from The Thief’s Journal

JEAN GENET

Genet. As if more needs be said. The prince noir des lettres stands alone, monolithic, iconic, and synonymous with the idiom he invented. To include Genet in a Naughty Bits anthology is like inducting Babe Ruth into the Hall of Fame: it confuses the categories of whole and part, for indeed there is no fame if not Babe’s, nothing naughty if not Genet.

Orphan, thief, vagabond, homosexual, prostitute: these, the oft-mentioned components of Genet’s life, get so overromanticized by people who share none of them that, when I catch myself doing it too, I end up not even wanting to like Genet, not wanting to be another Sartre sitting in the comforts of the rue d’Ulm eulogizing Genet’s black-nailed alterity. Yet the beauty of Genet’s prose demands no badge of authenticity, no street scars or bruises, and certainly no saccharine sympathy. We might try to read Genet as tourists, but we’re all too likely to go native, to feel, alongside our masterful guide, the hard heat of a man’s body pressed against us in a sordid cell, and to suspect that our own scrubbed experiences blanch in comparison. Reading Genet, I see the safety of my own life present before my eyes as a blank screen on which he projects a dance of passionate shadows.

In the scene that follows, Genet sketches, in two paragraphs, the vicious interlacing of shame, desire, and self-loathing that consume his male lover as they fuck for the first time. Yet the sad fact is that Genet seeks out these “queers who hate themselves,” finding, perhaps, in their pained concessions to desire a Dantesque punishment for his own inescapable self-hatred.

When I buggered this handsome twenty-two-year-old athlete for the first time, he pretended to be sleeping. With his face crushed against the white pillow, he let me slip it in, but when he was stuck, he could not keep from groaning delicately, the way one sighs.

Deeply threaded by my prick, he becomes something other than himself, something other than my lover. He is a strange part of me which still preserves a little of its own life. We form one body, but it has two heads and each of them is involved in experiencing its own pleasure. At the moment of coming, this excrescence of my body which was my lover loses all tenderness, clouds over. In the darkness, I sense his hardness and can feel that a veil of shadow is spreading over his face, which is contracted with pain and pleasure. I know that he knows he derives this pleasure from me, that he awaits it from my hand which is jerking him off, but I feel that the only thing that concerns him now is his coming. Though we are bound together by my prick, all our friendly relations are cut off. Our mouths, which could perhaps re-establish them are unable to meet. He wants only to be more deeply impaled. I cannot see him, for he has murmured “Put out the light,” but I feel that he has become someone else, someone strange and remote. It is when I have made him come that I feel him hating me.

—translated by Bernard Frechtman