Hélène Hazéra

Actor

Hélène Hazera (born 1952) is a French journalist, actress, filmmaker, radio producer and trans activist.

Born into a bourgeois family with ties to the French Resistance, Hazera grew up in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Her late adolescence was marked by crisis: she was committed to a psychiatric hospital at 17 following a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and went through a suicidal period. Estranged from her family and without resources, she prepared for the entrance exam to the IDHEC film school before being allegedly barred from entry by its director, and turned to sex work. She transitioned in 1973.

As a trans woman and close friend of Marie France, she joined the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) and became a central figure and political voice of the Gazolines collective. In the mid-1990s she joined Act Up-Paris, where she led the trans commission. A self-described libertarian, she was also a member of the Confédération nationale du travail and an occasional contributor to Le Monde libertaire on LGBT issues and press workers' rights.

She appeared in films by Adolfo Arrieta, including Les Intrigues de Sylvia Couski (1974), and was photographed by Nan Goldin. In 1978, through a connection made at the FHAR, she joined Libération as a television columnist, later becoming the paper's specialist in French-language song, a role she held until 1999. From September 2002 to June 2017, she hosted the programme Chanson Boum on France Culture, broadcast on Friday nights.

In 1985 she conceived an eight-part documentary series on the anarchist filmmaker Jean Painlevé, directed by Denis Derrien. In 2003 she co-directed a portrait of Nicole Louvier with Raymonde Couvreu.