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Guillaume Dustan's autofictional Dans ma chambre unabashedly recounts the HIV positive narrator-protagonist's drug-fueled navigation of Parisian gay sex culture. This essay argues that, despite the narrator's seemingly self-destructive tendencies, the novel offers a wholly life-affirming model of wellness and embodiment based on connectivity and a logic of prosthesis.
It would be an understatement to say that Guillaume Dustan caused a stir during his brief literary career. As David Caron recalls in My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community, in the months preceding the 1996 release of Dustan's debut novel, Dans ma chambre, the news of the impending release of a gritty, no-holdsbarred semi-autobiographical look at Paris' contemporary gay sex culture, complete with depictions of "barebacking" or the practice of unprotected anal intercourse between men, spread through gay circles like wildfire (94-95). Fueling further interest, Dans ma chambre was published under strict anonymity with not so much as an author photo; Guillaume Dustan was the pen name of William Barranes, who finished the novel while working as a magistrate in the overseas territory of French Polynesia. Dustan would attract even more attention from both LGBT communities and the larger French public alike after shedding his cloak of anonymity and establishing himself as a media personality. In the years preceding his death in 2005 from an accidental drug overdose at the age of 39 ("Disparition"), Dustan appeared regularly as a guest on evening television talk shows, shocking audiences with both his attire-he would often accessorize his conspicuously gay, masculine "leather look" with a flamboyant wig- and his impassioned advocacy of individual freedom and sexual liberty, which for Dustan included the right to le bareback. Dustan's staunch, iconoclastic critique of the disciplinary rhetoric of "safe sex" and its effects on gay subjectivities and experience predictably attracted the ire of mainstream HIV/AIDS and LGBT activists in France.
As far as the leadership of prominent HIV/AIDS and LGBT activist group Act Up-Paris were concerned, Dustan was a decadent liberal individualist of the worst sort willing to do harm to "the gay community" in the egotistical pursuit of literary fame and libertine sexual thrills. By representing and discussing bareback sexuality (without discouraging or condemning it), Dustan risked undermining the hard-won accomplishments of HIV/AIDS activists; he would...