Portrait
Jean Genet
Born
19 December 1910Paris, France
Died
15 April 1986Paris, France · aged 75
Writer and playwrightFrance40th anniversary of death

Jean Genet

A writer who turned criminality, exclusion and desire into an unsettling literary world.

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. Placed with a foster family in rural France, he later passed through a reformatory, military service, desertion and repeated imprisonment. Those experiences became material for writing that challenged the values through which society judged him.

He began “Our Lady of the Flowers” in prison in 1942. Its thieves, sex workers and drag queens occupy a world in which shame can become beauty and desire between men carries an intense imaginative force. “Miracle of the Rose” and “The Thief’s Journal” continued the transformation of experience into deliberately unstable self-portraiture.

Writers including Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre supported him when further punishment threatened his freedom; a presidential pardon followed. Sartre’s “Saint Genet” helped establish his reputation. Genet’s plays, including “The Maids”, “The Balcony”, “The Blacks” and “The Screens”, moved his questions about power, performance and revolt onto the stage.

In later life he supported the Black Panthers and Palestinian struggles, turning again to the lives of people confronting state power. He died in a Paris hotel in 1986, aged 75, and was buried in Larache, Morocco.

More in December

01DecBorn 198541st birthday

Janelle Monáe

A musician and actor whose imagined worlds opened into increasingly direct expressions of queer desire.

01DecBorn 197650th birthday

Matthew Shepard

The murder of the 21-year-old student in Wyoming shook America – and led to a federal hate crimes law.

01DecDied 198739th anniversary of death

James Baldwin

A writer whose accounts of race, sexuality and belonging confronted the stories America told about itself.

02DecBorn 197848th birthday

Jason Collins

An NBA player whose decision to come out made a private truth a public milestone in men’s sport.

02DecBorn 194680th birthday

Gianni Versace

A fashion designer whose vivid clothes brought classical imagery, celebrity and sexuality onto the same stage.

02DecDied 199036th anniversary of death

Aaron Copland

His ballets and concert works helped define an American orchestral sound. He also made room for younger composers as a teacher, conductor and mentor.

03DecDied 20224th anniversary of death

Jim Kolbe

A moderate Republican congressman from Arizona, he came out in 1996 – and was re-elected five more times.

04DecDied 197650th anniversary of death

Benjamin Britten

His partnership with tenor Peter Pears shaped both his private life and some of the most distinctive music of the twentieth century.

04DecDied 196264th anniversary of death

Anna Vock

Known as “Mammina”, she helped sustain the Swiss organising and publishing networks from which “Der Kreis” emerged.

04DecDied 198046th anniversary of death

Stanisława Walasiewicz

An Olympic sprint champion whose intersex body became a tabloid sensation after she was killed in a robbery.

05DecBorn 193294th birthday

Little Richard

The “Architect of Rock and Roll” wore make-up and pompadours in the 1950s – and spent his life torn between his queerness and his faith.

05DecBorn 197353rd birthday

Caleb Orozco

Attacked and threatened, he went to court alone against Belize’s colonial sodomy law – and won: “the first day of my life in which it is legal for me to be me.”

06DecBorn 1893133rd birthday

Sylvia Townsend Warner

The author of “Lolly Willowes” lived for almost forty years with the poet Valentine Ackland – and is buried with her.

07DecDied 199036th anniversary of death

Reinaldo Arenas

Persecuted in Cuba as a gay man and dissident, he escaped in 1980 and wrote his memoir “Before Night Falls” while dying of AIDS.

07DecDied 197056th anniversary of death

Romaine Brooks

Her grey-toned portraits of women in top hats and tailored coats are icons of 1920s lesbian Paris – where she loved Natalie Barney for fifty years.

08DecDied 195472nd anniversary of death

Claude Cahun

Cahun and Marcel Moore used photography to unsettle fixed identities and later worked together in resistance to Nazi occupation.

09DecBorn 199234th birthday

Erika Hilton

A Brazilian politician who brought the experience of a Black trans woman into national politics.

09DecBorn 1717309th birthday

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

The founder of modern art history celebrated the beauty of Greek statues of young men – and wrote passionate letters to his male friends.

09DecDied 199135th anniversary of death

Berenice Abbott

She photographed the Paris avant-garde, helped preserve Atget’s archive and documented a changing New York.

10DecBorn 1830196th birthday

Emily Dickinson

A poet whose private world opened into an extraordinary range of language, feeling and thought.

10DecBorn 196264th birthday

Cássia Eller

Her powerful interpretations made her a Brazilian rock star; after her death, her partner’s care of their son became a landmark family case.

11DecBorn 1913113th birthday

Jean Marais

An actor, sculptor and potter, Jean Marais brought Jean Cocteau’s imagined worlds to the screen and became one of France’s most recognisable stars.

12DecBorn 197254th birthday

Brandon Teena

His murder exposed both anti-trans violence and the consequences of a sheriff’s failure to protect him.

12DecDied 196858th anniversary of death

Tallulah Bankhead

A stage star famous for her husky voice, her wit and her “dahling” – who made no secret of loving both men and women.

13DecBorn 1895131st birthday

Lucía Sánchez Saornil

An avant-garde poet who wrote love poems to women under a male name – and co-founded the anarchist women’s movement Mujeres Libres.

13DecDied 198343rd anniversary of death

Mary Renault

Her novels about ancient Greece told of love between men with a dignity few dared – and she lived for fifty years with Julie Mullard.

14DecBorn 196660th birthday

Lucrecia Martel

One of the most acclaimed filmmakers in the world, she turns the sticky heat of northern Argentina into unsettling cinema.

15DecBorn 1913113th birthday

Muriel Rukeyser

A poet who went wherever injustice was – and lived as a bisexual single mother at a time when both were scandalous.

15DecDied 20215th anniversary of death

bell hooks

Her writing connected race, gender and class with questions of education, belonging and love.

16DecBorn 1901125th birthday

Margaret Mead

America’s most famous anthropologist showed that gender roles are shaped by culture – and loved both men and women.

16DecDied 196561st anniversary of death

W. Somerset Maugham

Once the highest-paid author in the world, he lived on the Riviera for decades with his partner Gerald Haxton.

16DecDied 198838th anniversary of death

Sylvester

“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”: the disco star with the falsetto voice never hid who he was – and left his royalties to fight AIDS.

17DecBorn 198739th birthday

Chelsea Manning

Her disclosure of classified material and her fight for recognition as a trans woman brought military secrecy and individual rights into public debate.

17DecDied 20251st anniversary of death

Rosa von Praunheim

With a 1971 film whose title said it all – “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives” – he sparked the gay movement in West Germany.

17DecDied 198739th anniversary of death

Marguerite Yourcenar

The author of “Memoirs of Hadrian” was the first woman elected to the Académie française – and lived for forty years with Grace Frick.

18DecDied 199333rd anniversary of death

Joe Carstairs

Tattooed, in men’s suits and openly lesbian, the “fastest woman on water” raced powerboats and bought her own island in the Bahamas.

19DecDied 194383rd anniversary of death

Eva Kotchever

A Jewish writer and café owner whose book preserved an early portrait of lesbian life in New York.

20DecDied 194383rd anniversary of death

Anita Augspurg

Germany’s first woman with a law doctorate fought for women’s suffrage, peace and resistance to the rising far right.

20DecDied 20179th anniversary of death

Wolfgang Lauinger

Persecuted by the Gestapo, imprisoned again under Paragraph 175 in 1950 – and refused compensation until his death at 99.

21DecBorn 194680th birthday

Rebecca Allison

A cardiologist from Mississippi, she transitioned in 1993 and fought within the American Medical Association for better care for trans patients.

22DecBorn 1899127th birthday

Gustaf Gründgens

Germany’s most famous Mephisto was widely known to love men – and was protected by Göring while other gay men were sent to camps.

22DecBorn 198541st birthday

Kae Tempest

A poet who fills concert halls, Tempest came out as non-binary in 2020 and as a trans man in 2025.

22DecDied 193987th anniversary of death

Ma Rainey

The “Mother of the Blues” sang about loving women and wearing a collar and tie – in 1928.

22DecDied 20197th anniversary of death

Ram Dass

The Harvard psychologist turned spiritual teacher wrote “Be Here Now” – and spoke late in life about loving men as well as women.

23DecBorn 1888138th birthday

Christa Winsloe

She wrote “Mädchen in Uniform”, one of the first films to portray love between women with sympathy – and was murdered with her partner in 1944.

24DecBorn

Stormé DeLarverie

According to many witnesses, her fight with police at the Stonewall Inn sparked the uprising of 1969 – she was called “the Rosa Parks of the gay community”.

24DecBorn 1926100th birthday

Maria Janion

Poland’s great scholar of Romanticism challenged nationalism and the Catholic Church – and came out as a lesbian in her eighties.

24DecBorn 197155th birthday

Ricky Martin

The “King of Latin Pop” came out in 2010 as a “fortunate homosexual man” – one of the biggest stars to do so.

24DecDied 1864162nd anniversary of death

Heinrich Hössli

A Swiss milliner whose historical research became an early defence of love between men.

25DecBorn 1908118th birthday

Quentin Crisp

With dyed hair and make-up in 1930s London, Crisp defied a hostile world – and became a queer icon with “The Naked Civil Servant”.

25DecDied 201610th anniversary of death

George Michael

A pop singer and songwriter who turned public scrutiny into a more openly self-directed career.

26DecBorn 194581st birthday

Maxine Feldman

“Angry Atthis”, written in 1969, is considered the first openly lesbian song of the women’s music movement.

27DecBorn 1901125th birthday

Marlene Dietrich

In a top hat and tuxedo she kissed a woman on screen in 1930 – and loved men and women all her life.

27DecBorn 196165th birthday

Guido Westerwelle

A German liberal politician who became the country’s first openly gay foreign minister.

28DecBorn 1882144th birthday

Lili Elbe

A Danish painter who became one of the first women to undergo gender-affirming surgery – her story inspired “The Danish Girl”.

28DecBorn 1888138th birthday

F. W. Murnau

A silent-film director who found new ways to make movement, light and shadow tell a story.

28DecBorn 193294th birthday

Manuel Puig

His novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman” put a gay man and a revolutionary in one prison cell – and became a worldwide success.

28DecDied 201412th anniversary of death

Leelah Alcorn

A 17-year-old trans girl whose death in 2014 moved the world – and led to bans on conversion therapy for minors.

28DecDied 200422nd anniversary of death

Susan Sontag

The great essayist of “Notes on ‘Camp’” and “On Photography” loved women, among them Annie Leibovitz – but rarely spoke about it.

29DecBorn 197056th birthday

Dejan Nebrigić

A founder of Serbia’s first gay and lesbian organisation, he brought the country’s first case of homophobic discrimination to court – and was murdered on his 29th birthday.

29DecBorn 196759th birthday

Lilly Wachowski

The co-creator of “The Matrix” came out as trans in 2016 – and later confirmed that the film was always a trans story.

29DecDied 200125th anniversary of death

Cássia Eller

Her powerful interpretations made her a Brazilian rock star; after her death, her partner’s care of their son became a landmark family case.

29DecDied 199927th anniversary of death

Dejan Nebrigić

A founder of Serbia’s first gay and lesbian organisation, he brought the country’s first case of homophobic discrimination to court – and was murdered on his 29th birthday.

30DecBorn 1910116th birthday

Paul Bowles

The author of “The Sheltering Sky” lived in Tangier for 52 years – in an unconventional marriage with the writer Jane Bowles, each loving their own sex.

31DecDied 199333rd anniversary of death

Brandon Teena

His murder exposed both anti-trans violence and the consequences of a sheriff’s failure to protect him.