Scandal!—Guillaume Dustan - author - Brief Article

THIS LITERARY LION'S CAUSING AN UPROAR

Edmund White called him "the toughest new writer to emerge in a land known for its incorrigibles," but the disaffected club kid and dancer-turned-writer Guillaume Dustan prefers to call himself an "anticonformist." Dustan is nothing if not provocative; he has caused uproars in Paris by, among other things, advocating unprotected sex, a move that prompted such Sadean headlines as 'MUST WE BURN GUILLAUME DUSTAN?" "The problem with condoms is that they prevent you from having a normal sexuality," he complained to the French daily Liberation. "ACT UP tells us, 'You're HIV-positive, you must wear condoms till the day you die.' Well, I say no. Sexuality means fusion. We're not going to give it up." When I ask him about his incendiary views, he explains, "I try to be as efficient as possible, and scandals are useful. I advocate a world where you can have your own choices."

Dustan is in his thirties, but he claims to have been born in 1995, the year he came to grips with the fact that he was HIV-positive and began to write. "It was like leaving a will," he says. "I had always wanted to write and then life offered me a good plot." An admirer of Bret Easton Ellis, Dustan has published five books of "autopornobiography" that have a brute honesty and a sexual immediacy which might make even readers of American Psycho flinch. Guillaume, the hero of In My Room (Dustan's first book, and the only one available in English), travels the Paris streets from gay dance clubs to backroom bars, and from bedroom to bedroom, equipped with latex hoods and cock rings, and his story reads like one long day's journey into a hallucinatory night of sex, poppers and house music. The book's undercurrent of social critique makes Dustan the latest in a long line of French literary satirists: like Voltaire, he doesn't hesitate to point out the hypocrisy of the society around him. "There's nothing so gay ab out Paris," he says. "We are not free. I think Tahiti is a little freer, and maybe Tibet. It's all unsatisfactory, except when there is love, which is so rare."

Deborah Treisman is a deputy editor at The New Yorker. Left: Guillaume Dustan wears a shirt by VERSACE.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group