The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1

by Guillaume Dustan

  Political posturing becomes pure in this book, as if Dustan's extreme corporeal engagement legitimized, in advance, the explicit discourse he would later create. This physical gift occurred via a total and quite impressive autobiographical commitment. Any detour through traditional fiction would have been obscene as Dustan did not want to write about sadomasochism as a theme; he experimented with it as a sort of analogon of what he thought literature was, an over-exposition of the self that should trouble the reader.

  No Words

  We can make conflicting arguments about sadomasochism: that it is a complete self-exposure to the other, a violent regression, a polemical image of power, role-playing, etc…. Despite its implicit affinity for Foucauldian-Deleuzian thought on this specific point, Stronger Than Me is in no way discursive. This is where it gets its power; it fully belongs to literature in so far as it does not deliver any explanation of sadomasochism. Indeed, no theory of sadomasochism is convincing, because sexual practices must be seized by their actors themselves and not according to the discourses that seek to confine them, whether that be to condemn, glorify, or even analyze them. Literature, again, exceeds all interpretive systems (which are inconveniently contradictory) by neutralizing them. Stronger Than Me, without a shadow of speculative allusion, dilutes its sources in the regime of the visible.

  We could even go so far as to say that Dustan wasn't a sadomasochist, but that through this experience he formed a non-predicative identity composed of several removable labels. S&M was perhaps the ultimate test of the paradoxical de-subjectification that transformed him from homosexual to gay. Proof of this lies in Dustan's abandonment of sexuality in the rest of his work, as if he had to pass through an experience of limits in order to get rid of the assignment to “sex” through his identity. The paradox is quite strong: Dustan refused to desexualize homosexuality (as a certain queer tendency would have it), but it was through sadomasochism that he would, little by little, free himself from his identity.

  Build It, He Said

  Stronger Than Me has a legible construction; it is structured around a very specifically dated flashback that is framed by a prologue and an epilogue indexed on the year 1998, the date of the composition of the text. Its thirty-six chapters are staggered from 1981—a politically flagship year during which the Left came to power and a large number of discriminatory laws regarding homosexuals were abolished—to 1995, on the eve of his first literary publication (In My Room would be published a year later in 1996). We witness a retrospective construction of the author's identity at the very moment when he had already published his two preceding “novels,” and when he could, with relative ease, envision how he had become who he was at the time.

  This narrative construction introduced, through repetitive sexual scenes that ran the risk of being viewed as static, the dynamism of a book that was de facto leaning towards the present. This construction highlighted the processual quality of Guillaume Dustan's identity—from young, cultivated bourgeois man to diligent practitioner of pleasure. The most beautiful pages, those that unveil the initiatory aspect of homosexuality, implicitly refer back to Practicalities by Marguerite Duras: “A man's transition from heterosexuality to homosexuality involves a very severe crisis. No change could possibly be greater.” 7 But while Duras dramatized the passage from one to the other, Dustan, strengthened by his previous novels, concretely showed the sexual trial of the backroom into which he entered accompanied by a guide.

  Sentenced to Death

  The constant relation that Dustan forged between sex and death nevertheless made it impossible to separate S&M from its morbid side, which infused the entirety of Stronger Than Me: “I was twenty-six. Everything made me want to die” (chapter 17). Let us take another look at the attraction to extreme sexual practices and the opening sentences of this preface. What kind of learning was this if not the Montaigne-like apprenticeship of death? From this angle, when he announced his seropositivity at the beginning of chapter 10, this had less of a bombshell effect—it was something his reader already knew from previous novels—but rather justified the radicalness of his undertaking. The indivisibility of death and life explained the urgency with which Dustan took hold of his destiny between 1995 and 2005, when his final text was published, two years before his death. How could one forget the presence of the disease, since life had become so tenuous? “Statistically, I had about five years left” (chapter 10). Far from being a destiny unique to its narrator, many characters in Stronger Than Me were also HIV-positive. Dustan, through the disease, joined a declarable community at the antithesis to secretkeeping. S&M's ambiguous nature was thus complete: a sexual enterprise that considered itself both a vitalist response and a flirt with death: “The risky behavior of men can be explained by the virile need to prove that one is stronger,” explained Dustan in a later notebook.8 We could read this text in a stoic manner, but how could we deny its Christlike aspect, where the masochistic subject's absolute fantasy is to be killed by love.

  When all is said and done, what is “stronger than me?” Is it Sex, an ideal that catapults the subject towards self-abandonment? Is it Homosexuality, which is self-evident? Is it AIDS, a disease that destroyed a major portion of the homosexual community between the 1980s and the 1990s? Its form, that is to say its composition, gives us the key to a possible reading of this text. Stronger Than Me, the last part of this trilogy, ends a cycle. At the end of the book, Dustan leaves for Tahiti, a sunny paradise, a world before sin, a location that affords him a new space and time. His epilogue circles back to the narrative present. We have moved from the initial “say nothing to be accepted” to this final “say everything to be unaccepted, but free.” The ferocious radicality of Stronger Than Me does not comprise any other solution than its own overcoming. Its author's great intelligence was to have understood this. After Stronger Than Me, a new Dustan would emerge, one entirely oriented towards life.

  “My mother always taught me not to talk to strange men. But I always do.”

  — TWA, TWA Theme

  “I was convinced that parties like this prolong people's lives, whirl us around in the snares of mystery.”

  — Konstantin Paustovsky, Story of a Life,

  Volume 5: Southern Adventure

  Prologue

  (1998)

  I don't have enough memories of my childhood. Before I was five, nothing. After that, a couple episodes. Gifts in preschool: I was able to choose first from all the cool things because of my place in the alphabet.1 Forts made out of chairs and blankets in the living room of the apartment. Boxing matches between my sister and me, refereed by my dad. I'd get wound up like crazy. On vacation in Corsica (I was five), I called the neighbor we used to play with a dog. Mom yelled at me. I'd look at men's swim trunks, even my dad's. My father was the sun. He didn't want that. He turned his back on me. He left me. I was left alone, reduced to ashes, cold, dead. I went to middle school over on Milton Street. People noticed I was nearsighted. I started wearing glasses with thick lenses.

  My father was the sun. The strongest. He wanted to be the greatest. Like his own father before him. Like me, after. He was good at painting. He studied medicine. Something conventional, bourgeois, respectable. Like me, after. He married my mother whom he had met when they were seventeen. She was beautiful. Two children were born. In our family photos, one thing is clear: he wants to split. He ended up doing it when I was seven, my sister six. He left for another woman, a rich one. My father was handsome, always perfectly dressed, no flamboyance, no sense of humor, no friends. He thought he was the Law. He exercised his power. He said no. I really wanted him to love me. But that was impossible.

  Books gave me shelter. Between the ages of six and sixteen, that's all I did, read, while listening to Bach and Duke Ellington (with Ivie Anderson). The world no longer existed. And then, I knew everything. I was the best, first in my class. But I was afraid of everything. I wanted to be like the Fantastic Four, in Strange, to have superpowers, to be a mutant. To bui
ld, using only my thoughts, a wall around myself. To be invisible. Or, even better, to be like the Human Torch, blond, beautiful, in flames, flying through the air. Although sometimes it would have really come in handy to be like his friend, the Thing, endowed with superhuman strength (but no one wanted to love him because he was covered in scales).

  I never rebelled. I obeyed when he forbade me to finish the brown scarf I had started to knit for my mother (I must have been ten or twelve). I gave in when he opposed one after another of the projects that would have allowed me to grow. I never acted otherwise. I couldn't stand that he disapproved of me. I was only allowed to leave the math section for the literature section in senior year when Françoise Cheinisse (we had been friends since sixth grade) and her little sister Danièle were poisoned by their father (a toxicologist at Fernand-Widal, so he knew how to do it) just before the good doctor shot his own mother and left to commit suicide in the woods near Chartres (his wife had died from leukemia a couple years earlier). I was supposed to be with them out in the country that weekend, the first weekend in September. To go horseback riding with Françoise, and then also it was sort of a tradition to close down the local pool at Châteauneuf. I don't remember why I didn't go. I always thought that if I had been there, I would be dead too. A year after, I saw Françoise again. In a dream she told me what was going on with her and Danièle. That went on for years. In my dreams they never died. The only thing I thought was that Françoise didn't die a virgin. She had been with her first guy the year before. Danièle was too young. I was probably afraid I'd end up like them.

  Marcelo is looking at me, in the photo I have of him, on the desk where I am writing. He looks like my father. This scares me. And then I tell myself that there's nothing shocking about that. On the contrary even, that's probably what turns me on. But there are big differences. He smiles at me. He's giving. He teaches me not to hate myself. So I'm peaceful. I know that it's not like with my father, or even like with Quentin. With them, I didn't exist. I was only an appendage. They were people for whom no one existed but them. People who don't know what love is.

  1

  (1981–1988)

  I was sixteen years old. My Italian teacher took us to see a play. I got there late. Chaillot was closed. So I wanted to know what sex was like. Sex was stronger. Stronger than fear. Stronger than me. I went down to the gardens.2 I had read in the Nouvel Observateur that people went there to cruise. I hung out in the bushes, feeling slightly afraid. A guy approached me, much older than me, thirty, with a mustache. He asked me what I was doing there. I said I'm cruising. He said Me too. I followed him behind some kind of Greek monument. We kissed. I had already made out with two or three girls, but this was different. Electric. After that we sucked each other off. The taste was awful. I came, I don't remember how. I didn't allow myself to really pay attention to those types of things back then. I was covered in sweat when I got home, I felt like vomiting.

  After a year, I had recovered. I went back. This time I walked straight up to a guy, a different one of course, just across the street, at Beaugrenelle. We did the same thing as the first time, only longer. I saw him again. One day he ended up fucking me. We went down to the tower's bowling alley covered in sex sweat to catch a cold drink. I liked the discrepancy. But he was ugly. Things got better when he invited me over for his birthday. I met a small group of preppy boys. I fucked them one after another.

  In an interview, Joe Dallessandro explained that he liked big and strong guys who would fuck him and vulnerable girls who he could screw. I followed him to the letter. I didn't want to stop enjoying the wave of approbation that welcomed me when I entered a restaurant with Claire or Laurence or Nathalie, which wasn't there when it was Hervé or Frédéric or Christophe. I didn't want to blow my chances. I was made to succeed. To have a beautiful and intelligent wife, with a good name and a good family. Beautiful and intelligent kids. A prestigious job. A tasteful house. So what if I have to lie. At Sciences-Po I had already learned not to tell people I was Jewish. It kept me from seeing that frown pass over their faces before they distanced themselves. For a fag, it was better to do the same. Say nothing to be accepted.

  2

  (1988)

  It was Emmanuel G. who took me to a sex club for the first time. I had never been to that type of place, or to a bar for that matter, or even a gay club (I had stopped cruising in the Tuileries years before, ever since the day I brought home an older blond guy in a red track suit, no underwear, he grabbed my head, smacked my cheeks with his cock, forced me to suck him off. I let it happen, hypnotized, telling myself that this wasn't normal. Then he drove his dick so far inside me that I felt like throwing up. I asked him to get out). I met guys with friends, on the street, or at the gym. Anyway there weren't that many. By twenty-two, I must have had around twenty guys and exactly seven women.

  We had dinner in Les Halles, Emmanuel and I, in a tacky place with colonial décor that isn't there anymore, near the Niki de Saint-Phalle fountain. Then we crossed the Seine and headed to Trap. Trap was this place that was completely anonymous. From the street there was no way to figure out what was going on inside. Emmanuel rang the doorbell. The door opened. After we got checked out head to toe (I didn't know it was our youth that he was looking at), the dark and handsome doorman (whose name I learned later) let us in. Red lights. Bar to the left, a lounge to the right, a staircase that led to a floor that was shrouded in darkness. There were a lot of people. Twenty to thirty guys. My age or a bit older and guys who were thirty to thirty-five. Big. Muscled. Handsome. Confident. Thank God, there were ugly guys too. At least uglier than me. That calmed me down. We grabbed a drink at the bar right under the TV where big, muscled, well-hung guys were fucking. Then Emmanuel suggested we head upstairs. It was darker on this floor but you could still see the faces of the guys who were waiting to go further back, where it was completely dark and I couldn't see anything anymore.

  We headed back farther into the darkness towards an open door. I felt a wave of heat hit me. The stench of poppers. I told Emmanuel that I wanted to go in, but only if he held my hand. He gave me his hand. And then he crossed the threshold. I followed him. I squeezed his hand. I paused for a moment. I couldn't see a thing. I was scared. There was only a tiny red light far away. I was completely incapable of estimating the size of the room, or how many people it held. But I could feel that it was really full, because of all the bodies around me, near me, ready to touch me. I thought about the métro during rush hour. That made me smile. I calmed down. The Hi-NRG music that was playing in the bar downstairs started to run through my head again.

  Emmanuel felt my hand relax. He led me forward, through the bodies. Six or seven feet further away (but I had the impression it was a lot more), he stopped. He grabbed me by the shoulder, made me stand in front of him. I followed along. He had the upper hand on me ever since he had aggressively fucked me a couple weeks ago. He had been circling around me for a while in class before, but then I was taken. Then I more or less dumped Christophe in tears in front of everyone in the restaurant in Milan while eating a plate of gnocchi.

  He crossed his arms around my stomach. Someone placed their hands on me. I couldn't really make out people's faces and I started to freak out at the idea that the guys were old, gross, covered in sores. Hands were running all over me. My crotch.

  My chest. I let it happen. Then I remembered this letter in Libération where a guy told about how he used to go into backrooms and cut guys’ butts with a razor. I started to freak out but I was already hard. It was too late. A hand undid my belt, unbuttoned my jeans, dug through my underwear. I froze when he grabbed my cock. Emmanuel was holding on to me tight. I calmed down. Let it happen. The guy was jerking me off. It was good. And then suddenly someone's lips pressed against mine. I had no idea whose mouth it was (an old guy!, herpes!). I jerked my head away.

  But the mouth came back again. Now I was getting used to the darkness, so I could identify its owner, a super ugly guy in his forties. I t
urned away again. The mouth slid across my face, around, under my ear, and since at that moment I had a dick in each hand and someone was jerking me off at the same time, I let it happen because it felt too good. His mouth came back up towards my ear and he drove his tongue in. grosssss. I turned away, wiped my ear off with one hand (that was holding a dick a few seconds earlier). Then I felt Emmanuel starting to let go so I did a half turn and I said, not too loud because no one was talking, you could only hear squeaking and breathing, Don't let go, OK? He said Never, and he grabbed me by the waist.

  I got back into position. Things started again right away. I was being felt-up from all sides then the guy who was in front of me tried to kiss me and since he was hot I let him do it. Thirty seconds later, I was getting sucked off, I didn't know who was doing it and I didn't care, I almost wasn't afraid of him biting it off with his teeth. And then someone pulled my underwear down, slid his hand between Emmanuel and me down to my ass, started fingering me. Mouth, dick, chest, ass, all of it at the same time, I liked it. I arched back. Someone's hand pressed down on my neck, I knew what that meant and since I was super excited I bent over the cock, I took a whiff, it didn't smell so I started to suck it and that's when Emmanuel let me go.