Disturbing Attachments

A truck with a spray-painted "Genet" tag in mauve is spotted in New York City, a queer British pop-punk duo takes the name "Jean Genet" (2004), the U.S. artist David Woynarowitz produces a lithograph in which angels carry weapons, Jesus Christ is shooting up, and a haloed Genet occupies the foreground (1978 -79), the Canadian band CocoRosie writes a song narrating Genet's mythic life story with, as its melancholy chorus, "Oh those beautiful boyz / pimps and queens and criminal queers / Oh those beautiful boyz / tattoos of ships and tattoos of tears" (2004), a queer/transgender couple, one of them a sex worker, gets tattoos representing the street queen Divine and her pimp Darling from Genet's 1946 novel Our Lady of the Flowers to commemorate their love (2009). 1 These anecdotes are suggestive not only of French author and activist Jean Genet's (1910 -86) contemporary subcultural iconicity, 2 but also of the impassioned identification he inspires in many of his queer admirers.Genet is capable of sparking such passionate attachment because he resonates, more than any other canonical queer author from the pre-gay liberation past, with contemporary queer sensibilities attuned to a defiant nonnormativity.Genet, after all, was not only sexually queer; he was also a criminal, hated France, and therefore, all nationalisms, famously "chose" abjection, taking up the position of the social pariah by begging, tramping, and prostituting himself, and allied himself, late in life, with the revolutionary anticolonial movements of the Black Panthers and the Palestinian Liber-ation Organization (plo).From the vantage point of a "homonationalist" 3 present in which gays and lesbians, as avatars of sexual modernity, have become assets to liberal states, Genet seems to exemplify a prior historical formation of queerness as politically potent outsiderhood.Genet embodies the queer romance of the alternative.Queers are not the first to have found, in Genet, the quintessential romantic outlaw.Indeed, "outlaw" and "antihero" were performances he first honed as a scrappy thief trying to get out of prison and into the French literary canon.In 1943, the psychiatrist Dr. Henri Claude was charged with determining the extent of Genet's responsibility for stealing a rare edition of Verlaine's Fêtes galantes.Having already undergone numerous convictions for theft, Genet was eligible for life in prison if sentenced in excess of three months.On realizing that Claude idolized Romantic poets, Genet strove to embody his fantasies, posing as an amoral "noble savage" and vagabond poet in search of "absolute freedom." 4 Claude responded by pronouncing him "morally mad" but not insane.This diagnosis attenuated his responsibility for his crime without, for that matter, mandating institutionalization in an asylum for the criminally insane.As a result, Genet was sentenced to exactly three months in prison, one day shy of what would have meant a life conviction.Performing outsiderhood was Genet's way into the exclusive world of French letters.Introduced to Parisian high society as a criminal-poet, Genet pilfered his hosts' valuables as a parlor trick to thrill the haute bourgeoisie. 5 The fascination he exerted on Jean-Paul Sartre was so great that the latter prematurely canonized him.The first volume of Genet's complete works, published in 1952 when he was still a relatively young author, was composed not of his own writing but of Sartre's mammoth existentialist biography of him, Saint Genet: An Actor and a Martyr (Saint Genet: Comédien et martyre).In it, Sartre details Genet's heroic journey from dependence and inauthenticity -as a foster child, thief, prisoner, and "passive" homosexual -to existential freedom as an author.In the process, he at once redeems Genet of his outsider past and resuscitates that past as the insignia of all that he has overcome.Like many minoritarian subjects, Genet had to learn to perform other people's exotic fantasies about him in order to achieve recognition and success.Rather than stripping away the mask, Genet's writing sets the stage for his live performances.His texts give us, as their most fascinating spectacle, Genet "himself," frozen in a series of obscene postures designed to solicit the reader's hatred, pity, and disgust.This is Genet, fantasizing that he is orally tunneling into his dead lover, Jean Decarnin, via the latter's asshole, Genet,

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