Jean Genet
Jean Genet was born in France in 1910. His mother was a prostitute who abandoned him at a young age. He was put into foster care. His adoptive parents told him the truth about his birth mother, and they were abusive parents who were struggling with poverty. This made him start stealing at the age of 10. He ended up going to a juvenile prison called Mettray Reformatory at age 16, where a lot of the boys were having gay sex. He realized that he really enjoyed it. After getting out of prison in his early 20’s, he enlisted for the Foreign Legion, gathered the signup bonus money, and then quickly ran away. It became an almost natural transition for him to begin earning money-turning tricks for sailors. He also continued to steal, and smuggled drugs for gangs. He was arrested multiple times as an adult, and passed the time by writing stories about his life.
His autobiography called Our Lady of the Flowers went over all of the details of his sex work at a young age. He told salacious stories of pimps and prostitutes, wild sexual fantasies, and even described a murder. The book became a famous piece of homosexual literature. It was so popular that he went on to write several other novels and plays that were well-read by the gay community in Paris.
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was another famous French writer from that time, Jean Genet lied about his difficult childhood. Sartre claims that Genet was given up by an unwed mother, and that his foster parents were farmers who gave him a lot of love and attention, and that he made up the whole sob story as an excuse for why he ended up being such a bad kid who grew up to be a criminal. Either way, Genet’s colorful past gave him a lot of material for his novels, and his work is still being read to this day.