The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1

by Guillaume Dustan

  Sexuality is one of the foremost pleasures of life and constitutes a reason to live, or in Dustan's case—to survive. Consequently, it must be faithfully recorded: here autobiography is in the service of a “sexual truth” that is affirmed and carefully depicted. This sexual expenditure goes hand in hand with a certain age in life, youth, the true “golden years” for Dustan who, let's not forget, lived and wrote during a very short period of time, barely a decade. Dustan would go on to reverse the ageism he was accused of,6 shifting a negative value into a positive one, by means of a rhetorical strategy well known to avant-gardists and oppressed minorities and about which he would later theorize. Discovered and practiced by a subject who rejected the straitjacket of Western, Judeo-Christian, puritan social and familial constraints, the porn film also had a political side to it. The sex described here was not abstract but was instead the sexual life of a man determined to render a minority excessively visible. There was no need to be militant, all that was required was to show what was being hidden, according to a logic of transparency that remains controversial, depending on whether it fights power, or becomes its accomplice.7 Regardless of that undecidable debate, it nonetheless remains that this logic is at the very core of the autobiographic esthetic and of the criterion of the pleasure (or the rejection) it provokes.

  This baring all was additionally aimed at describing a milieu, his own, that of the hedonistic homosexual night owl who represented an active portion of the gay population in the 1990s. From this perspective, the sociological import of Dustan's literature is undeniable. For those who want to understand a milieu as coded as that of the gay world, there is no better introduction than this first trilogy. The debates around autofiction masked the work of documenting a micro-milieu described by its own actors, a milieu that had never been the object of any deep study, with the exception of a precursor, Renaud Camus. Far from the polemics that poisoned the reception of Camus’ Journal, we mustn't forget the debt that Dustan owed this important author. Tricks, published in 1978 with Hachette/P.O.L., is a masterpiece, and Dustan's great intellectual honesty (he was very generous towards those who influenced him: he named them directly) also consisted of knowing who his predecessors were. Tricks is a list of 85 short accounts of Camus's sexual encounters written in diary-like fashion. So what separates Tricks from the first trilogy? Other than a more structured writing: simply twenty-five years. Tricks came onto the scene during the 1970s, before AIDS, during a sort of happy time that seems unreal to us now, a time that Mathieu Lindon captured in his book Learning What Love Means. Dustan wanted to create his own mimetic code, less correct than the Camusian narrator's (we could also cite other, more discrete sources like Pierre Guyotat or Tony Duvert).

  When Marguerite Duras wrote, “I would rank porn above commercial cinema,” 8 she highlighted an ethical quality that is unique to the genre, one that emphasizes its incapacity to lie about what it has to offer. But for all that, pornographic art entails a totality that restricts its interest to genre literature. There is no break in porn (aside from intermediary scenes, which are, themselves, metaphorically pornographic through the ideas they have of reality), which makes its reception more delicate. Burdened by a purely performative aim, the pornographic genre is either poorly written or excessively well-written. It's because style is actually the locus of the obscene, which is not to be found the representations that it accompanies. Dustan is a true writer for he measured up to this demanding experience, one which opened a new horizon for the uncultured, with an additional pedagogical aim.

  Although physical, porn is no less metaphysical by implication. Theorized as an area of research in its own right—”porn studies” gave an intellectual legitimacy to something previously delegitimized9—porn has left its mark on contemporary literature. It's tempting to offer the following paradox: Dustan brought gay literature out of its ghetto thanks to pornography, that universe that extends beyond the sole question of sexual identity to reveal the contemporary subject. “The true song of the pornographic is that it reveals the essential, the unspeakable essential, the essential as unspeakable: pornography is maddening.” 10 This quote from Georges Molinié underlines the importance of the pornographic as an ethical and esthetic regime that refuses to ennoble the human, but also one that no longer cultivates the transgressive religion of the forbidden. The pornographic neuters both the moralist credo that make it a symptom of modern inanity, as well as the anti-literary stance that laments the role of the exhibitionist. In a recent essay, Laurent de Sutter shows how there is a “tautology of sex” 11 that only refers back to itself. This is a possible definition of pornography, which has two opponents. The first, eroticism, in so much as it embellishes sex with a chatty intentionality; the other, puritanism, in that it tags sexuality as something “outside” the norm so as to diminish its value. At the intersection of subjectivity and de-subjectivation, Dustan's oeuvre is neither chatty nor puritan; through porn it aims at an intense Neutral.12

  Sex and Terror

  Although essential, sexuality is no less indissociable from its counterpart, death, which here carried the name of AIDS. For Dustan, sex was certainly an antidote to his death drive, but it was continually interrupted by it. There was no excessive idealism here, as one can well imagine, and the ambiguity of the text was only the stronger for it; as, far from separating Eros from Thanatos, it blended them inextricably until they bordered on the unbearable. Dustan's vitalism, which is undeniable in his discourse, therefore ran up against a certain limit in this defense of a pleasure that was not devoid of the enormous weight of the guilt that it claimed to fight. An “innocent” reading of Dustan is not possible: we must see in this orgy a ferocious battle pitting the fanatical desire to escape guilt with the Western impossibility of detaching from it. In his magnificent essay, Sex and Terror (which Dustan highly regarded), Pascal Quignard suggests that “pleasure is puritan.” 13

  The Dustanian text was an excessively affirmative declaration of life threatened by death. The radicalness of Dustan's writing was inevitable; it is as if he knew that he had to “liberate” himself from a destiny burdened by the disease. From this point of view, the turnaround between the end of the second to last chapter, “Then I'll be so disgusted with myself that it will finally be time to kill myself,” and the escape abroad in the last chapter stand for the movement of a book oriented towards an exit or salvation. It's not easy to forgo Judeo-Christian morality, and as we know, its complete negation is only the opposite of its presence. Experimenting with the extreme created a disturbing ambiguity, awareness of which was raised by the author when he wrote, “I wonder if it's sinister or if it's good.” 14 Beyond its terrible reality, unsafe sex became a metaphor for a literature haunted by evil. The voluntary direct exposure of his text, at times quite scary, (take Chapter 9 for example, where Dustan gets his testicles pierced) is a sort of manifesto about the harshness of those years. AIDS was still destructive and strategies to combat it required the letting up of behaviors that Dustan did not hide: “everybody's HIV-positive now,” 15 he has a character say. Now is not the time to reopen the debate on this topic; Dustan would lead the charge in the following trilogy, with his disputable and disputed defense of unsafe sex. But the gnawing problem was already present in these pages, similar to porn films where actors don't wear condoms. Real practices must be shown; it is not up to literature to hide the contradictions of reality. Dustan did not cheat us: we can critique the underlying reasons that motivated his actions, but not the representation that he gave of them.

  In My Room has the outrage of beginnings, those which bring to life Baudelaire's quote, “One must enter the literary scene with a thunderclap.” Dear reader, abandon all hope: the despair this text leans up against, written in a purposefully impoverished style, heralds a rise in power. From the outset, an auteur carved out his space in the dark room of sex, death, and writing.

  To Philippe and Philippe

  PART I

  1 Good Intentions<
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  I left Quentin the bedroom. I moved into the little room at the back of the apartment so I wouldn't hear them fucking. A few days later, a week maybe, I thought it was getting to be too much of a downer. I demanded to get my room back. Of course Quentin immediately decided to move himself and Nico into the living room, which meant I would have to bang on the wall to get them to quiet down the nights I had to go to work the next day. As a bonus, I was able to hear Quentin say he was going to kick my ass and Nico replying Sweetie, calm down.

  I was living day to day, not knowing where I was going. It wasn't unpleasant. I am always bored shitless whenever there's nothing going on. This is probably why I was still living with Quentin even though we were no longer together. His most recent idea consisted of entering my room without warning. The first time I was lying on my bed, jerking off, smoking a joint. The door opened. He came in. He said, Did you happen to see my mom's datebook by chance? She thinks she left it here. I didn't answer the question. I said Please knock before coming in. He said I knocked. I said I didn't hear anything. He started asking about the dumb planner again. I said Quentin, get the fuck out, now. He looked stunned. And then he left. It took me another ten minutes before I was able to jerk off properly.

  The second time he knocked. Just as I screamed NO! he came into the room. This time I was literally getting railed on the edge of the bed. I said Get out! Instead, he looked at me all confused. I was furious. I told the other guy Don't stop, he'll leave, he's just doing this to fuck with me. I focused on the sex. Quentin watched us doing it. After a while, he left without saying a word.

  After that, I decided I wouldn't let myself get pushed around anymore. I started yelling systematically every time he got shitty with me. I yelled about the cans of food he didn't replace, the disgusting bathroom, and about the messages he never gave me. I insulted him regularly. Quentin would say nothing. I savored my vengeance. I liked yelling at him with impunity. My good friend Alessandro was living in the little bedroom so that put me at ease. I thought that in the presence of a third party, Quentin wouldn't dare do anything seriously stupid, he liked his comfortable life too much to risk it for prison. And then one day, I was feeling pretty good and I started talking to him like we did before. I talked about what I did the night before with some super hot guy. When I was done, he looked at me and said You like that pretty little mug of yours, don't you? Well, you won't be so proud of it when I throw acid all over it. This shook me up a little. I asked Alessandro if he wanted to share a place with me. I didn't want to live alone. He said OK. As soon as I told Quentin I was going to move out, he started threatening me again. I asked Alessandro to start bringing his girlfriend to the apartment. And then it got to be so unlivable that I ended up moving into Terrier's shitty studio all the way up in the 18th arrondissement.

  Terrier and I were having better and better sex. I had a feeling my presence was doing him some good. I was the first person he told he was HIV-positive. He found out he was positive the first time he went to get tested, he was only twenty—just seven years ago. Ever since he told me, he no longer has these nightmares where someone nails down the coffin lid over him while he pushes against it hard but it never budges and then suddenly he wakes up. I had also given him a makeover. I made him cut his bangs that hid his face and cut his nails that he kept long. It made him a lot better-looking. Maybe even a little less shy.

  I didn't want to move out of my neighborhood. I found another apartment about three blocks away. It was perfect timing. I was a little bothered by the thought that I would still be running into Quentin, but it was a part of the neighborhood where he'd hardly ever go and we didn't have the same schedule. I left him all the appliances and the furniture we'd bought together. I had money anyhow. I bought everything again at Darty one morning as soon as they opened with Terrier. A new life was beginning.

  2 The Meeting

  It was hell with Terrier. He'd get drunk. He'd make a scene at bars as soon as he saw me looking at someone else. I realized he wasn't going to change quickly enough. I told him that I would only see him during the week and that I needed the weekends for myself. I went out alone. The first night, I fucked a guy who was nothing special. The second night, I went to the Keller,1 I got fucked a little first by two guys in the backroom, then I went back to the bar to drink a beer, I felt better, I was a bit paranoid about my look, I was worried my light-brown cowboy boots looked too tacky with my black leather 501s. Fortunately the top half looked great: bare chest, black leather vest.

  Right in front of me, I saw this guy leaning back against the bar. It was his face that kept my attention. He looked very normal, not at all the type of guy to play the pervy, tough leather look. Plus he was cute and had a nice body, was short and clearly older than me. He looked at me indifferently. It was then that I ran into Serge. We'd fucked six years ago when I had just met Quentin (and at Quentin's no less, who was away on vacation at that time). I asked him Do you know that one? He said For one night, it's very nice. And he is very well-hung. This bothered me because I thought now that he had seen me talking to Serge, he knew that I knew he had a big one. It was going to be a lot more difficult to hit on him now.

  I found a spot next to him at the bar, I stood there without looking at him. I waited a little not wanting to appear so obvious. Actually, he was with another guy, a tall blond dressed all in leather, kind of cute, who laughed the whole time. And then after a while, they weren't talking any more. The guy next to me looked straight ahead and then a little to his right. I took advantage of the situation by saying Hey. And then I said nothing so I could play hard to get. He said Hi back. I said My name is Guillaume. He said I'm Stéphane. I said The guy you're with, is he your man? He said No, he's just a friend. I asked Is he a good fuck? He said Yes, why? Do you want me to introduce you to him? I said Uh yeah. He said Éric let me introduce Guillaume. I don't remember what I said to keep this conversation going. And then this big ugly leather guy came up to the group and what was cool is that he started to hit on me saying he wanted to take photos of me. I gave him my number and told him that I was always up for narcissistic activities, then I was rather negative regarding all that was “art,” I told him I didn't give a shit about art. This snobbish asshole asked So what are you into then? I'm into the fuck of the century I said, looking at Stéphane. It worked. I still had to struggle a bit but I ended up bringing him home.

  Serge was right in a way. The first time was nice, in a rabid dog kind of way. I liked what I was seeing in the mirror when he was fucking me from the front. I thought we looked good together. His super big cock hurt a little but I felt the potential. I decided to keep him. Instead of letting him leave I asked him if he was hungry. The fridge was full since I had gone shopping earlier that day. We ate in the kitchen.

  I told him that I thought he was super cute. He tensed up, but not like he was used to that type of compliment, but because he thought I was making fun of him. I told him Just because you have one eye smaller than the other, and one is green and the other blue, and one eyelid is higher than the other, that won't keep me from thinking you're super cute if I think you're super cute. This surprised him. He calmed down a little. I told myself I liked him. I gave him my number. I waited for him to call me.

  3 Country

  I didn't have to wait long. We talked. After a while I said You know, I was pissed that you saw me talking to Serge about you the other night because I thought you knew I knew you had a big dick and I thought that you must have found that tacky to hit on you for that reason. He said it's true that guys are only interested in him for his dick.

  So I proposed that we have a lunch date instead of fucking. He showed up a little late, visibly upset, dressed pretty bad. I had picked a chic place to impress him. Lunch went well. I was not bored. We decided to meet up again to fuck at my place because his boyfriend was at his place. That next date, I jerked our dicks off together, mine was seven inches, hard, his nine. I had to stop myself from being hypnotised by it. I
wanted there to only be two dicks, no difference between them, each one loving the other's as much as his own, no more no less. I also learned a little about his life and his relationship with Jean-Marc that was headed down the drain. They have been together for the past ten years but less and less for the past five, and for the past two haven't slept together. He's at his lover's house right now. Stéphane said He told me he is in love with him.

  We see each other a third, a fourth, and a fifth time. Each time he fucks me. But we also talk. We go on walks. We're starting to get to know each other. I ask him to talk to me about his life with Jean-Marc, he tells me what I was expecting, that he spends his time running errands, cooking, doing the dishes and waiting for Jean-Marc to fuck him. I tell him he shouldn't let himself be treated like that.

  We start seeing each other regularly. One night each weekend plus one evening during the week. Stéphane tells me that he doesn't feel like he is betraying Jean-Marc because Jean-Marc also has something on the side. But this bothers me. I demand three nights a week. We end up seeing each other every weekend except when they host a dinner at their place. The second thing that starts to bother me is that I am not allowed to fuck him because of an agreement he and Jean-Marc have. Each of them can fuck whomever they want, but can't get fucked. I point out to Stéphane that, according to what he'd said, this isn't as fair as it sounds because Jean-Marc doesn't like getting fucked. I tell him that I can't go on much longer like this.

  He asks Jean-Marc for permission. Jean-Marc doesn't give it, but he says that he knows he will do it anyway. I invest. I take Stéphane out to the country for a weekend, to an ugly chateau hotel full of salesmen. Stéphane is a little uptight, he claims he isn't used to this. I tell myself he's just hung up on his social status, but it'll pass.