Word: genet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...modern America. The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse '70s and the plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare as any writer in history...
...Tuesday in March, White meets a visitor at the Providence railroad station. "Both Diane Von Furstenberg's daughter Tatiana and Jane Fonda's daughter Vanessa Vadim are in my writing class, and Ann Charters -- do you know who she is? -- she wrote a biography on Kerouac -- is in my Genet class," White says breathlessly. On the way home, he stops off at a student's house to pick up a copy of Genet's The Screens. "Isn't he cute," White says of the student when he returns to the car. "I have to avert my eyes when I talk...
That afternoon White and his class of 30 view a BBC interview with Genet. It's something the class has been looking forward to for weeks, and a strong buzz of intellectual fervor is in the air, academia at its best. But before running the video, White has an announcement. It seems that next week there will be someone in the class to evaluate...