By Erik Morse
In the inaugural vignette grotesque of Genet’s 1949 memoir-cum-roman noir Le Journal du voleur, the black prince of literature recalls his childhood travels between Paris and the ruins of Tiffauges. Here, along the verdant slopes of the Loire, was the crime scene of France’s most diabolical pederast and murderer, Lord Gilles de Rais. Genet claims his adoration for the countryside’s eponymous genets (a kind of flower endemic to Europe
also known as Spanish broom) compelled him to worship at their rhizomes while they, in turn, bowed to their human counterpart in a veritable miracle of the rose.
“They know that I am their living, moving, agile representative, conqueror of the wind,” he writes. “They are my natural emblem, but through them I have roots in that French soil which is fed by the powdered bones of the children and youths buggered, massacred, and burned by Gilles des Rais.”
This recurring trope, Genet’s “artifice of the flower” framed his every character and crime from the “spiky blossoms” of Darling Daintyfoot’s theft to the prostitute Divine’s “warm anal stele” to the “decorous pageantry” of Querelle’s murders. Flowers were, for Genet, a synecdoche for beatification growing rampant in the charnel house of absolute evil.
The figure of Steven Morrissey on the Smiths’ 1983 Top of the Pops debut had all of the Dionysian and homoerotic charge of Genet’s underworld flaneur. With his chiseled, Northern jaw line, coiffed pompadour, and back pocket overflowing with gladioli, Morrissey summoned, in his melodramatic rendition of “This Charming Man,” the saintly icons of condemned playboys Weidmann and Pilorge who adorned Genet’s cell at Sante prison.
The lachrymose crooner achieved a similar macabre infamy, penning odes to the victims of the Moors Murders and using gay icons Joe Dallesandro and Terence Stamp on the Smiths’ album covers. During a 1986 “graveyard” photo session for the New Musical Express where he mused to a reporter, “I can stand in a graveyard for hours and hours, just inhaling the individuals. When they lived, when they died, it’s all inspiring,” he inspired a new generation to mourn the slaughter of the innocents.