A Couple Of Books That Changed My Life-- Jean Genet's Thief's Journal & John Rechy's City Of Night

A Young Man Seeking Liberation Through Transgressive Experiences

Once I got an inkling I was gay, I was never for a moment interested in living a life in the closet— nor in gay marriage nor adopting a child and living in the suburbs. Or anything about the suburbs. I saw myself as a different kind of gay than that. My idea of gay— or at least the gay subculture I identified with— was a forbidden, dangerous, even criminal subculture. I’ll never forget taking Danny Fields and Dee Dee Ramone, for a hoot, to a leather bar, the Eagle, I think, on Folsom in San Francisco. Danny giggled and said the brooding macho studs were probably all playing dress up and working as ribbon clerks during the day. Danny and Dee Dee both knew that world better than I did then.

A year before I was born, Jean Genet, nearly 40 by then, wrote Journal du voleur (The Thief's Journal). I can’t remember how old I was whenI read it. I think I was reading it instead of studying for my SATs. By the time Genet wrote it, he had already spent several years of his teenage life in a penal colony, which he got out of by joining the foreign legion, been discharged (dishonorably) after being caught having sex with another soldier. He then went on to have the life of a vagabond, petty thief and male prostitute, the recounting of those adventures, in Thief’s Journal, somehow appearing heroic to me and appealing to the rebel in me.

Thief's Journal is a semi-autobiographical, fictionalized account of the author's experiences. In the book, an unnamed young man embarks on a journey of, vaguely equal parts self-discovery and self-destruction. It’s structured as a diary as he navigates different cities— Barcelona, Antwerp, Marseilles, Tangier, Brno, Paris— encounters various characters (notably Stilitano, Armand, Michaelis, Java and Bernardino the cop), and reflects on his desires— blurring the lines between love and lust— struggles with non-conformity and an identity steeped in being a marginalized outsider, and inner conflicts, like the tension between embracing his outsider and criminal status and a yearning for connection. In my mind, he experienced a sense of liberation through his criminal actions and sexual encounters, but he also grappled with a deep sense of alienation and existential despair.

I’ve never been a fan of pornography. Genet’s exploration of sexuality and eroticism, and his pretty unique perspective on desire and pleasure, was as close as I got. But mostly I was attracted to the book because of his rebellion against conventional norms and his sense of alienation— and what 15 year old studying for his SATs wouldn’t get hung up in that kind of challenge to conventional morality of a young man seeking liberation through transgressive experiences?

I always assumed that when John Rechy wrote his classic City of Night, he was as influenced by Genet as I was. It’s even written by an unnamed “youngman” narrator, also a vagabond— albeit from El Paso, sent into a spiral of depression when his dog dies. I read it right when it came out— 1963, when I was still in high school. Between Genet and Rechy (City of Night and Numbers) there was no way I wasn’t going to… give it a try. It, meaning sex work. I still wasn’t even self-identifying as gay but I very much liked the idea of being paid by someone who wanted to blow me, when none of my friends could even have imagined anything of the sort.

I saw City of Night as an American version of Thief’s Journal. It was years before I ever imagined myself traveling overseas but after reading Numbers in 1967, I drove from New York right to Griffith Park (which happens to be where I live now, many decades later and not the slightest bit curious about what goes on in the bushes— if anything). If Genet didn’t make me confront the idea of being gay, Rechy did. It was still years before I came out (to myself) but I became a fan of sexual liberation reading City of Night— and learned how to do it. The protagonist's transient lifestyle, superficial connections, alienation and loneliness both attracted me and scared the bejesus out of me. The idea of forming meaningful connections in a world of fleeting encounters was something I grappled with once I accepted I was gay when I was living in Amsterdam in the 1970s.

Genet’s and Rechy’s protagonists gave me the idea that I could explore, with some degree of safety, complex human desires that never got discussed in my home or among my friends, and like me, their characters blurred the lines between love, lust, power and vulnerability, dealing with their own desires and the societal expectations that surround them/us.

I don’t want to give you the idea that I was spending my time as a male hustler when I was a teenager. I probably did it 4 or 5 times in total, a thrill. Many years later, after I was back living in the U.S.— and had heard Dee Dee Ramone’s autobiographical 53rd and 3rd I was in need of money and knew where that loop was and spent a couple of months making it that way. Let me see if I can find a photo from those days. There's that one above and this one here:

Yeah, monotony, conformity, mundanity, chains of judgment… that was never going to be for me. Putting myself through college as a drug dealer and dodging the police had more appeal. Traveling through Europe and Asia as a smuggler made more sense than going to grad school. Once I left I had forsaken America and was a European, I loved driving to Paris in my VW van to walk the city’s streets like Genet’s anti-hero, defying norms, crossing boundaries without end, claiming first Amsterdam, then Paris, then London and Berlin as my kingdom, my dearest friend… the beat of the night, Jack Kerouac's restless spirit vagabond soul, roaming the open road, tasting freedom of misfits, dreamers, those who dare roam, creating our own reality.

Thank God Roland doesn’t read my blog; he’d kill me for writing this. And if you do read my stuff and know me as someone else, don’t worry, I’m that too. Genet made one movie, Un chant d’amour which was banned in the U.S. but smuggled in by Jonas Mekas, whose memoir inspired me to write one. Anyway, here’s the film. People used to go to jail for showing it; anyone can watch it now: