Irma the Deuce: Genet’s The Balcony and Some Problems of Bisexuality

Abstract

Rereading Jean Genet’s The Balcony in preparation for writing this paper, I was reminded of an experience I had in Istanbul, Turkey, where I lived in 1989. While there, I worked for an English-language newspaper, and one of my assignments was to write a feature story about the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. I interviewed the patriarch (Demetrios I, who died in 1991) in his audience chamber, a large and shabby room in the patriarchal compound, in a seedy neighbourhood on the southern bank of the Golden Horn, which then smelled, on most days, of untreated sewage. The patriarchate is one of the last remnants of Greek culture in Turkey: the patriarchate’s ability to remain in Istanbul is underwritten by international convention, but its presence in Turkey, since the Turkish War of Independence in the 1920s and the eradication of Greek culture (and Greeks!) in Anatolia, has barely been tolerated by successive Turkish governments.