Director Christophe Honoré still looks pained at the memory of the protests against gay marriage that rocked France seven years ago. The adoption of same-sex marriage in the country, a flagship policy that President François Hollande had campaigned on, was supposed to have been a smooth process. It became law in 2013, but only after a protracted backlash that saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets – more overall than the recent gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement.

“I realised there was still a cloud of suspicion hanging over gay citizens,” says Honoré, best known internationally for comedies and musical films including 2007’s Love Songs. “I felt hurt, but also responsible, because in my work I’d never thought that gay visibility might still be important. I felt like I’d failed, like I’d deserted the fight the generation before me had led.”

The 48-year-old director embarked on a quest to reclaim his identity, which has now yielded three very personal works: Ton Père, an essay about being a gay father, the film Sorry Angel, which competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, and a new play, Les Idoles (The Idols), given its French premiere this month at the Odéon theatre in Paris.

The last two look back to the early 1990s. Sorry Angel, which won France’s Louis Delluc prize (akin to a Man Booker prize for film), is inspired by Honoré’s years at university in Brittany: in 1993, a student much like himself, played by Vincent Lacoste, falls in love with a Parisian writer who is HIV positive. Les Idoles, meanwhile, tackles the Aids crisis head-on, by bringing back to life artists who were heroes of Honoré’s and succumbed to the disease.

‘I felt like I’d deserted the fight’ … Christophe Honoré. Photograph: Laurent Emmanuel/AFP/Getty Images

“I wanted to create a sort of dance of the dead, to bring them to the stage in order to have a conversation with them,” Honoré says. The production shuns realism and grew out of playful improvisations with the cast. While all the characters are male, Honoré enlisted women to play two of them, including Marlène Saldana as the film-maker Jacques Demy.

“Homosexual desire and Aids are at the heart of the play, but I wanted the expression of that desire to be universal,” the director says of the gender swap. Theatre also provides the kind of creative licence that film leaves little room for, he says. “The relationship with the audience is so different. On stage, you work with this idea that people are ready to believe pretty much anything, even that someone as iconic as Demy is being represented by a woman in a fur coat. On screen, it would be deemed ridiculous.”

It’s not normal to start out with this idea that death is intimately linked to your sexuality Christophe Honoré

Honoré is well placed to know: in addition to being a prolific children’s author, he has gone back and forth between film and theatre for nearly two decades, a multifaceted career that makes him an outlier in France. “I’m always surprised by how rarely I see other film directors or producers at performances. French cinema still hasn’t left behind the cliche that it should be above theatre. Jean-Luc Godard once joked that he wasn’t interested in it because stage actors spoke ‘too loudly,’ and it stuck.”

The French director especially relishes the collective nature of theatre work. “Film is really solitary. There are too many phases, from shooting to editing, for the people around you to understand exactly what you’re trying to do.”

Central to both Sorry Angel and Les Idoles is the notion of filiation – artistic and otherwise. “I lost my father when I was 15, and I thought art was going to offer me the kinds of fathers I no longer had in real life,” Honoré muses. While he never met the six men who inspired Les Idoles, who include the playwrights Jean-Luc Lagarce and Bernard-Marie Koltès, their deaths at the height of the Aids epidemic, just as he was reaching adulthood as a gay man, hit him hard. “It’s not normal to start out with this idea that death is intimately linked to your sexuality. And then to bury friends when you’re just 20 … ” he says, tailing off.

‘On stage, you work with this idea that people are ready to believe pretty much anything’ … Jean-Charles Clichet and Harrison Arévalo in Les Idoles. Photograph: Jean-Louis Fernandez

There are many lighthearted moments in the play, but Honoré also circles back to the responsibility he felt in the wake of the same-sex marriage protests, by asking whether artists had a duty to lead a public fight against Aids in the 1980s and 1990s. He contrasts Hollywood and Broadway-led campaigns at the time in the US with the rifts he remembers in France between artists and activists, who saw public figures like Lagarce, who declined to write about the disease, as “traitors.”

When it comes to speaking on behalf of a community, Honoré is still fighting his own instincts. “Just starting a sentence by saying ‘As a gay artist’ … ” He cringes. “It’s not something that comes to me naturally.”

Still, his recent productions, along with Robin Campillo’s 2017 drama 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute), show that the time is ripe to tell stories about a crisis that claimed millions and devastated artistic communities everywhere, before the advent of antiretroviral therapy in 1995. “It makes me mad when I hear it’s a trend,” says Honoré, looking down at the floor. “For years, it was as if nothing had happened to my generation. We kept the trauma to ourselves.” No longer.