Guillaume Dustan (28 November 1965, Paris – 3 October 2005) was a French writer. Dustan's 1998 novel, In My Room, brought the author instant notoriety for his masterful use of autofiction and depiction of gay glamour and romance in mid-1990s Paris. He was openly gay.
Early life and education Dustan was born William Baranès in France in 1965. He graduated from the École nationale d'administration and worked as an administrative judge before turning to writing.'La disparition de Guillaume Dustan', 10 October 2005, Têtu He used the pen name Guillaume Dustan from 1995 onwards.
Work Dustan's first novel, Dans ma chambre (In My Room) (1996), brought him immense fame in France for his ambitious portrayal of gay life in a Paris celebrated for its sensual pleasures and haunted by the AIDS crisis.Owen Heathcote, 'DUSTAN, GUILLAUME', in Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, ed. Gaetan Brulotte and John Phillips, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 386-287 He also edited Le Rayon Gay, a collection of books, for Balland.
He was also a short film producer, and the films he produced include Nous and Back.
In 2004, Dustan played a role in the film Process written & directed by C. S. Leigh, as the employee who checked Béatrice Dalle's character into the hotel where she later took her own life. The film also stars Guillaume Depardieu.
Dustan's writing has been compared to Renaud Camus, Marguerite Duras, Hervé Guibert, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and Bret Easton Ellis. Critic Bruce Hainley writes that Dustan celebrated Duras for her liberating sense of abjection and "alcoholizations of the first person", including her “bad French, her badly written books of the ’eighties and ’nineties”.
Dustan's first three novels, In My Room, I'm Going Out Tonight, and Stronger Than Me, published in France between 1996 and 1998, were re-released in English by Semiotext(e) in 2021. Edited by Thomas Clerc and translated by Daniel Maroun, the novels follow the narrator's sexual journeys in Paris.
He was a contemporary of such gay writers as Herve Guibert, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana. Dustan was a proponent of barebacking and at loggerheads with ACT UP.Michael J. Bosia, '"In Our Beds and Our Graves": Revealing the Politics of Pleasure and Pain in the Time of AIDS', in Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, And Activism, ed. Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-ajani, Rutgers, 2006, page 121
Death Dustan died of an accidental drug overdose on 3 October 2005. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery (division 29).
Bibliography Dans ma chambre, (tr. In My Room, Serpent's Tail and Semiotext(e)), 1996 Je sors ce soir, 1997 Plus fort que moi, 1997 Nicolas Pages, 1999 (winner of the Prix de Flore) Génie divin, 2001 LXIR, 2002 Dernier Roman, 2004 Premier Essai, 2005
Reedition Oeuvres 1, 2013 Includes Dans ma chambre, Je sors ce soir and Plus fort que moi (all three commented by Thomas Clerc) English: The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1, tr. Daniel Maroun, June 2021
Further reading Lagabriell, Renaud, '»Je vis dans un monde où plein de choses que je pensais impossibles sont possibles«: »Queere Bedeutungen« in Dans ma chambre von Guillaume Dustan,' in Anna Babka und Susanne Hochreiter (Hg.), Queer Reading in den Philologien: Modelle und Anwendungen (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 221–236. Raffaël Enault, Dustan Superstar. Biographie, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2018.
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