»Das Ende von Eddy«

At lengthy intervals, the Big 5 publishing cartel, operated by females but run by heterosexualist males (and Jonathan Galassi), dares to publish literary homosexualist fiction. (Michael Cunningham: “I can’t help noticing that as soon as I write a novel without a blowjob, they give me the Pulitzer Prize.” Gay is not what fiction is about.)

For reasons known only to this intelligentsia nested within an elite, some white trash from France now has the full force of the American publishing industry on his tail. Édouard Louis, a nom de plume, as he appeared in FANTASTIC MAN:

Louis’, or Belleguele’s, The End of Eddy has no real 21st-century function or role. It is a book full of eternally recognizable archetypes of the young sissy. It’s just that those archetypes have been translated from the French (also into Deutsch). (Like all Big 5–published books, this one’s typography is indifferent and apparently produced on Windows using circa-1998 software.)

It is torture to read a novel not just because nobody in it goes to the bathroom, spends every night watching TV, or surfs obsessively on their phones, nor just because the novel was permanently discredited by David Shields’ Reality Hunger as a Victorian form that has not evolved. (I’ve never been the same.)

If gay literature (and gay cinema) are Literatures and Cinemas of Recognition, where the job of the creator is to cause the beholder to pause and nod “Yes,” then The End of Eddy represents Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which name is a stickler’s minefield that’s as tricky to pronounce as Knopf, deploying a 20th-century army to represent 20th-century homosexualist archetypes using a 19th-century form.

Why, though?

1. Then there were my tastes, always automatically turned toward the feminine without my knowing or understanding why. I loved the theatre, female vocalists, and dolls, whereas my brothers (and even my sisters, in a certain way) preferred video games, rap, and soccer.

   As I grew up, I could feel my father’s gaze, when it fell on me, grow heavier and heavier… his powerlessness in the face of the monster he had created and whose oddity became clearer with each passing day.

   At least this Victorian novel acknowledges that video games and rap exist.

   Actually, Eddy’s family watches TV all day and night. (Probably dubbed American shows.)

   The bedroom was taken up with a bunk bed

   – I would have translated that as by a bunk bed –

   and a piece of wooden furniture with the TV on it. It was so crowded that you bumped right into the bed as you walked in, with only a couple of inches for your feet. All the space was taken up with just the bed and the television. As my brother watched TV all night long, I always had a hard time falling asleep.

   There’s also exactly one mention of the Internet.

2. Just as Eddy dreams of ballet and hates being forced to play soccer, when every normal boy in the vicinity runs around naked, he’s scared shitless with gay-boy body shame. (“Then he took off all his clothes, piece by piece, in order to show off the powerful physique he was talking about, until finally he was totally naked.”) The young gay boy, painfully aware of other boys’ and, more unnervingly, men’s bodies, swivels that telescope around so his own body disappears into a point on the horizon.

   (The awareness of looking at nude bodies is why young men do not appear naked, at all, ever, at any gym anywhere anymore. It’s also related to porno.)

3. As with anti-Semitism in countries with no Jews, Eddy’s “buddies” hate gays without bothering to have met any: “The reactions were less reticent than one might have expected from kids who, according to their own words, and already when they were only ten years old, when they were too young ever to have seen many, or even one, hated all fags.”

4. Gay boys are neat freaks, unless and until a self-loathing consumes them.

   She offered me something to drink and I said yes. She gave me a dirty glass. I remained silent. I didn’t dare say anything. I took the glass into which she poured a little strawberry syrup.

   Then she went back to the kitchen, where she rinsed out an empty bottle of detergent and then filled it up with water. I realized she was going to use it as a pitcher. I tried not to let my disgust show, and said nothing when she poured a little of the water into my glass, horrified by the flakes of detergent that were in it.

   A propensity to disgust joins forces with body shame to keep young gay boys from actually enjoying sexual encounters later on. It’s also why nearly all male vegans who aren’t Indic are gay.

5. Eddy’s family, while very poor, still had another family, even poorer, to look down upon and call filthy – a non-negotiable necessity of any poor household.

6. When he gets into a performing-arts college, Eddy notes “Bourgeois people don’t exhibit the same kind of bodily habits.”

   1. As in the year-long Times bestseller that Democrats read with self-flagellation, Hillbilly Elegy, to a man or woman every single random povo bogan in both books is a filthy, reprehensible creep who treats the author like shit – and has no future whatsoever, by choice or lack of same.

   2. Someone walks up,
      Tristan.
      He calls out to me
      Hey, Eddy – as gay as ever?
      Everyone laughs.

      I laugh along with them.

   3. All the richer and better-educated doppelgängers treat these respective authors like royalty and help them out unbidden.

      Some people are better than other people.

      (Pace Michael Malice, if you agree with that statement you are axiomatically right-wing. Play it as it lays.)

7. Muscular low-class boys finally fuck Eddy, and each other, as is the natural order for that age.

   Eddy has true Kinsey 6 disgust for the sexual anatomy of his girlfriend, which disgust is the natural order at all ages and is under intense Orwellian attack by batshit trannies, who want you to believe some dykes have cocks (“Get over it!”).

8. During the audition process I met a young man named Fabrice. We chatted and promised that we would be friends that autumn if we were both admitted. Fabrice haunted my thoughts all summer. In truth, I was thinking less about Fabrice himself than about the possibility that I could have a circle of friends… who were boys, as a boy should have, and not girlfriends anymore.

9. Eddy sings in a school pageant and, to his incomprehending shock, the crowd, which otherwise loathes him, goes wild. Even the ginger and the hunchback who beat him up and spit on him (cf. Poison) “stood up and yelled exuberantly Bravo, Eddy, bravo! ”

   I won an academic first prize in high school, which hated my guts yet applauded with gusto as I took the long route up to the stage, aware even in utero how to milk an entrance. I left and never looked back, as povo homos all must.

10. Bright red and yellow, an Airness jacket. I felt so proud when we bought it, my mother had said

    quite proud herself

    It’s your present to take to high school, it’s really expensive, we’re pinching pennies so we can afford it

    But as soon as I got to high school, I realized that it didn’t fit in with the people here, that no one here wore things like that; the boys wore men’s coats or else wool jackets, like hippies wore

    People found my jacket comical

    Three days later, filled with shame, I threw it in a public trash can.

    My mother will cry when I lie to her (I lost it).

    Mine was an Adidas gym bag, just like the ones the white-trash Acadian kids carried. (The kids who couldn’t pronounce th.) I buried it under my bed on sight and instantly.

If you want French gay, watch French gay films

André Téchiné foremost.

Édouard Louis:

I remember less the smell of the rapeseed fields than I do the burnt smell that would pervade the village streets when the farmers let manure slowly dry up in the sun…. I remember less the milk still warm from the cow’s udders, brought by my mother from the farm across the way, than I do the evenings when we didn’t have enough to eat, and when my mother would say Tonight we’re having milk, one of poverty’s neologisms.

I have never seen a “conventional” gay French film. The director who heads off into true yet unexplored territory is André Téchiné, whom contrarian Armond White correctly champions (articles).

Téchiné’s up-to-the-second timeless elemental wintry tale Being 17 is packed with surprises, livestock, buses crawling around icy mountains (in France‽), honkers, gay cruising apps, romping in the woods, running at full tilt through waist-high snow, husbandry, an iPhone, a rustic cabin barely wired for 240 V, and what shouldn’t be brave performances by young actors, but even Téchiné fights against expectations, one such expectation being that French boys in their late teens would both be uncut.

Téchiné provides complexity, sensuality, texture, and warmth (sometimes also brutality, including a theme of animal abuse), while a Victorian novel about a poor sissy who doesn’t even have the Internet in the 21st century does what, and exists why, though?