Band of Thebes

Born December 19: Cyril Collard, Jean Genet

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 seven years he had published his five groundbreaking novels -- Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle, The Thief's Journal -- 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.

Born December 14: Hervé Guibert

In his teens Hervé Guibert lied about his age to work at the magazine 20 ans and in his very early 20s he got a job with Le Monde. He published several books and, at 28, won a César Award for his gay screenplay L'Homme blessé, co-written with its director Patrice Chéreau. It tells a Genet-like tale of young man's doomed first love for a manipulative thief/hustler/pimp whom he later kills. Open about his same-sex affairs since high school, Guibert avoided mainstream gay culture and had significant affairs with Michel Foucault, 29 years his senior, and Thierry Jouno, who was living with a woman, Christine, and their two children. In 1988, four years after Foucault's death, Guibert was diagnosed with aids and began to document his decline, giving rise to his most famous books, including the barely veiled novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life which describes/betrays secrets about Foucault's S&M and attacks former friend Isabelle Adjani for backing out of a purported promise to film one of his screenplays. Guibert married Christine, who was also HIV+, so that she and Thierry's children would inherit his royalties. Blind and ravaged by the disease, Guibert tried to kill himself the day before he turned 36. He died two weeks later. Thierry followed within six months.

Fire in the Belly: The Life of David Wojnarowicz

 

I couldn't attend last night's event at the LGBT center for Cynthia Carr and her Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle], but the book deserves another boost, both for its remarkable artist and how his story is told. [Above: works from 1988, 1989, and 1982]

The NYT calls it "thorough and sensitive...a smart match of author and subject...sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s...The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones...Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als says the biography is "outstanding...Carr analyzes those impulses, but never at the expense of conveying her subject’s spirit and the energies he applied to becoming himself, loving a few people, and making a difference."

Born December 11: John Preston

On Thursday, April 15, 1993, longtime activist John Preston delivered the Jon Pearson Perry Lecture at Harvard, which he titled My Life As a Pornographer. He was 47 and it had been ten years since the release of his classic gay SM novel Mr. Benson [Kindle], which he published under his real name. (In a great reversal, he used a pseudonym for his straight adventure books.) Preston said, "Pornography has made me be honest, about myself and some of the most intimate details of my life and my fantasies. ... Once I had exposed my own sexual fantasies, my most intimate desires, I feared little else about self-exposure as a writer." Among his other popular one-handers were In Search Of A Master, Entertainment for a Master, The Love of a Master, and I Once Had a Master. He edited many important anthologies including Flesh and the Word, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront Aids and Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong. His most famous non-erotica novel is Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, which has been adapted for the stage. He died of aids at 48. Dozens of authors paid tribute to him in Looking for Mr. Preston.

Kergan Edwards-Stout Talks with Trebor Healey

Author of the award-winning Songs for the New Depression [Kindle] and ace interviewer, Kergan Edwards-Stout last week aimed his Q's at me and Thebes' annual poll. This week he gets A's from novelist Trebor Healey.

Trebor's first novel Through It Came Bright Colors [Kindle] won the Ferro-Grumley Award in 2004, yet he only published his second and third novels this fall. Faun [Kindle], about a high school boy who turns into a satyr, is his first book to be set in Los Angeles where he has lived for 12 years. A Horse Named Sorrow [Kindle], a late-80s aids novel leaves San Francisco for a cross-country bicycle trip:

Kergan: One of the key images in the book is a bicycle wrapped in different strings. How did that come to you?

Trebor: I actually rode a bicycle across the country in the summer of 1986. It was an amazing way to travel and felt to me like traveling by horse, which is how the whole horse/bike/sorrow metaphor first came together. The speed, the human scale, the way you had to maintain your vehicle and plot your trip. It's very meditative and seemed a perfect style of journey for a person in need of retreat and reflection. As for the strings, I think that came from how kids used to tie strings around each other's ankles and wrists, and the idea was that you'd make a wish, and when the string came off, the wish you'd made would come true. There is a lot about wishing in the book, both the good and the bad of it.

Read the full interview on Huffington Post or LGBTQ Nation.

Failing US Aids Goals Worse than Abroad + 5 Other Articles in Atlantic

MacArthur Fellow Mark Harrington writes in The Atlantic: "Not only is the U.S. [aids] plan not on track to achieve its goals, but they are themselves far less ambitious than what has already been achieved in the past decade in some of the world's poorest countries, such as Cambodia, Ethiopia, or Zambia." Look at this chart lists twenty-five nations -- including India, Thailand, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Ghana -- where new hiv infections fell by more than 50%, while in the US new infection rates have "hovered around 50,000 per year for two decades." Harrington attended a White House event where the administration talked about commitment to ending the pandemic but no official mentioned drug users or reauthorizing Ryan White or PEPFAR. Harrington adds, "In the United States, only 25 percent of the 1.2 million HIV positive people are on effective ART with an undetectable viral load. Only 33 percent are retained in care...Each year Obama has been president, he's cut funding to the CDC and to the TB program."

The magazine has five other articles about aids:

Kenyon Farrow's "Young, Gay, Black -- and at Risk for HIV"

Rebecca Chao on China's Surprising Assault on HIV/AIDS—and a Cultural Taboo

Brian Fung's The Global Geography of HIV: 20 Years of Change—in 1 GIF

And two from John-Manuel Andriote, "Should Everyone HIV+ Be Required to Disclose That to Every Sexual Partner?" (45 states have made failure to disclose a criminal offense) and The Prospects for a 'Sterilizing' HIV Cure.

Born December 3: Patrick Angus

The artist Patrick Angus said he didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street. David Hockney bought five of Angus's paintings, and in 1992 three galleries held solo shows, yet without new work the momentum was lost. He is included in overviews like Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West and James Saslow's exceptional Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. Much credit is due Douglas Blair Turnbaugh for his steadfast dedication to securing Angus's legacy. Kudos also to film director Ira Sachs for including Angus in his prize-winning short about NYC artists lost to aids, Last Address.

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's  greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., Days of Heaven for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate.

For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films. He describes the challenges and innovations of working with directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide which colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night, he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He also shot ads for Calvin Klein and Armani. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

June Elbus, a 14 year-old in Westchester, grieves for her favorite uncle, Finn, a successful, reclusive artst in Manhattan, who dies of aids at the start of Carol Brunt's debut novel Tell the Wolves I'm Home [Kindle]. It's 1987 and the suburbs' reaction to the pandemic is ignorance, hostility, fear, and indifference. June's family says Finn's longtime partner, a wayward hiv+ Brit named Toby whom they've never met, murdered Finn by infecting him to inherit his apartment and expensive art, and they hound him away from the funeral. Finn has left June and Toby notes begging each to take care of the other and the bulk of the story is their wary then warm secret friendship. June's problem isn't hiding it from her clueless, accountant parents but from her suspicious, jealous sister Greta, who plays Bloody Mary in the school production of South Pacific and is offered a role in Annie on Broadway. Finn's final painting was a double portrait of June and Greta which is featured in the NYT then lands on the cover of Newsweek. Skeptics of these rosy plot points may balk at the novel's lite grasp of aids, whose side effects are mainly thinness and a little shivering before death, but the book is surer of its sense of teen girl confusion and drama.

Perks & Plague: Support Queer Film This Weekend

After We Were Here and United in Anger, today's aids doc How To Survive a Plague has an average rating of 90 on Metacritic, meaning "universal acclaim." The San Francisco Chronicle says it "lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year." It opens in NYC, LA, SF, and Chicago; next week: DC, Atlanta, and Cambridge.

Stephen Chbosky's million-copy-selling first novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower is now a movie that he adapted and directed. Most critics have singled out its gay character, Patrick, played by Ezra Miller. EW gave the movie an A, citing Patrick as "a kind of teenage Oscar Wilde played by the mesmerizing Ezra Miller... The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star." (The quarterback is played by Johnny Simmons, right in OUT's moody photo.) Salon's Andrew O'Hehir writes:

"Here he takes one of the most hackneyed central-casting roles in the lexicon – the wisecracking gay sidekick, who covers his pain with laughter – and fills every moment with awkward significance... Patrick is trying on semi-adult masks to see if they fit. He’s doing so in that confusing post-Harvey Milk, pre-gay marriage era when LGBT rights was emerging as a national issue but options for real-life gay kids in suburbia were pretty limited."

On the lasting importance of pop entertainment, Daniel Mendelsohn's new essay revisits landmark gay TV moments, from Paul Lynde to Dynasty to Brideshead to Will & Grace to the Glee kiss that made him cry.

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.

David Wojnarowicz Biography: Fire in the Belly

Just out from Bloomsbury, Cynthia Carr's bio of essential artist / writer David Wojnarowicz takes its name from his work censored at the Hide/Seek exhibit, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle]. PW chose it as a Pick of the Week, writing "In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, former Village Voice reporter Carr reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics. Tracing his early life as a withdrawn, unstable student, sometime hustler, and store clerk in the troubled New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Carr reveals the artist’s struggle to express his emerging gay identity and the violent intensity of his family life."

The NYT says, "Ms. Carr’s biography is both sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s... The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones. There’s an account of the art store clerk who gave away free supplies to poor artists he admired, and one of Redden’s, the sole funeral home in Manhattan that would accept AIDS patients in the early days of the crisis, winning the loyalty of many gay men. Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The knowing cover photo is by friend and mentor Peter Hujar, whom David called "the parent I never had," except they did sleep together. See Peter's nsfw portrait of David's nude handwork.

If you haven't already, read David's journals and diaries.

ACT UP Marches on Wall Street To Mark 25th Anniversary

Of the hundreds of people marching on Wall Street yesterday to mark the 25th anniversary of ACT UP, nine were arrested. Among the many artists, filmmakers, and writers in attendance, I saw Ira Sachs wearing a baby, Tom Kalin talking truth about My Week with Marilyn, John Weir, and Daniel Allen Cox. The demonstration was a joint action with Occupy, and groups came from at least as far as Boston and Philadelphia to demand more aids funding and to honor the New Yorkers who started it all in 1987. The Nation offers some background.

Remember, in a pinch, duct tape is your friend.

New York Magazine's ACT-UP Portfolio

To mark the 25th anniversary of ACT UP's founding, this week's New York magazine showcases a few of the 225 black and white portraits photographer Bill Bytsura shot of members over a six year period, and Christopher Anderson captures some of the same sitters today.

This image shows Luis Lopez-Detres and Eric Sawyer, who now reminds readers, “This treatment is not a cure. And for 97 percent of people living with AIDS in the world, they have no access to the drugs at all. For them nothing has changed.”

Gran Fury Reunion

Did you know the two sailors in the READ MY LIPS ad have their pants open and are firmly at crossed swords? After the Furies appropriated the top half of the image and made it famous, one of the men called to say thank you. Such were the revelations Tuesday night when four members of the queer activist art collective Gran Fury discussed their work and legacy: from left, moderator Andrew Ross, with Robert Vasquez, Tom Kalin, Avrim Finkelstein, and Marlene McCarty. Several times they emphasized that their work was created when they were at war, it was made to be used in direct action, and the shopworn question "Is it Art?" was an artificial conversation. They reminded the audience that their famous Kissing Doesn't Kill, which you recall for its two same sex and one interracial kisses in the style of a Benetton ad, was "about saliva transferability," a "huge controversy at the time." Tom Kalin said aids absolutely brought on PTSD which he suggested was why the trio of aids documentaries needed until now:We Were Here, United in Anger, and How To Survive a Plague. Predictably, members of the panel differed on the role of social media; either they cited the importance of old school, non-virtual encounters or the success of the Arab Spring revolutions driven by Twitter and Facebook. 

The NYU show of Gran Fury's work, on display at 80 WSE until March 17, is a must-see.

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. In 2010 he was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

Born January 26: Ellen DeGeneres

Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, record company wannabe, vegan, animal lover, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she also cites Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to thirty-two Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won five consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl, in 2010 she was a judge on American Idol and appeared as herself on The Simpsons, and in 2011 Hillary Clinton made her a Special Envoy for Global Aids Awareness. Her new book is Seriously...I'm Kidding [Kindle].

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

"Festa Barocca" photo by Andrea Mohin/NYT

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [[Kindle]] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Check his upcoming tour in February and March.

Born December 19: Cyril Collard, Jean Genet

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.