202
KATE MILLETT
and requited love as rare in Genet as it
is
fleeting. Homosexual love
is a life of continual rejection. There is always a better-looking queen
for the lord to expropriate; there is always one more commandingly
masculine for the "chicken" to run to. Yet, the obligation to loyalty
rests heavily and exclusively upon the feminine partner for the male
is permitted, even expected, to
be
promiscuous. Due to the regula–
tions and the punishments of guards, intrigue is required, and
in
a
world where homosexuality, like love, is both irrepressible and con–
demned, secrecy is a necessity against the scorn of
all
and sundry.
Idolatry is also a feminine function. The mac is "dangerous" or hard
to get, his most magnanimous gesture a momentary display of
p0sses–
siveness. Tenderness or affection are beneath him: for a male to
love would
be
to lose status. Every equality is forbidden. Proposing
himself to another youth, Genet is rebuked with a dismayed "Huh?
We're the same age.
It
wouldn't be any fun."
In his own account of Genet, Same constructs a theory, sturdily
Marxist
in
bias, that it was the lifelong feeling of guilt branded on
him as a child by his foster parents when they caught him stealing
and sent
him
to spend the next fifteen years in the "children's hell"
of Mettray that led Genet to homosexuality. The hypothesis
is
at
odds with Genet's own assertion that homosexuality preceded
his
crimes against property. And indeed, the dizzying shame, followed by
a stubbornly resistent contumacy, which is Genet's stand toward the
world, originates with sex, even with the "original sin" of his birth,
a bastard and abandoned child. Weighted down with guilt, already
an "unnatura:l" phenomenon in a society based on family and
pro~
erty, it is somehow logical he should complete his fate by advancing
to the "unnatural" life-style of homosexuality, where he can further
outrage "nature" by becoming a feminine or passive partner, furnish–
ing the last touch by accepting the most ignominious role, laying
claim to "the gravest insult" - cocksucker.
8
3 In
The Miracle of the Rose,
Genet informs us that "among toughs [this
epithet] is very often punishable by death." The degree to which eroticism
and shame are inseparable in Genet is a nice illustration of how deeply
guilt
pervades our apprehension of the sexual, an unpleasant fact of sexual politics
and hardly less true of heterosexual society than it is of Genet's: "I know
by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love - it
is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the
word shame that accompanied it in the beginning." Such a sentiment is
probably universal.
