A Glamorous Void

In My Room: Guillaume Dustan

Edit: a reader corrected my presumption that Dustan died of AIDS-related complications, he passed of an accidental drug overdose

Sometimes, I think I could change this Substack’s byline to include “Constance Debré fan girl”. I picked up the collected works of Guillaume Dustan because an interviewer insisted that Debré sounded a lot like Dustan, and Debré reluctantly admitted that was likely true as she had read his works as she was writing her own. I read Dustan’s In My Room (1996) the night before last. It mostly takes place in Dustan’s bedroom. The literalness of the title is telling. Both Dustan and Debré wrote/write autofiction, and there are strong similarities in their anxious yet deadpan stream-of-consciousness prose styling. Both were/are in Paris, and show their reader the seedier, gritty parts of the culture that aren’t typically shown to us might-be tourists. The two writers rely on shock value (shock and grit are more common in French literature than American, eg., Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Michel Houellebecq, Christine Angot). There’s sex, gay sex, explicitly detailed, lots of it, and often with people neither particularly liked. Through the explicit details of acts, the authors showed that they not only left the legal industry (Dustan quit his job as an administrative judge), but they both threw away those careers away with great force because with it went the bourgeois lifestyle the profession represents, though their straight-forward, plain talking, blunt force writing styles are strongly influenced by legal writing and reasoning.

From there, Dustan’s In My Room diverges from Debré’s. There’s little introspection, relying only on description to show the reader his mindset and the novel’s themes. He has an ex with whom he shared housing, until their relationship falls apart spectacularly. He still thinks of the ex, in random moments, comparing sex with other partners to said ex. He meets a lover, pursues him with hard although said lover lives with a boyfriend. The sex is graphic and nearly clinical as Dustan details positions, preparation, sex toys…there’s a ton of it, sometimes kinky, often wildly abandoned, and sometimes several times in a single day. Debrè bragged of tallying women’s names on her walls, but Dustan tells his lover he’s had a thousand men. There are also a lot of drugs, every weekend, and sometimes clubs and bars, like a life lived in reverse, a youth of hard work, an adulthood of the sort of carelessness that's usually youthful - of yourself, your mind and body, and most of all, careless toward the people around you. When Dustan is well, he buys lovely food and takes care of himself. When he’s sick, the cabinets empty, there’s only canned stuff and packaged bread. Because like Derek Jarman, Dustan also contracted HIV, and he passed away of a accidental overdose before his 40th birthday. And when he’s not having sex, or sometimes when he can’t get into the sex, the despair and reality sets in, the fear of blood becomes real, and there are glimpses into Dustan’s reality of knowing his fate will be an early death. And through the sex, drugs, and parties, there’s a dark specter haunting the gay community in the questions about blood and condoms, that the men who aren’t HIV+ are constantly testing, and in the sheer numbers of men who are HIV+.

From a personal perspective, I wouldn’t per se recommend this novel. The sex is difficult to read of, or at least for me, someone who, um, you know, isn’t attracted to men and finds the male form off-putting if I have to think about it as closely and intimately as this book would have me. There’s something rough and violent about it. Sometimes, I had to put the book down, take a few deep breaths, and take a break from its pervasive air. Other reviewers believed it to be glamorous, a look into the hard partying lifestyle of gay 1980s and 1990s culture. For me, well, I live in San Francisco. There are with more queer women per capita than any other city in the US. There’s a lot of sex, loads of polyamory, you know, that modern cousin to the free love that this city embodied in an earlier era, more sex parties and sex dungeons than I care to think about, and far too much careless drug use with the inevitable suffering,. These are easily accessible to me if I wanted to partake, because I know those people and I don’t find it glamorous or compelling. As Dustan conveyed through his autofiction novel, or Debrè through hers, rebellion and a refusal to be limited by dull, senseless rules, sure, but it’s also that people who are seeking that scene into their 30s, 40s, 50s are often running away from insecurities, despair, grief, or trauma, and often a combination of all four. It’s a whirlpool of darkness, hurt people hurting other hurt people. Reviewers have compared Dustan’s work to Bret Easton Ellis, a queer contemporary of his. Ellis makes clear the empty void behind the glamorous facade, but Dustan does so with with such subtlety that some readers might not notice it at all.