Jean Genet

I was born on December 19, 1910 as an illegitimate son of a Parisian prostitute and orphaned by the time I was seven months old. Petty theft quickly became a hobby of mine starting at the ripe young age of 10. By my 15th birthday, I called Mettray penitentiary, a French reform school for boys, home until I was 18. Mettray was a place of hard labor and a place where the inmates enforced a code of love, honor, gesture and justice. My sexual awakening, discovering my homosexuality, occurred at Mettray. By 23, I was living in Spain, sleeping with a one-armed pimp and lice-ridden. This period of my life became the basis for which my record of a satanic journey, "The Thiefs Journal", was written. Much of my young adulthood was spent in prison for crimes like theft and prostitution. In 1948, I was pronounced an un-reform able criminal and sentenced for life. While in prison, at 32 years old, I started writing his first manuscript for "Our Lady of the Flowers", which was discovered and destroyed on multiple occasions. I rewrote it from memory and eventually smuggled it out of my cell and gained the attention of Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre. Cocteau and Sartre lobbied for me, with 40 other intellectuals and artists, including Pablo Picasso, for a pardon from my life-sentence. It worked and I never found himself back in prison again. Many of my works have themes related to life in prison: the inversion on conventional morals, prostitution, murder, theft, betrayal, and complex identities associated with criminal subcultures. After writing five novels and producing nothing over several years, I re-emerged as playwright. My plays are re-evaluations of the themes found in his novels and become ritualized means for staging and demolishing identity. "The Maids" (1947), "Deathwatch" (1949), "The Balcony" (1956), "The Blacks" (1958), and "The Screens" (1961) are all conflicts between life and death, good and evil, the strong and the weak, the old and the young, and illusion and reality. In my personal life, I became attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker (what a hottie). Abdallah committed suicide in 1964, which caused me to enter a downward spiral period of depression and an attempted suicide. Following my role as a playwright and novelist, I assumed a position as a public intellectual and became openly involved with militant politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I defended Maos Red Guards in China, went to the US to support the Black Panthers in 1970 during the years they were subject to police harassment and brutality, and supported the Palestine Liberation Organization after Israel took the West Bank in 1967. I wrote my last novel, "A Prisoner of Love" as my own reaction to my experiences in Jordan at Palestinian refugee camps. I developed throat cancer and died on April 15, 1986 in Paris. I am buried in a Spanish cemetery near Larache, Morocco.