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
