On the 25th of September 1933, Oscar Dufrenne, show business manager and city councillor of Paris, but also a well-known homosexual,was found murdered in his office above the famous music and movie theatre “Le Palace”, rue du Faubourg-Montmartre.The police suspected the murderer to be a male prostitute disguised as a sailor, but the suspect was finally discharged and the crime remained unsolved. As well as giving us an insider approach to homosexual lifestyles in 1930 Paris,this affair, which was extensively covered by the press, also enables us to analyse social images of homosexuality in public opinion at the time and to understand how moral prejudices could be used to political ends. It clearly shows that there were very different ways of living and defining one’s “homosexuality”,depending on sexual practices, gender inversion and conformity to middle-class norms of respectability.