David Davis

on the death drive

Guillame is looking for a new apartment. His relationship with his live-in boyfriend, Stéphane, has been in a nosedive, and the two of them agree that if they’re going to stay together, they’ll need a fresh start. Stéphane goes to stay with his parents while Guillame looks for his own place. With a fresh start, Guillame hopes, they can salvage what they have and build something new.

On the morning of moving day, an old hookup calls Guillame and offers to pierce him. Guillame is busy moving, naturally; can they meet later in the week? No, says the old hookup, he is only free this afternoon. Guillame decides to go for it. “I had been thinking about it for a long time,” he tells us. “Lots of guys I had been seeing or knew had it done. Not me. It was one of the only things I hadn’t already done. And now I felt like doing something serious.”

Guillame decides to have his balls pierced. Despite a few hiccups, the piercing goes well enough, but after the piercer leaves—he has a nipple to attend to—the bleeding won’t stop. Hours later, Stéphane returns to help Guillame move, “looking very happy to see me.” But when he learns about the botched (?) piercing, he is thrown into despair. Knowing they won’t be able to have sex for weeks, Stéphane, a normally insecure and even somewhat submissive man, punches a wall.

“I realized,” Guillame tells us, “that I had just fucked over our new start.”

This week, I wrote an essay about cruising and I’m Going Out Tonight, an autofiction novel by gay French writer Guillame Dustan. The scene above is from another one of his novels, In My Room. (Obviously I haven’t gotten Dustan out of my system yet.)

Readers will already know that piercing is an interest of mine (and subscribers can read and see more about that in a paywalled post, if they can handle it). But what caught my attention about this scene from In My Room was how Dustan uses a failed scrotal piercing to encapsulate Guillame’s relationship with sex, desire, and intimacy. This naked self-sabotage, clear to Guillame only in hindsight, of course, undercuts his stated desire to save his relationship with Stéphane: he has prioritized a risk with a fling over his partnership, one that has been transformative for both of them. To wit, Stéphane has told Guillame that, bottoming for him, he’s “beginning to understand what fucking is all about.” “He gives his ass up gladly,” Guillame observes of Stéphane. “I can see he’s really obsessed with his man cunt…He’s the same way I was when I discovered my asshole with Quentin [his ex-boyfriend] five years ago.”

Fucking, talking, eating, dancing, caretaking, cruising other guys, and cohabitating don’t appear to be enough to outweigh a more or less nonsexual encounter with a man that Guillame doesn’t even bother to name. Why would he choose the cheap countercultural thrill of needle through nutsack over love?

In a 1920 essay called Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Freud expanded on psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein’s writing on the death drive(s) to complicate his own formulations of the human instinct to self-preservation. He arrives at the conclusion that it is not just the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain that satisfies our biological and psychological need. In fact, Eros, the biological “drive” that produces creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation, exists in opposition to another “drive,” the one producing destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction—the death drive. It’s in situations where the pleasure principle “cannot cope adequately” that the death drive emerges. Freud identifies these situations primarily as children's games and all-ages patterns of compulsive, repetitive, self-injuring behavior of the kind often now associated with traumatization and PTSD.

I hope I’ve gotten that right. (I’m sure I haven’t.) But since I hear the term “death drive” thrown around a lot in the context of SM activities like piercing, I wanted to attempt to get a grip on what that means before digging in here. At this point, we’re used to encountering stigmatizing “explanations” of SM, and other so-called high-risk “sexual” behaviors, within the context of trauma; through this lens (whose origins can be found a century ago in the work of the father of psychoanalysis), SM is, at best, a set of reactionary behaviors in response to certain kinds of damage. Even if we’re able to move away from conceptions of SM as deviance or even just cope, at best it’s seen as a sort of unconscious self-therapizing. The current narrative, pitying and infantilizing and often highly hypocritical, feels like a pat on the head to broken people with no other recourse to healthy, normal sexuality and connection.

Long-time DAVID readers will know that I’ve gone over the pathologization of sadomasochism at length. What can we do about it? Well, I think we can start by rattling the conceptual cage in which SM is often contained by exploring its other uses and purposes. This can be done not just by studying the ways in which SM is done intentionally (and, yes, politically), as happens with leather traditions, but by taking another look at the ways in which it is done “naturally,” instinctively, and, yes, even compulsively.

In In My Room, Guillame introduces latex, pain, and power exchange into sex, with Stéphane and with other men, when it starts to get boring, or when he is angry, or when he has learned that a friend has seroconverted but cannot comfort him with a hug because they are in public together. One might say that, with the last-minute ball piercing, Guillame has introduced risk to a foundering relationship like he has introduced a leather hood to a slow fuck in the past—though this time, it doesn’t work. Or doesn’t it?

In My Room ends with Guillame making plans to leave Paris for a job overseas. He makes his farewells. “Stéphane,” he tells us, “was my last date.” They meet in Guillame’s eponymous room, where they talk. “And then we get so emotional that we held each other in our arms. Electric erection. We kissed. It was powerful.” It is only now, as they’re leaving each other, that Guillame sucks Stéphane’s dick “like I never sucked it before. With love.”

Afterward, they go out to eat. They drink, they laugh. Stéphane drives Guillame back home, where they say goodbye in the final paragraph of the book. “I know I should have left him much earlier,” Guillame admits to us. “When I told myself for the first time that I would never be in love with him. But it felt so good to be loved by him. So good.”

I’ve written before about SM as an adaptive intimacy. Perhaps it’s also an expansive one, an invitation to bring what we call sex—but which is actually something much more interesting and complex—outside of the places that are circumscribed for it. It need not involve whips, chains, or the normal paraphernalia, only a willingness to feel discomfort, physical or otherwise. To do so is unavoidable for some; as an HIV+ gay man at the height of the pandemic, how is Guillame to distinguish between risk and safety in the same way that normal people do? What is his death drive and what is his Eros when his sexuality, HIV status, and lifestyle are considered neither normal nor safe?

I take safety very seriously, as do the people I play with. But I doubt, or at least question, its primacy when we talk about SM, or even sex generally. (This is why “risk-aware” is superior, in my opinion, to “safe and sane.”) The overreliance on safety, or rather the notion of safety, which can become a fantasy of control, not only prevents us from accessing pleasure, or the thrill of danger, or the rewards of risk; it flattens the intimacy that we are supposedly seeking. What if, like Guillame (and Dustan, his self/creator), you could acknowledge resentment, or boredom, or anxiety in the course of a “normal” sexual encounter with another person? Or even elsewhere? Heartbreak can’t be compared to a heart attack, but neither are safe, are they?

“Sex” is so closely, restrictively associated with “pleasure” that there is little room for otherwise in our conception of it, and yet sex, like a conversation, a meal, a dance, takes place between people, often those who have met each other before and thus have a backstory, a context, a history. Hookups with someone about whom you know nothing, or next to it, are powerful and exciting and even intimate for their own reasons. But sex with someone you know, perhaps very well, cannot pretend to be that—and why should we want it to? Guillame, Stéphane, and the men they fuck together and separately respond to their feelings in the sexual moment. There is no script. There is no pure ecstasy, pleasure, or climax (particularly if you’re fucking for a long time, which is often needed for more “extreme” kinds of sexual pleasure, like fisting) without the frictions of anger, anxiety, boredom, fear, and a host of other negative affects.

One of the things I find so compelling about Dustan is his way of bringing me to a familiar conclusion: that the difference between SM and gay sex is sometimes (or perhaps even more often than sometimes) impossible to identify, and what’s more, that the difference between gay sex and gay life is just as nebulous.

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