Cyril Collard [above, right] adapted, directed, and starred in the vividly bisexual film Les Nuits Fauve [Savage Nights], based on his second novel. The autobiographical story examines the life of a thirtyish aspiring director, Jean, engaged in simultaneous affairs with an 18-year-old French girl and a young, "straight" Spanish rugby player, Samy, who develops a taste for S&M and moves in with him, while Jean still (compulsively?) enjoys frequent, rough anonymous hookups, all of which is further complicated by his being HIV+. Heralding the start of a dazzling career, the movie won four Cesar Awards in 1993, including Best Film, but Collard did not attend. Three days earlier he died of aids at 35.
Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the preceding five years he had published his five groundbreaking novels, as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, read Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography
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