doctor here has to ask in what situation the child of an a fertility treatment will be raised and then deny treatment to certain people, just as a French person can wonder how backwards we Americans are because we don't have the ability to choose our own legal families, returning to the care of our parents instead or our chosen families, like children instead of adults.

But then again, what is it exactly that we want? Considering that what we want is a question that's mapped out on a particular culture or legal landscape, one that's easily internalized, it might not always be what's best for us as individuals or a group.

But it's still a good question to constantly ask.