I recently discovered remaindered copies of Jean Genet’s classic Querelle of Brest at Whitcoulls, and promptly picked up a shiny new copy to replace my dilapidated old one.

I was almost twenty when I encountered Querelle for the first time, as well as the work of Jean Genet himself. Genet was a French gay badboy author, but his misfortunes didn’t originate from his sexual orientation- France had decriminalised male homosexuality back in 1805, during the Napoleonic era.

He was born into impoverished rural French circumstances, and experienced his first gay love in an adolescent borstal, as related in his early biographical novels, Miracle of the Rose and A Thief’s Journal.

His next book, Funeral Rites, was somewhat more controversial, as it depicted two parallel gay French couples as Liberation Day neared for Paris in 1944, at the end of its Nazi occupation. In one case, the relationship is egalitarian and tender, while in the case of the Nazi soldier Erich and his collaborationist militia partner, there’s a loveless scene of frenzied coupling atop the rooftops of Paris as the bullets fly.  The latter couple die, but their sacrifice is meaningless, unlike the gay maquis, who is mourned by his surviving lover.

As for Querelle, it was written and published in France in 1952, Due to the inertia of British censorship laws, some time passed before it was finally translated into English in 1968. In Germany, Rainer Werner Fassbinder filmed it in 1982. Tragically, it was to prove the last project that this magnificent West German gay filmmaker undertook before his drug overdose later that year.

Querelle itself marked a new development for Genet, in which he took advantage of the relative sexual freedom of the sailor subculture on the high seas, away from the restrictions and repression of land-based law. Georges Querelle’s merchant marine vessel docks at Brest, and Querelle himself is an exuberant, guilt-free hedonist who seeks pleasure from other men, and is loved afar by Lieutenant Seblon, the ship’s master.

At the port, he discovers that Robert, his twin, is the kept man of the ageing, but still beautiful, Madame Lysiane, whose body and sexuality are noticeably described in sympathetic terms. Robert is deeply annoyed when Querelle deliberately loses at cards, just so he can play butch bottom to Nono, Lysiane’s African gay ex-sailor husband. As if that wasn’t enough, Querelle enjoys the experience so much that he pays repeat visits to the burly top.

Apart from Nono, Querelle and the repressed Seblon, there are others- Mario is a cop, and Dede is his eighteen year old rent boy lover, while Gil is a labourer and Roger is his sailor boyfriend- but their relationship founders on drug-running. At the end of it all, Querelle embraces Seblon, and their vessel sails away, leaving Lysiane and Robert with wistful memories of his twin and her lover’s doppelganger.

In 2000, Faber and Faber republished Querelle of Brest, and there happily appears to be a surfeit of this classic of gay literature available. Buy it, and savour the work of a French gay literary genius.