“There is no other source of beauty than the wound — unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that every man keeps within, that he preserves and whither he withdraws when he wants to leave the world behind for a temporary but deep solitude.” (Jean Genet, The Studio of Alberto Giacometti, orig. 1957) [1]
Un Chant d’Amour (“A Love Song” – Jean Genet (1943)): A Revolutionary Vision of Emancipation Through Sensuality, the Film is a Song of Love Both Universal and Eternal.
I recently had the fortunate opportunity to have rediscovered Jean Genet’s acclaimed and only film, Un Chant d’Amour (“A Love Song”, LS below), the only film produced and directed by Genet, and a masterpiece of homoeroticism.
The film was banned for decades by prudish censors, courts, critics in France, the UK, the United States, and elsewhere because it was an unembellished statement by the French gay author, playwright, and novelist, of the beauty and passion of the masculine spirit in its raw physicality and tender sensitivity. The short film, a mere 28 minutes long from start to finish, portrays the would be hardened criminals in their cells enacting various erotic acts, including undisguised masturbation, and their voyeuristic warden, who appears obsessed with their performances. Genet portrays the confined untamed masculine spirit as represented by the prisoners, and the envious, hypocritical, lascivious eye of society enjoying the spectacle but doing so as a controlling and oppressive power.
I could not avoid relating my interpretation of the LS film to what I understand to be the essence of homoerotic Tantra and Mascul-IN-Touch℠ in contemporary western society.
There is a wide chasm separating an author’s attempt to show that love between men, a love disparaged by society and impaired by toxic cultural conditioning, that such love can still persist in spite of human weaknesses and compelled depravity, and an author’s decision to apparently deprive his characters of any redeeming characteristics ‘whatsoever, apart from physical beauty or ambiguous sexual charm. Note that I write “apparently” in its connotation of “appearing as if” or “seemingly” because I read Genet as pointing to the character’s depravity as being in the eye of society and not in the souls of the characters. Their crimes are mere metaphors of their failure to fit the mold society has provided for them, they refuse to wear the oppressive mask of “acceptability” merely to please the closeted and corrupt institutions.
The LS is based on Genet’s novel Journal du voleur (“Thief’s Diary”), which has been described as perhaps Jean Genet’s most authentically autobiographical novel, personifying his quest for spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil. But I take issue with that description because I do not interpret Genet’s description of “evil” as a ”quest for “spiritual glory through the pursuit of evil,” rather as an exposé of why “evil” is a product of society itself and its marginalization of those who dare to be different. I would agree that there is a spirituality in Genet’s exposés but the spirituality, regrettably, falls below the radar of western exclusivist society-at-large. Perhaps Genet earned the epithet of France’s “Black Prince of Letters,” but for the wrong reasons.
Indeed, Jean Genet may appear to suggest in his debut novel, “Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers,” (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (1943)) that all homoerotic expression is, in the final analysis, doomed to frustration: the attractive male is desirable because of his virile masculinity, but he immediately loses this attraction when he responds to his homoerotic nature, expresses his feminine principle, or in demeanor or language appears excessively feminine. After all, isn’t the clearest sign of virility an intense and exclusive desire for “real” women. I suggest that there is an underlying fallacy in that absurd moralizing assumption. Mignon-les-petits-pieds (“Darling Dainty-Foot”),[2] the Montmartre pimp in the novel, may well proclaim that ‘A male who fucks another male is a double male’, but as Genet suggests, and as Sartre makes explicit, this is not at all the case. [3] He is merely “a female without realising it,” and the longer Mignon associates with Divine, his transvestite lover, the more feminine he becomes.[4] Both Mignon’s and Sartre’s statements are exaggerated but make their point; sexuality and gender are not the same, sex is purposively procreative, gender is an ambiguous, even arbitrary social construct, and artifice; the masculine complements the feminine — the one principle cannot exist without the other.[5]
Actually, there’s a great mythology here about a young man (in the novel, Louis Culafroy), who becomes a stereotype (the notorious Montmartre drag queen Divine), has an affair with an outwardly sexy “pimp” (in the novel, Mignon), and a handsome criminal (in the novel, the murderer called “Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs” (Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers)), and then dies (in the novel of TB, the AIDS of the era). These portrayals are full of male beauty, sensuality, homoeroticism, passion, suffering, and death. But if we go beneath the surface, we find there sensitive, passionate men, and in the superbly directed and silent scenes, portrayals of beautiful males symbolically imprisoned and subjected to the hypocritical voyeurism of society, and the culture of conditioning, oppression and control. Genet portrays the drowning of the divine masculine spirit; but the divine masculine spirit refuses to suffocate. In the novel and in the film, the beautiful male actors continue to tease, to masturbate, to dance, to live — while society attempts to confine them and to steal glimpses of their unbridled freedom. It’s purest genius and every man seeking his homoerotic self and awakening of his divine masculinity should gorge himself on this film.
These remarks do draw attention to one of the several ways in which Genet’s prose and poems — and the films based on them — enlarge the reader’s or the viewers imaginative experience by enabling him to see how the world can appear to the gay man: the gay man sees the world as inhabited by handsome desirable males, whose crotches, buttocks, waists, thighs and shoulders glow with the same kind of erotic sensuality, the same qualities which the so-called straight male find attractive in a female. And, in isolation or confinement, the straight man find just as attractive in other men, and does not hesitate to taste of the forbidden fruit.[6]
The storyline and the characters of Genet’s masterwork are extraordinary metaphors for what I speak of in homoerotic Tantra and Mascul-IN-Touch as the toxic cultural conditioning and the oppression of the divine masculine, and suppression of the western man’s expression of the feminine principle, the Śakti principle.
In the darkness and tragedy of the Genet work, and despite the fact that it takes place in a dark prison, the only characters men isolated in confining cells, we can discern a free masculine spirit of energy, inventiveness, creativity, versatility, playfulness, spontaneity seems to enliven the individuals and channel the relationships. We can learn from such dark portrayals that a man cannot live a one-note symphony; it will become oppressive very fast. Moreover, quite realistically, the ingenious communication and feedback between the men, despite the walls of their cells is incredibly inspiring as well.
Just as the prisoners in the Genet novels and the film are individualized, categorized in their cells, and just as the prisoners are subjected to the voyeurism of a “bi- or gay curious” guard [viz. society; in Orwellian terms, the Love Police, the Thought Police], western men find themselves in an analogous situation. That situation requires them to be “innovative,” “resourceful,” “flexible,” “versatile,” in their expressions of their eroticism, sensuality, and spirituality.
The splendidly attractive males whom Genet presents in his poems and in his novels, many of which were made into films, are soon revealed in a very different light. Maurice Pilorge, for example, is described in Le Condamne a Mort as a beautiful Greek shepherd, with “eyes like roses” and “hair powdered with clear stars of steel.” Yet on the very first page of Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers, Genet reveals to the reader that Maurice killed his lover, Escudero, to rob him of less than a thousand francs, a pittance. Stilitano,[7] whom Genet follows “around Spain and Holland with dog-like devotion,” is a coward. Divers, the handsomest boy at Mettray[8] is syphilitic and betrays his accomplice Harcamone to the police, and even Querelle,[9] the most virile and enterprising of Genet’s pretty-boy social deviants, feels the need to do penance for his crimes by having masochistic relationships with a pimp and a policeman. It seems that the burden of male beauty and homoeroticism has to be offset by some sort flaw, the more egregious the better, for the homoerotic male to titillate the interest of readers and viewers.
Genet’s characters are beautiful men, desirable, men who are in many cultural respects gender-ambiguous, countercultural, and accordingly suspect; they need to be sequestered, physically or socially, and monitored. Such men are a threat to the status quo, its institutions, its power and control structure. Such men are dangerous.
In Genet’s writings, he presents these beautiful men as indeed gender-ambiguous but also as social stereotypes of a contrived masculinity and femininity, the one concealing the other, and if you experience Un Chant d’Amour appreciating this observation, you will better understand the metaphor that the entire short film in fact is.
My interpretation of Genet’s motive in presenting his characters as exquisitely beautiful men, who are ardently desired by other men is simply the fact that society has forced such androgynous men into 
“deviance” and antisocial behavior; their spirits are free and countercultural, society strives to control them even if it means imprisoning them in real cells or by social marginalization. Such physically perfect men, men who are complete in expressing both their masculinity and their complementary feminine principle, that is, they are homoerotic, take advantage of their physical desirability to express their inner rage against society for pushing them to the edge of despair. They avenge themselves on those who grasp at their external beauty by inflicting on them the consequences of the evil that is born of their rage against toxic cultural conditioning. The homoerotic genius, Genet, hurls these men, the pretty boys and their lovers, and their rebellion, their crimes into the lap of society, with the outrage and anger of a all oppressed males, who have been deprived of the freedom to be homoerotic, homophilic, to physically, emotionally and spiritually love other men, to be homosexual. These men are the homosexual writer’s literary accusation and condemnation of a cruel and intolerant society that at the time made social monsters of homoerotic masculine gods.
Genet’s insistence on ramming the depravity and deprivation, stupidity and degradation, the depth and beauty of his heroes down the reader’s throat is the most effective homoerotic aphrodisiac and a wake-up call that a moralizing writer could find. But there is a wide difference between showing that love can still persist in spite of cultural oppression, social condemnation, intolerance, imposed weaknesses and compelled perversity, and the writer’s decision to deprive his characters of any redeeming features whatsoever apart from physical attractiveness, virility, and a somewhat ambiguous sexual charm. The love that can persist is the insistent homophobic message of the artist, however; the deprivation of the characters of any redeeming features apart from physical beauty and erotic charm is the message society has articulated.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his famous Saint Genet as an analysis of Genet’s work and life but most especially of Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers. Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers made Genet, in Sartre’s mind at least, a poster child of existentialism and most especially an embodiment of that existentialist views on freedom of the individual person as a free and responsible actor determining his own development through acts of his will.
If what Sartre proposes and presents is credible, Jean Genet may be a very acceptable poster boy for Homoerotic Tantra℠ and Mascul-IN-Touch℠.
Notes
[1] Genet, Jean, Marc C. Chaimowicz, and Phil King. The Studio of Giacometti. , 2013. Print
[2] The pun made with the French term “mignon,” which means darling but is also a slang word for a passive homosexual, should not be lost when discussing the gender ambiguity of many of Genet’s characters, most obvious in his transvestite characters, particularly Divine.
[3] Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Bernard Frechtman. Saint Genêt, Actor and Martyr. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.
[4] I interpret feminine as used here to connote longing, desire, vulnerability, surrender, tenderness, compassion.]
[5] For a detailed study of Genet, see Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Bernard Frechtman. Saint Genêt, Actor and Martyr. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, and the article by the same authors in The Tulane Drama Review. Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1963), pp. 18-36.
[6] Thody, Philip. Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays. New York: Stein and Day, 1970. p.42
[7] The name Stilitano connotes a restless spirit seeking freedom, opportunities to enjoy life, and whose intense spiritually and powerful soul urge can sting or charm. His intention is to make love, to go places and to do things. The name suggests an individual who is very adventurous and willing to take risk to achieve his objectives. New ways and new experiences can’t satisfy his restless nature. One adventure leads you to another. Personal growth is vital for such a man, and it is difficult for him to be tied down by rules and obligations.
[8] The Mettray referred to here is the Mettray Penal Colony, which was situated in the small village of Mettray, north of the city of Tours. The Mettray reformatory was a private facility, established in 1840 for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents between 6 and 21 years old.
[9] Querelle in French means a “quarrel, feud, altercation, vendetta.”
Homoerotic Yogic Tantra & Masculine Intimacy 