Édouard Louis

Jordan: What brings you to New York?
Édouard: I’m here for a month and a half to teach at NYU. I’m actually giving a seminar on class war in literature. I teach both French and American literature – Faulkner, Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Proust, Guy de Maupassant.
Is NYC a city of sex for you?
Um…for me traveling is a way of exploring different sex scenes and different sex possibilities and different…sex experiences. The interesting part is that it’s not only about the sex itself but the way that it really makes you dive into the place where you are, and you know, when you go somewhere to have sex with someone in this place, it’s a way of connecting very deeply with that place, of seeing an additional layer.
Have you ever had an experience like that here?
Hmm…I don’t know. I’m going to try to say something I never say, so I need to find time to articulate it…
Take your time.
So Gilles Deleuze had this beautiful idea that when you meet someone, you meet a landscape. With its own geography, with its own risks, with its own beauties. My strongest memories of New York in the last ten years have been moments where I connected with someone – sexually speaking – or with several people. But…I love going far with someone. I love the vibe of a summer love, when you go to a place and you get attached to someone and you know that it’s not going to last because you have your life elsewhere, and you lie about things and you both know you lie. You promise yourself that you’ll see each other again and maybe you will move to the other continent and maybe you will build something and maybe you will get married.
(laughs)
Both of you know that it will completely fail. But the beauty comes out of it. The beauty comes out of the mutual lies, the mutual fiction. When I write books I’m not interested in fiction, but in these kinds of moments.
Did you have a summer fling here?
Yeah?
Yeah?
Yes.
Can you tell me about it?
I met a guy in a taco place. He was making the tacos and we were smiling at each other every time I went. And…one day I was brave enough to ask for his Instagram. He gave it to me and for the two weeks, we saw each other all the time, every day. He didn’t speak a word of English. He spoke Spanish. I speak Spanish, but it’s bad to middle bad. So the communication was very difficult, but it was part of the beauty.
Amazing.
Those two weeks gave a depth to New York that I didn’t have in normal daily life. Because I hate everything about this city – I hate the noise, I hate the fact that people don’t talk but scream, I hate the fact that they put music in the restaurant to make people scream even more, I hate the fact that they put AC everywhere as if you were meant to live in a refrigerator, so even when it’s eight degrees Celsius outside, they still put the AC on inside. It’s inhuman. It’s destroying the planet. This city is a disaster – there’s no social system, there’s no health system, there’s no protection, there’s no left, there are no communists, there’s nothing interesting except a few crazy people like you or Nan Goldin. I hate everything about it. So my only way to connect to this place is to suddenly find someone who turns it into a setting, and then when New York becomes a setting, it’s beautiful. Because it’s not a substance of your daily life anymore, it’s just like a stage. Sex kind of dissolves New York and turns it into a context, a background, nothing else.
Do you feel like not speaking the same language – having to find other ways of communicating through inference or physical means – heightened a certain desire in that relationship?
Mhm. It’s also frustrating because there are things you’d like to say, so it creates these beautiful moments where you take a translator on your phone and say the things in French and then a stupid, ugly Siri voice says it in Spanish, and then you laugh together because the voice is so ridiculous and it creates these little beautiful bubbles of real human poetry. But also, of course, it makes you… focus more on the physical and on the sexual aspects.
Naturally.
But it’s important to talk about it because sex has a bad reputation now. We talk a lot about violence in sex, problems in sex, abuse in sex, which is important – and you know, I’m part of it, my novel ‘The History of Violence’ is about rape, so I don’t ignore the importance of violence in sex. I’m not saying we should stop talking about it, but I am saying we should be careful that this way of talking about sex doesn’t become the only way of framing sex. It shouldn’t erase the beauty of sex.
Right.
For me, throughout my entire life, sex has been an odyssey of knowing people. I’ve had sex with billionaires, with artists, with drug dealers, with taco makers, with old guys, with young guys. And all of that experience gave me a kind of notion of the world I live in. It opened my mind and my eyes to so many things.

I was at a pup play party earlier today and Iʼm curious if you have fetishes?
Um, no. Not at all. Not a single trace of it. I’m very classic. But that can be a kind of kink, this kind of classicism. I love the kind of Lana Del Rey classicism. I love to go buy beers for my boyfriend and give him a massage while he plays video games. That’s my kink. (laughs)
I love that.
It becomes a big part of the desire for me too. I was never into leather or S&M. It never worked for me. I’ve tried everything, of course.
Are there parts of the body that are of specific interest to you? Or is it more about this boyfriend experience?
Even if it’s a fiction, I love this experience. And I love armpits.
Are you into scents?
Yeah, it depends. I love body scents. Once, I was unable to have sex with someone just because I couldn’t bear the smell of his moisturizer. There are some scents that can really block me.
Shaved or unshaved armpits?
Both, but I don’t really care about hair. I don’t really care about age. I don’t care about…well, the only part that doesn’t really interest me is the back side. I never look at it.
You mean the butt? That’s so funny.
But what I love about all this is linked to the interconnection between sex and politics. Today, one of the big conversations about sex and politics is to say, ‘We have to pay attention because there are relationships of powers that create problematic sexual situations.’ For example, a teacher with a student, or if someone has a social status that the other person doesn’t have. For me, the fascinating part of sexuality is that power works in a very different way than in the rest of society. And in fact, what takes power out of you in your daily life, like being young, for example, can be – in the context of sexual relationships – a source of power.
Absolutely.
I know some guys – Roland Barthes talks about it in his diary – who would’ve been ready to lose all their money to a young guy just because he was young. Talking about this taco maker, I was the guy in power in this relationship, if you think in terms of the world we live in. Because I am white, he is not. I have money, he doesn’t have a lot. I have a social status that opens some doors to me, he does not. But in the context of the power of the sex relationship, I was the one obsessed with him. I would’ve done anything for him during those two weeks. I was buying him gifts because I felt sorry not to be beautiful enough for him and I wanted to repay him for that, I wanted to… I was so afraid to not be good enough at sex and I was obsessed with it. And I don’t think he was thinking about me as much as I was about him. So sex is also this place where there is no power with a capital P in the world we live in. In each circle and bubble and field – as Pierre Bourdieu would call them – of our lives, power works in a very different way. And what excludes you when you’re in the streets can give you so much power in bed. And I love that. Because sometimes you don’t know before it happens, you don’t know where the power will be, you don’t know how it will work…and I find that exciting.

I feel like so much of fetish or BDSM is the manufacture o or the exaggeration of those dynamics. Power can be so easily sexualized and it’s ever-present in sex. Have you cruised before?
Yes, thereʼs so much beauty in cruising.
Have you cruised here in New York?
No, never, actually. I don’t know where to go. You’ll have to teach me.
We’ll go!
Um, I’ve cruised sometimes by accident in the streets, but I haven’t gone to a cruising place because I don’t know where they are. Some people told me it was in Central Park, but some other people told me it was dangerous so I never really dared. I’m a scared gay child, like Allen Ginsberg would say, so when someone tells me something is dangerous, I tend not to go.
Understandable.
For me there are mostly two very interesting things in cruising. First is the profile of people that you see cruising, because cruising is very inclusive for outsiders, for people who are not in the gay community – they know they have this kind of anonymity, that it’s just for sex. So you have precisely people of very different backgrounds and very different sexualities. You might have straight guys who come just because they want a blowjob. I love this kind of unexpected situation where you never know who you’ll meet and what you’ll see. And also, what I find beautiful is that I really believe in a ten-minute love story.
Tell me more.
For me, it happens so much in my life. I can go to a cruising space and have sex with someone for ten minutes, and then I feel this person on my skin and I think about this person for days after with so much melancholy because I know it won’t happen again. And in a way, maybe I’m happy about it, but still, I have some sadness for it, or… I find it very beautiful and for me, precisely, that’s the way I always experienced love. I always experienced love in glimpses like this. I was never a lover like many people are. I don’t know why there’s a missing part in me – I’m not able to be a lover like in the novels of Proust or Marguerite Duras. I cannot think about someone for weeks and months and wonder where they are, like, check my phone to see if they’ve answered. I never cried because someone broke up with me. I’m always the one breaking up. I never suffered for three months because of a breakup.
No?
Never happens.
How did it end with the taco maker?
I knew I was going back to France and so I told him. And, um, we were sad. He cried a little bit. I didn’t cry, but I was very melancholic. Then it was over. But precisely because love works that way for me mostly.
Really?
Love in this kind of very short and strong moment. I don’t know classical love. I don’t know the love that they talk about in movies. My body was never able to produce that. Sometimes I’m sad about it. I’d love to know the feeling, you know? When I have a friend who meets someone and they say, ‘I think about him day and night and I wonder where he or she is.’ I find it beautiful in a way. But when I go to a cruising place, this intense love story of ten minutes is so fulfilling. And I have the impression that I am learning so much from it. Maybe much more than people who are in love for five years.
Where is a cruising space that you’ve been to?
I’ve done it a lot in Paris. In Athens. In parks. Mostly in the parks. Greece is particularly beautiful because it’s always warm. And you go in the cruising space in the night and you have the thickness of the night and it makes it very beautiful, and the kind of warmth is a kind of preparation for memory, because it creates such an atmosphere that it makes every scene that happens deeper and as if the temperature was a matter of memory, because the weather is so abnormal sometimes, because in the summer it’s 2AM and it’s still so hot. It’s the same thing when it’s snowing. When you have an intense weather, it becomes a form of memory. And that’s why I find it very beautiful to cruise in places like Greece. Or like Norway in the winter when it’s so cold. Because gay people are never tired, so even if it’s minus 15 degrees, they’ll go.
True. (both laugh) Anywhere else?
There’s also a very beautiful park in Geneva, Parc des Bastions, where Pasolini went a lot. I knew about it by reading his diary.
Sometimes – for me – cruising is about this collective masculine desire, an excess of pleasure. To be joined with bodies, to get fucked by or to fuck as many guys as I can. Does that resonate? Like, when you go cruising, are you looking to take as many loads as you can? Or is it a specific individual you are seeking to encounter?
No no no. I tend to look for one person. I’m kind of a very strange romantic. And almost all the time, the person I’m interested in is the person who looks very uncomfortable in those places. When people look too much connoisseur, it kind of turns me off most of the time. What I love is the feeling that this person doesn’t come here often, they don’t really know what to do, they’re a bit scared. I love this… I don’t know why. I love those guys who feel uneasy in those places.

Perhaps the stakes feel very high for them. Maybe there’s a sense of, ‘I have you. You’re good. We can have a nice time together.’ Also, at some point in time, we were both that person who was scared.
Yes. Clearly. But still I wonder why. For example, I have friends who’d really hate that, they say, ‘I don’t like people who feel out of place because the sex will be bad, he won’t know how to do it, it’ll be boring. I want someone who can handle everything.’ But I’m the opposite, I feel really attracted to the clumsiness. Maybe in general I love people who feel uncomfortable. (laughs)
I love that. It’s so beautiful. I just have to say, I love that we’re both huge Hervé Guibert fans. Just yesterday I was reading my copy of ‘The Dogs’. Obviously, Guibert had, like myself, a particular fascination with BDSM. I realize you’re not into BDSM, but in terms of the power play, do those dynamics animate your desire at all?
So, of course, Michel Foucault was a close friend of Guibert’s and he was thinking about to what extent that sex is part of the rest of society. If you reproduce sexuality patterns that exist in society, do you reproduce society as it is? Or is it completely detached? It’s an interesting question when it comes to power relationships, for example. Today I think the theory is that sex is reproducing society as it is. That’s why many people talk about fetishization. They say if you love in a certain way, if you desire in a certain way, if you have sex in a certain way, you reproduce the world around you.
Is that true or not?
I’m frankly not sure. It’s a difficult question. That’s why we never found a final answer to it. But, uh, if you play dominant-dominated sex, does it mean that you fight for domination in the world we live in? I’m not sure. I don’t really think so. Michel Foucault loved BDSM and dominant-dominated relationships and in all his books and all his public texts, he was fighting against any form of government, power, discipline, all his life. He wrote against it. So there were no contradictions for him. I think it should be a right to play in bed with things that are ugly in the world, but it takes on a different meaning. Some people fetishize working-class guys…but that’s not how class works. Class is having a bad job, breaking your back, working at the factory, not having health care, having bad food that will give you cancer – it’s not receiving a blowjob. That’s not how class domination works. So if you have desire for working-class men because you’re a bourgeois and you think it’s funny and it makes you shiver, it’s not the way to reproduce the world. You reproduce the world if you vote for the right and you fight against welfare – that’s the way you will make them suffer. Not by giving a blowjob or giving your ass or your dick.
Right.
Of course, sex is intertwined with history, and we know the story of Jean Genet who wanted to get fucked by Black guys, we know the story of Marcel Proust who wanted to have sex with working class guys because he was this old, rich queen and loved the masculinity of the working class. But I don’t think that while they were doing this they were reproducing the violence in the world. I don’t think that when Genet wanted a Black guy to fuck his ass he was reproducing the racism in the world. In fact, Jean Genet was in Palestine when no one else was and fighting with the Black Panthers when no one else was. I believe that society and sex are in a way – even if they are intertwined – extremely different and because of that, I have no trouble playing with social norms during sex that I usually fight in the streets, you know? I kind of like this idea because it becomes a conscious decision.
When Covid hit, I was living in London and working primarily as a playwright, and then all of a sudden I was living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and my income dried up. And no wealthy parents to fall back on. (laughs)
I feel you.
So I turned to sex work. And I know you’ve written about similar experiences, within an autofictional context – at least, doing sex work to pay for medical bills.
Yes, in ‘Change’.
So I’m curious, what is your relationship with sex work?
I mean, it was largely a thing that was beautiful to me. Once again, it’s blurring the ideas of power because I mostly did it when I was around 18, 19, 20, 21.
How would you describe your clientele?
Mostly wealthy guys. They were much more powerful than I was. I was just a student who did sex work to live. It’s not as if I absolutely wanted to do it, but I had to do it and I preferred to do it instead of working at McDonald’s to earn 10 euros an hour. I was making 400 for one hour. Most of the time, those men were intimidated by me because I was young, because I was so fresh, so new, so… Those guys with their beautiful apartments and their money, you know. I could see sometimes how shy they felt about themselves. Most of the time, they wanted me to feel comfortable, giving me more money than was expected.
Have you ever been on the other end of sex work?
Yeah, I remember there was this very beautiful man cruising me on the street. It was a long time ago, well, a few years ago. And he was hitting on me and flirting. It was so beautiful, I could’ve died. He had a white cap on. I love guys with caps. Then he pushed me to the end of seduction. Then tells me, ‘It’s going to be 100.’ And I couldn’t say no. I would have sold my house, my mother, my Proust collection to have that moment with him. I would’ve sold my most precious belongings because it was so beautiful. It was bizarre, because I had been on the other side for so long. But in crossing the threshold and going to the other side, I found the same simplicity, and beauty.

Was the guy with the cap worth it? Was it good sex?
Yeah, it was good. It was beautiful. The money made the pressure vanish. I wasn’t in the state that I usually tend to be when I’m having sex with someone, thinking, ‘Am I beautiful enough? Am I good enough? Do I smell good enough? Am I in shape enough?’ And this gets worse with age. (laughs)
How so?
When you’re 20, you think less about it, but when you turn 30, you start thinking more about it. Particularly during the occasions where you suddenly have sex with, I don’t know, someone who’s 23 and you’re 32. Suddenly you see a difference in the body, in the texture of the skin. Then it becomes this very melancholic obsession. Particularly if you’re the bottom in the relationship, because then you don’t have the game of the older top guy, which is a classic fantasy. When you’re the bottom and you’re older, for me, it comes with a lot of melancholy.
Why’s that?
I think aging bottoms are really a good source for writing a tragedy. I know some gay friends around me who are terrified. They think, ‘What will happen? Will I be able to have any sexuality?’ It’s a real source of pain. Of course, there are guys who love older bottoms and everything. It can also be a kink, a preference, but it’s not the majority. Let’s be honest about it. Most of the tops fantasize about younger guys. Particularly when it comes to age, my friends who are tops, they age with more confidence and even as they turn 30, 35, 40, they enter a bar and they have all the young guys looking at them.
It’s so true. What do you think about porn? What do you like to watch?
Porn? Um…I love different kinds of porn, but…the thing that I love is when sex is about vanishing. It’s about feeling that you are…not a person. (laughs)
I very much relate to that.
Desire is about vanishing, as Anne Carson wrote. What I love about sex is the feeling of disappearing. I talk a little bit about it in ‘Change’. I love in sex the moments where I have the impression that I have no name, no history, no past, no family, no future, no questions – I’m just a body here giving pleasure to someone, or someone taking pleasure out of me instead, more precisely. That’s what I tend to look for in porn.
What kind of scenarios?
So it can be, like, several people on one person and this person is just the object of the posse. And they don’t do anything with each other, they just focus on him. I love it when it’s sometimes wild and anonymous in nature. Also when someone just fucks someone very quickly and then almost throws him on the floor. For me, those moments of nonexistence are a real privilege. Our life is full of dreams, fears, traumas of the past, things that we’re carrying with us, anxiety of whether or not we can pay our rent, what we will be in 20 years… Life is full of the past and future, but sex is this moment when it’s just pure presence. You are just a platform of happiness in which your persona doesn’t count anymore. A collective thing in which you are just a conductor of electric currents. And I think that you find it particularly when you are the bottom in sex. Because I believe that when you are at the top, you have to give a lot. My friends who define themselves as only top, they say things like, ‘I want to fuck him’ or ‘I would love to destroy his pussy.’ So for them, sex becomes a means of doing something. Whereas when you’re the bottom, it has to do less with yourself. At least it’s what I project and something that turns me on in porn.

Could you see yourself collapsing the distance between your lived experience and your fantasy? Could you see yourself in that scenario as the nameless cumdump being obliterated by this group of men?
Yeah yeah. I could. Completely.
Do you seek it out?
No. I love the idea, but I never practically looked for the experience. I’ve already had sex with several people in my life, but I think the maximum was three guys on me.
How did you arrange that?
It happened kind of organically. Uh…we didn’t have to formalize it. We met and…
At someone’s house?
At a bathhouse. In Brazil. It happened just kind of suddenly. One came up to me and the other said, ‘Can I join?’ And then another said, ‘Can I join?’ And it was pretty clear what was going to happen.
Nice.
But yes, I love the vanishing. That’s maybe why I have this feeling of melancholy after sex. It’s not really clear where it comes from. Sometimes after very good sex, walking alone in the night back to your hotel and you feel this deep sense of beautiful melancholy, not a crushing one. Just a feeling that it’s something you will never revive, that you will never get back.
Thank you so much for this. I’m really touched by your candor.
You’re so sweet. You made me say things I didn’t want to say!