A Note To Mr. Zeeland

Dear Mister Zeeland,

                                            I don’t know if you will read this or not but I am going to write it anyway. I have been thinking of you lately, as I have had my head up Michel Foucault’s arse. I make that link in my mind in the nicest possible way of course. I really have loved what I have read by you so far, in The Queen Is Dead, on your blog and in some essays posted on Mark Simpson’s website. You have shown me a world I never knew existed before and now I am kind of transfixed by it.

I am currently writing a fictional account about Michel Foucault’s life and work as seen through the eyes of his daughter. Yes I know he didn’t have a daughter. That is the fictional bit. Well to be honest it is all a complete departure from the truth except for when it suits me. That’s what writers do it seems. I’ve never written a whole novel before.

Anyway. I have started doing some research, but I am finding that I am learning most from his writings themselves, and also by talking to other people who have read them, who have a sense of the man, just as I do. Mark Simpson kindly sent a list of my questions about Michel to Professor Halperin, but he wouldnt answer them, saying I had to read all the official biographies. I have this horrible suspicion that even if I do, I still won’t get the answers I require.

Currently I am quite intrigued by how Michel-positioned himself in his sexual acts. To what extent he was a fucker, and what extent he was a sucker. Because when I come to write scenes in my story, he has to be one or the other, at any given point. I am starting to think he was versatile, as his accounts of the SM scene in Sanfrancisco suggest he had some quite self-shattering experiences, that only a bottom could have. And because of his diagnosis it is most likely he contracted the virus through being penetrated. But you never know with that one. But he also seems quite…dominant to me. He keeps taking control of situations in my story, anyway. I can’t seem to stop him from chasing young men round Paris.

Which is where you come in. I want to write a scene in a public toilet in the capital, and I was wondering if A) you knew of any particular locations that he might have visited, or B) have a sense of which side of the glory hole he might have fallen on. Would he have been a putter-of-dick through the hole, or would he have been a sucker on the other side.

Ive been reading about the 1960s and how the government declared homosexual acts in public a ‘scourge’ on society, and so cottaging would have been illegal then. But people would have still done it, right? Do you know anything about that time in France? I read a great story about the 1860s, a century before, and how ‘pederastes’ would drill holes in the cubicles in Les Halles, only for the police to fill them in in the mornings. And then the pederastes would come out and drill the holes all over again. I loved how defiant it was. I can’t see gay men defiantly staking their claim on their territory like that these days can you?

Thank-you for inspiring me to go underground, down into the labrynths of history, and of Paris, and, well, of Michel Foucault’s libido. It is a fascinating place to explore.

I hope you are well.

Yours, in some kind of solidarity,

QRG
xxx