Dear Jean Genet,
I knew you first from your saliva
The beautiful face of a boy covered in spit from his
Classmates (bullies? Lovers? Redeeming cruel angels?)
Todd Haynes filmed it in 1991
Covering your words in narcissus pink
A fragment of his triptic
on the way media portrays queerness:
pornography, villany or tragedy

Dear Genet, you chose pornography
Because it was the only moral option

Your fantasies sprout in tendrils among us
Polluting references with your wondrous Evil
Capitalized Evil
John Waters chose to name his muse after your most beautiful book
your most depraved
your most useful
By useful you meant a novel you could masturbate to
Is there any other definition of useful?

Your fantasies
are full of semi-erected cocks and me
(out of print Spanish translations)
I find shafts and manhoods
Euphemisms
Ridiculous masculine words
Maybe you would have liked them

I never knew if you liked
The pre-vaporwave universe
Fassbinder drew and painted for your Querelle
I like the endless sunsets on cardboard landscapes
The gaze of forever frustrated lust from Franco Nero
Who made a lot of films with Sergio Corbucci
Who made my favourite western
The Great Silence
Where the wretched of the earth end up losing
But they are always beautiful

Dear Genet, I always come back to the cinema
don’t I
Let’s go back to the cinema

It’s London 2017
A friend of mine hosts an evening of short films
Around the theme of queer liberation
The first screening is Un Chant d’Amour
Your tiny voyeuristic miracle from 1950
Made with the money from a night club
I say tiny because it’s just 26 minutes long
A whole universe
50% art 50% wanking material
To protect your collaborators
In case of an obscenity trial
your name is the only one listed  in the credits
You had been an outlaw before
What else could they do to you?

You did it all first
Before Pasolini, even
Without you, for sure
We wouldn’t have had Kenneth Anger
Who died last year and
Whose loss
Still echoes in me like a painful preview
Of the aseptic apocalypse on the horizon

Dear Genet,
What would you have made of our times
So strangely puritanical?
Our stories desexualized
Family-oriented queerness
Genocide-aiding homonationalism
Always playing respectability politics police
As if there was any version of ourselves
(Small enough harmless enough acceptable enough)
That could ensure our endurance in a system that wants us gone

You wrote novels with only two goals in mind:
Sexual arousal
And to protect the dead
The only two honest objectives in life
One we’ve already praised
It’s 2024 and we need to pay attention to the other

If we are the inverted perverted
Let’s invert the terms and pervert the language
Is there such a thing as winning on paper?
“My victory is verbal” you once said
Making a career out of Walter Benjamin’s precept
We have to protect the dead because the enemy has never stopped winning
You wanted to protect the scum
The excrement
And all the beautiful things
That Good in capital letters
Insists on calling
Filthy

Dear Genet the enemy has never stopped winning

Dear Jean Genet
Let’s hope we are
Like you always unclean
Always unacceptable
Let us hope for more spitting on beautiful faces
Thick armpit hair
Semi-erect cocks
Criminal children
Judges in costume to kiss your feet
Carolinas on parade
Counterfeit money and illegal border crossings
Murdering the mistress of the house
(for real this time)
Cigarette smoke shared in shotgunning kisses
And this bouquet of wildflowers I slip between the bars
Of your cell, my love

Let us be as villainous
Unnatural
And perverse
As we are thought of
As we are named
Because if the enemy chooses our names
Let us
(at least)
Prove him right

---

Lara Alonso Corona is a queer writer from the north of Spain. They studied Film and TV before making the decision to write in a second language and move to London. Their fiction has appeared in venues like Literary Orphans, Whiskey Island, Betty Fedora and the Pilot Press anthology on queer sickness, among others. They are the current reviews editor at the literary magazine minor literature[s]. They now live in Madrid. Twitter: @lalonsocorona