Guillaume Dustan and the Power of Touch
Saint Sébastien soigné par Irène et sa servante, Nicolas Régnier (Photo: François de Dijon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In a world devoid of touch, how can we carve intimacies? Pathogens make simple touch, intimacy’s most rudimentary form, impossible. Think back to high school history lessons on the Black Death, images of red crosses splattered on front doors like stigmata as warnings to stay away, commandments not to touch. Think more recently, COVID-19, intimacy subsumed to a cyberreality of avatars locked behind computer screens and bodies made of nothing but virtual ephemera. So much of who we are, of human connection and human love, is tactile. But in an ill world, touch is policed, forbidden. An ill world is fundamentally intactile, a world of borders and barricades that we dare not cross. And so we yearn for touch. Yearn, sometimes, for contamination.
The HIV crisis built unique boundaries on intimacy as a disease spread through sexual contact and, more often, queer sexual contact, an intimacy already deeply stigmatised. In 1980s France, responses to HIV were far from sharp, owing to a government belief that sex was a private matter and the absence of a gay ‘community’ in France able to mobilise itself against the government’s intentional unseeing. When grassroots organisation did finally arrive in 1989, it did so in the form of Act Up Paris, led by queer author Didier Lestrade. Its mission was both clear and rational – the elimination of HIV transmissions in a city that, by 1995, had recorded as many HIV cases as the entirety of the UK – but to stop transmission meant to erect boundaries: Have less casual sex. Know your sexual partners. Always wear a condom. A condom as a boundary, rubber over and between skin. Boundaries to queer intimacy, erected from within the community.
But these barriers were unnatural. Touch is human, it shouldn’t be policed. In Guillaume Dustan’s words, ‘La capote n’a jamais existé.’ (‘Condoms never existed.’) Guillaume Dustan, the literary pseudonym of one William Baranès, was the insurrectionist who led the controversial charge against Act Up’s safer sex messaging, a judge by trade who began writing after being diagnosed with HIV in the mid-1990s. He lovingly called his first three publications – Dans ma chambre (1996), Je sors ce soir (1997) and Plus fort que moi (1997) – a ‘trilogie d’autopornographies’ (‘trilogy of self-pornographies’), sordid accounts of a late-century gay scene resplendent with cruise clubs, drug consumption, and casual sex. This was Paris’s gay ghetto, ‘[un] monde merveilleux où tout le monde a couché avec tout le monde’ (‘[a] wonderful world in which everybody has slept with everybody’). But Lestrade and Act Up vitriolically rejected this world. Such a position was made clear with the 2000 publication of Lestrade’s Act Up : Une histoire, which attacked Dustan’s writing as the renegade proselytisation of a toxic ‘bareback ideology’ and called Dustan ‘un complice objectif de l’épidemie’ (‘an objective accomplice of the epidemic’). Bitter feud erupted, hot debate over the right to touch and intimacy in the context of a disease that made sex seem a gamble with fate. On one end was Dustan’s politics of sero-sorting, the belief that gay men could still seek unprotected sex if they did so with those they knew were of the same sero-status. On the other was Act Up’s message of safer sex, the belief that the best way to eliminate HIV was to ensure that all sex involved barriers, condoms, and thus involved no risk. Neither side relented, and the feud would only end with Dustan’s 2005 death, after which Lestrade reflected: ‘[I felt] a fundamental hatred [towards Dustan], one of the most powerful that I [have] had the capacity to feel.’[1]
Often, Dustan’s bareback advocacy is reduced to another part of the writer’s performative provocateurship, the same provocateurship that led him to appear on French national television in gaudy platinum wigs to debate priests or to declare his belief that everybody should contract AIDS. Yet I find something more powerful within it, a desire to preserve queer intimacies at a time they were needed most. As mentioned above, France didn’t have a queer community at the time that Dustan was writing, only the gay ‘ghetto’ that he continually refers to, a sort of Gide-esque underworld that existed outside of French society’s purview. Thomas Clerc has referred to this world as a heterotopia, the Foucauldian term for a zone that exists beyond the spatiality of normative culture while dismantling and perverting its hierarchies. This subversive potentiality is evident in Dustan’s accounts of a secret Eden of queer revelry and joy in an apathetic France, the cruel caveat being that this all had to stay secret at a time when queerness most needed to be seen.
This was the power of writing sex, memorialising it, even in its most affrontational forms. By recording the most intimate and most taboo forms of queer intimacy, Dustan worked to bring light to this gay underworld and make of it a sturdy community. His bareback, hyper-sexualised approach to queer politics may have been discomfiting, reprehensible even in the eyes of some, yet his embrace of homophobic stereotype – the gay man as a whore, nymphomaniac – was a conscious political strategy. Because by reclaiming queer stereotypes and abjection, Dustan celebrated the anti-social potentiality latent in queerness, the fact that queerness will never conform to a straight society whose survival is tied to the heterosexual couple’s ability to reproduce its next generation. [2] Writing gay sex is writing rebellion, it’s writing community. Dustan understood this better than any of his contemporaries, and it’s for this we must remember him.
[1] Quoted in Elliot Evans, ‘Your HIV-positive sperm, my trans-dyke uterus: Anti/futurity and the politics of bareback sex between Guillaume Dustan and Beatriz Preciado,’ 2015, available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1363460715569138.
[2] Lee Edelman, No Futures: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).