Prior to achieving success as a novelist, poet and playwright, Jean Genet spent three of his teenage years in a French penal colony, joined, and was subsequently drummed out of the French Foreign Legion for committing "indecent acts", embarked on a career as a petty thief and prostitute, and found himself in and out of prison for various and sundry crimes. In fact, Genet wrote his first novel Our Lady of the Flowers , while residing in the hoosegow. After finally finagling an introduction to the great French Renaissance Man, Jean Cocteau , Genet found a champion for his work. Additionally, it was only through the efforts of Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre that Genet was able to avoid serving a life sentence for his numerous criminal offenses. In 1945, Genet anonymously penned the transgressive Querelle de Brest , a novel heavy with erotic gay content and explicit images illustrated by Cocteau, himself. The story of a sexually magnetic (and homicidal) sailor at...
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While it is sometimes illogical and often feels like a Lifetime melodrama for gay men, the pages of P.J. Vernon's Bath Haus fly by at warp speed and delivers on the promise of its subtitle: A Thriller . Bath Haus thrills and chills, even when you want to throttle its chief protagonist, Oliver, for being so stupid. Pretty-boy Oliver is a 20-something year old recovering addict living in grand Georgetown splendor with his older (by 10 years), wealthier and more stable lover/benefactor, Nathan, a trauma surgeon who has fallen--hopelessly--in love with this wayward child of a broken home, broken dreams and broken lives. For his part, Oliver, determined to do right by Nathan, teeters constantly on the edge, fighting his urges to return to the drugs that almost took his life before Nathan entered it and saved him from himself. Oliver appreciates and loves Nathan as his knight-in-shining-armor, yet he also resents Nathan's need to monitor his comings and goings, to control him. One...