Guillaume Dustan

Guillaume Dustan (November 28, 1965, Paris – October 3, 2005) was an openly gay French writer.

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.

He used the pen name Guillaume Dustan from 1995 onwards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2004, Dustan played a role in the film Process written & directed by C. S. Leigh.

He was the employee who checks Béatrice Dalle into the hotel where she later takes 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 died of an accidental drug overdose on October 3, 2005.

He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery (division 29).