KDRK · 20.12 · The Darkroom · essay · September 20, 2026

Matinee

Making Love at Brookdale East, Querelle at the Campus, and the Genet that came after.

In February 1982 a movie opened at Brookdale East, the theater near where I grew up, and I went to see it more than once. Making Love was a Twentieth Century Fox picture with Kate Jackson, Michael Ontkean, and Harry Hamlin, about a doctor with a good marriage who falls in love with a man. The Minnesota Daily's arts weekly had run a review the day before it opened. The reviewer wrote that for fifteen years Hollywood's gay man had been either a monster in bondage gear or a hairdresser, and that this was perhaps the first big-budget American film to treat gay men as people. The paper had given away free preview tickets in January. I did not need the free ticket. I paid, and then I paid again. This is about two films I paid to see more than once, in 1982 and 1983, and the books they sent me to.

It is a careful film. Everybody in it is kind. Zack and Claire have a house and a future. Bart is a novelist who does not want to be anyone's future. The camera never raises its voice. What it did, in a suburban theater in the winter of 1982, was put two men in a bedroom and let the audience decide whether to stay. I stayed. I remember the film less than I remember watching the room.

Oak and Washington

Eighteen months later, in the fall of 1983, the Campus Theatre at Oak and Washington was showing Querelle. All seats a dollar fifty. The ad in the Daily called it Fassbinder's final statement, which it was. He had died the summer before, at thirty-seven, with the film finished and not yet released. The Campus was next door to Schlotzsky's and The Lotus, which between them handled most of my lunches, so a matinee after class took no planning at all. I saw it several times that fall. The showtimes are still in the ad: 1:30, 3:30, 5:30.

Querelle is set in Brest and never once looks like Brest. Fassbinder built the port on a soundstage and lit it like a sunset that has decided not to end. The stone bollards on the quay are shaped the way you think they are shaped. Brad Davis is Querelle, a sailor who kills, steals, and lets himself be taken, and who is loved from a distance by his lieutenant, Franco Nero, who writes it all down in a journal we hear read aloud. Jeanne Moreau runs the bar and sings Oscar Wilde's line about each man killing the thing he loves, over and over, in a voice that has given up on the idea of being surprised. A game of dice at the bar decides who goes upstairs with whom. Nothing in the film is natural and nothing in it pretends to be.

Making Love had asked to be let in. Querelle did not ask. It had been made by a man who knew he was dying, from a book by a man who had written it in prison, and it did not care whether Minneapolis approved.

What was next door to the theater

I went to the bookstore. Our Lady of the Flowers first, then The Thief's Journal, then the rest.

Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers in a cell at Fresnes in 1942, on the brown paper prisoners were given to make into bags. It is a novel about Divine, Darling, and Our Lady, a drag queen, a pimp, and a murderer, in a Montmartre that Genet builds out of his own bed. The saints are thieves. The cathedral is a garret. Everything the world had told him was low, he lifted, one sentence at a time, until it was the only thing in the book that was high.

The Thief's Journal is the same act performed on his own life. Spain in the thirties, the Barrio Chino in Barcelona, a one-handed thief named Stilitano whom he adores, beggars, sailors, prisons in three countries. Genet names the three virtues he has chosen, betrayal, theft, and homosexuality, and he means virtues. He is telling you what a saint looks like when the church has been taken away.

Sartre had written six hundred pages about him thirty years before I got there and called the book Saint Genet. I did not know that yet. Sartre found me two years later, and when he did, Genet was the reason I already knew what he meant by making yourself out of what you had been made into.

Minneapolis, 1983

I have tried to say what those books did and the plainest version is the one I have always used: they opened my eyes to a different world from Minneapolis, Minnesota. A harder one. Genet's world is cold, hungry, and mostly in jail. What it had was a writer who had decided that the things my city kept off the page were the whole page, and that beauty was a decision he was allowed to make about whatever he had been handed. A sailor. A cell. A sheet of brown paper.

That is a photographer's idea, and I did not know that yet either. You do not choose the light. You choose what to do with it.