I opened my eyes. Outside the sun was shining. I thought that this dream was perfect for the book. I started to tell it to myself so I wouldn't forget.
Totally fucked up, that dream.
Trash 2000.
Thank you to Christine B., my mom, Jean-Xavier D., P.O.L., T.F., F.M., Hugo M., Jacky F., Christophe Vix.
Notes
Introduction
1 Christine Angot, Renaud Camus, Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Michel Houellebecq, Camille Laurens, Catherine Millet, and Marc-Édouard Nabe have all had to grapple with society and had problems with literary legitimacy.
2 David Vrydaghs, “Personne n’a dit que Guillaume Dustan était un intellectuel, ou les raisons d’un échec,” @nalyses 1, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 207–21.
3 Pierre Bourdieu, “Quelques questions sur la question gay et lesbienne,” in Les études gay et lesbiennes, ed. Didier Éribon (Paris: Editions du centre Pompidou, 1997).
4 This issue will be examined in the second volume of Works.
5 Michel Foucault, “Conversation avec Werner Schroeter,” in Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, vol. 4, 1980–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1074.
6 See Dictionnaire de l’homophobie, ed. Louis-Georges Tin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003).
7 Guillaume Dustan, editorial, e.m@le, no. 66, December 1999.
8 In French, the word genre refers to both gender and genre.—Trans.
9 The fact that Dustan used a pseudonym and substituted characters’ names (to be revealed in subsequent books) in no way invalidates these works’ basic autobiographical perspective. This was simply a form of protection that, in fact, confirms the referential anchoring of the texts.
10 The term autofiction, which Dustan rarely uses, is poorly suited to his work.
11 Philippe Gasparini, Autofiction: Une aventure du langage (Paris: Seuil, 2008),
12 Pascal de Duve, Cargo Vie (Paris: JC Lattès, 1993); and Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe, Corps à corps (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
13 Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); and Cyril Collard, Savage Nights, trans. William Rodarmor (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1994).
14 See Gilles Barbedette, L’Invitation au mensonge (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
15 François Cusset's Queer critics: La littérature française déshabillée par ses homolecteurs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) does not mention Dustan.
16 See Les spirales du sens chez Renaud Camus, ed. Ralph Sarkonak (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009).
17 Frederic Martel, Le Rose et le Noir: Les homosexuels en France depuis 1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 514.
18 “Back then there was no treatment. Statistically, I had about five years left.” Dustan, Stronger Than Me, in this volume, 286.
19 This issue will be examined in the second volume of Works.
20 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 59.
21 Ibid., 21.
22 For another point of view, see Philippe Artières, “Michel Foucault et l’autobiographie,” in Michel Foucault: La littérature et les arts, ed. Philippe Artières (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2004).
23 Michel Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 2000), 166.
24 See Pierre Rivière, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother…: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, ed. Michel Foucault, trans. Frank Jellinek (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); and Michel Foucault, “L’écriture de soi,” in Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, vol. 4, 1980–1988, 415–430.
25 Frédéric Gros, Michel Foucault (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 91.
26 See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977); and Michael Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
27 The expression comes from Albert Thibaudet's 1922 monograph, Gustave Flaubert (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
28 This subheading alludes to an interview of Michel Foucault by Bernard-Henri Lévy, originally published in Le Nouvelle Observateur, March 12, 1977. See “Power and Sex: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” trans. David J. Parent, Telos, no. 32 (Summer 1977): 152–61.
29 Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” interview by R. de Ceccaty, J. Danet, and J. Le Bitoux, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 1997), 136.
30 Éric Marty, Pourquoi le XXe siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux? (Paris: Seuil, 2011).
31 Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” 136.
32 Monique Wittig, preface to The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 2002), xiii.
33 “Sex is no longer the biggest secret to life,” Foucault claims in Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1976–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
34 According to Dustan, the French Socialist Party is an example of this.
35 Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
36 On Dustan as pornographer, see my introduction to In My Room, in this volume, 38–41.
37 This essential point will be developed in the second volume of Works.
38 La Rabbia, a documentary film directed partly by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963.— Trans.
IN MY ROOM
Introduction
1 A drawing by James Jarvis entitled In My Room illustrated another such column, published in the February 18, 1999, issue of e.m@le.
2 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
3 Bénédicte Boisseron, “Post-coca et post-coïtum: La jouissance du logo chez Guillaume Dustan et ‘Seinfeld,’” L’Esprit créateur 43, no. 2 (Summer 2003).
4 See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1989).
5 Guillaume Dustan, In My Room, in this volume, 93.
6 In Subjectivity and the Ageing Process in Twentieth-Century French Writing, a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Wadham in 2003, Oliver Davis opposes Hervé Guibert to Dustan and his supposed ageism.
7 See my introduction to this volume.
8 Marguerite Duras, “Retake,” in Le monde extérieur: Outside 2 (Paris: P.O.L., 1993), 12.
9 See, for example, Ruwen Ogien, Penser la pornographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003).
10 Georges Molinié, De la pornographie (Paris: Éditions Mix, 2007).
11 Laurent de Sutter, Contre l’érotisme (Paris: La Musardine, 2010).
12 Clerc uses a play on words in the original French, “Neutre Intense,” which is also the title of an art exhibition that he cocurated in London, 2008.—Trans.
13 Pascal Quignard, Sex and Terror, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2011).
14 Dustan, In My Room, 92.
15 Ibid., 73.
In My Room
1 Le Keller, a gay nightclub located on a street of the same name, in the Paris neighborhood of Bastille. [Words that appear in English in the original text have been italicized.—Trans.]
2 The Queen, a gay nightclub located on the Champs-Elysées, a shrine to nocturnal gay life. Bataclan, a concert hall located on Boulevard Voltaire.
3 Le Transfert, a gay nightclub in the first arrondissement of Paris.
4 Yanko, a Parisian sex shop.
5 Quetzal Bar, a gay bar in the Marais district.
6 SOS Médecins offers house-call emergency services.
7 Le Bon Pêcheur, a large café in Les Halles shopping center.
8 The QG, a gay bar in the Marais district.
9 Modern Mesclun, a character from Agrippine, a well-known comic, named after its teenage heroine, by French comic-book artist Claire Brétecher.
10 La Loco, a Parisian nightclub located on Boulevard de Clichy in the eighteenth arrondissement, just a few steps from Moulin Rouge.
11 ASMF, the Association of Sado-Masochist Fetishists.
12 The Minitel, a French ancestor to the Internet, frequently used in the gay world for meeting people, retired in 2012.
13 Folies Pigalle, a nightclub for both straights and gays.
14 Au Diable des Lombards, a hip café-restaurant in Les Halles, trendy in the 1980s.
I’M GOING OUT TONIGHT
Introduction
1 Saturday Night Fever, American film directed by John Badham, 1978, starring John Travolta.
2 Consider, for example, Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, or Robbe-Grillet's The House of Assignation.
3 It should be noted that Anne Garréta preceded Dustan in this regard, with her 1986 novel Sphinx, which gave the nightclub its pedigree. Another predecessor was Renaud Camus (see my introduction to In My Room, in this volume, 40).
4 Dustan's reference to Dante appears very quickly in the text; see p. 168, in this volume. For Duras's statement, see “The Pleasures of the 6th Arrondissement,” in Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 20.
5 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 330–36.
6 Bénédicte Boisseron, “Post-coca et post-coïtum: La jouissance du logo chez Guillaume Dustan et ‘Seinfeld,’” L’Esprit créateur 43, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 82.
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, trans. James Luchte (London: Continuum, 2010), 325.
8 See I'm Going Out Tonight, in this volume, 172.
9 For Dustan's panorama of French literature, see his novels Nicolas Pages and Génie Divin, forthcoming in the second volume of Works.
I'm Going Out Tonight
1 Gay Tea Dance (GTD), a dance party initially organized at Le Palace (see note 4, below) on Sunday afternoons.
2 Quick, Europe's first hamburger chain, with around four hundred restaurants.
3 Saint Jean, a café-tabac on Rue Lepic, in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. I'm Going Out Tonight is set in a Paris of nocturnal pleasures whose topography and traditions date back to the nineteenth century. Since the 1930s, the city's Quartier Pigalle has also earned a reputation as “the first Parisian homosexual islet.” Frederic Martel, Le Rose et le Noir: Les homosexuels en France depuis 1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 121.
4 Le Palace, a nightclub located on the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, in the ninth arrondissement of Paris. In 1978, Roland Barthes devoted a text to the club; see “At Le Palace Tonight…” in Incidents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), trans. Richard Howard, 45–48.
5 Les Bains, a straight nightclub located on Rue du Bourg-l’Abbé, in the third arrondissement of Paris.
6 The second one refers to I'm Going Out Tonight itself, Dustan's second novel, partly written in the prefecture of Var.
7 Lapin, we learn later, is the person to whom I'm Going Out Tonight is dedicated, Dustan's Chilean lover Marcelo.
8 Terrier, a character from Dustan's In My Room.
9 Au Diable des Lombards, a hip café-restaurant in Les Halles, trendy in the 1980s.
10 3,000 refers to book sales for In My Room.
11 The many consecutive blank pages which follow are faithful to Dustan's vision for a revised edition of I'm Going Out Tonight; the first edition had fewer blanks.
STRONGER THAN ME
Introduction
1 See Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 1976–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1150 and 1556–1562. These interviews were initially published in English-language journals.
2 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
3 Germaine Bazin, The Avant-Garde in Painting: An Interpretive History of the Great Innovators—from Giotto to Warhol, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969).
4 This text is extant in the Fonds Dustan at the l’Institut Mémoires de L’édition Contemporaine (Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives), Abbey d’Ardenne, Calvados, Normandy.
5 Paul-Laurent Assoun, Leçons psychanalytiques sur le masochisme (Paris: Economica, 2003).
6 For discussions of this ruling, delivered in the 1997 case of Laskey, Jaggard, and Brown v. the United Kingdom, see La liberté sexuelle, ed. Daniel Borrillo and Danièle Lochak (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005).
7 Marguerite Duras, Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 40.
8 Fonds Dustan, l’Institut Mémoires de L’édition Contemporaine.
Stronger Than Me
1 Recall that Dustan's real surname was Baranès.
2 The Gardens of Trocadéro, a place of homosexual cruising, mentioned by Julien Green in Journal.
3 It is in Jean Genet's novel Funeral Rites, published in 1948, that one can find this scene between Riton, a militiaman, and Erik, a German soldier.
4 BH and Boy, gay nightclubs near Les Halles.
5 Broad, a gay nightclub near Les Halles.
6 FG, Fréquence Gaie, a radio station founded in support of the gay community, which began broadcasting in 1978 from the kitchen of the Argentine writer Copi. In 1991, the station distanced itself from social activism and redefined itself as a dedicated electronic-music station.
7 Terrier and Stéphane, characters from Dustan's In My Room.
8 Marcelo, also known as Lapin, is Dustan's Chilean lover, to whom I'm Going Out Tonight is dedicated. Dustan would later describe their relationship in Nicolas Pages, forthcoming in the second volume of Works.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guillaume Dustan (1965–2005) worked as an administrative judge in France before turning to writing full-time. He is the author of eight books, including the award-winning novel Nicholas Pages. He was posthumously awarded the Prix Sade in 2013.
The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1 Page 27