Paris- France’s first private TV channel for gay and lesbian audiences – PinkTV – has marked its maiden broadcast with a celebrity party in the capital, Paris.

Politicians, media figures and stars like Claudia Cardinale were among some 2,500 who gathered to celebrate the first transmission on Monday evening.

France’s culture minister said he hoped the channel could help people “live their freedom and respect one another”.

PinkTV aims to show anything from porn films to cult shows like Wonder Woman.

Its backers hope to draw advertisers to the new subscription channel in pursuit of the higher spending power of gay people.

Rarely has the term “Gay Paris” been quite so apt, the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt reports from Paris.

The city’s popular mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, is openly gay.

Gay couples already have the right to a legal partnership contract and a lesbian couple recently gained equal parental rights over their child for the first time in French legal history.

Mr Delanoe was among the guests at the party in the Chaillot Palace, who also included a former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and the actors Michel Blanc and Nathalie Baye.

The channel hopes to attract heterosexual viewers too “I hope that PinkTV becomes a broad space of freedom and culture allowing all of our fellow citizens live their freedom and respect one another,” said Culture and Communications Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.

PinkTV is backed by three of France’s main channels and has received widespread and mostly positive coverage in the French media, being promoted as a hip, urban channel which hopes to attract both straight and gay viewers.

Comedy programmes will include French and Saunders and Metrosexuality, while there will also be documentaries on subjects such as Aids and the life of rock star Freddie Mercury.

Sports programmes will be presented by a transsexual, Brigitte Boreale.

The channel will also broadcast porn films after midnight with titles like Madame and Eve, and Out of Athens.

Subscribers will pay nine euros ($12) a month and the channel hopes to have at least 180,000 subscribers within two years.

Advertisers make up 20% of PinkTV’s revenues, keeping its budget to just over 12m euros a year.

However, some other TV stations aimed mainly at gays and lesbians have not done as well as expected financially.

Pridevision, a similar gay channel launched in Canada in 2001, and Gay TV, which started in Italy in 2002, are both struggling.

But PinkTV’s backers say the demand is there in France and they are optimistic it will succeed.