Two convicts make love though a hole in the wall, a hole so tiny that the only object that can pass through it is a straw and the only love that can be made is one convict blowing smoke into the other’s mouth.

This is the most famous scene in the dank and languid Un Chant d’Amour (A Song of Love), an underground film made in the year 1950 — an antique prehistoric moment before the emergence of a forthright gay sensibility — by Jean Genet, France’s most acclaimed thief, pornographer and poet of perversity. (You can watch the complete 25-minute film below, after the break.)

And when I say perversity, I’m not being flip or using an egregious code word for “homosexual” favored by haters of gay people. No, Genet had — or perhaps, for the sake of his art, for the “beauty of the gesture,” affected to have — a most Satanic taste for true perversity: he once wrote that the greatest act of love was for one lover to betray the other to the Gestapo, while the accused looked on. (more…)