Run Faster !

JIM AND WILLIAM, IS BEING DIFFERENT A CRIME?

Love differently

It’s a love story in a different way. Within a city. Jim and William love each other. Author of them, the world is agitated. In the cities, violence is omnipresent, it has become a necessary evil. In the seventies, it took birth, it began to take root. People are starting to get scared by the word unemployment.

It is the cancer of the working class.

Can a boy love another boy in the working class?

Poverty always accompanies acculturation. I had a experience at the factory, one day, a person of my age, around twenty years old at the time, told me that culture was regional news. At the time, I started reading Libération and the monthly Actuel. I already passed for a Zulu. Lack of money often accompanies racism and intolerance. Maybe by hating others, we don’t see our misery.

Jim was born into a working-class family, his parents barely managed to make ends meet at the end of each month. They ask right or left for a little money to acquire the bare necessities. Is this the fourth world? I don’t see it that way, but it’s the floor just above, it forms the place where you can’t go any lower. Otherwise, you end up in ruins. Nobody represents the fourth world, a state within a state, where people don’t count.

What Is Poverty – Working-class Hero

This is poverty, how can we define it, a poor person lacks the material elements that would allow them to live decently? Misery is extreme poverty, the state in which you are pitiful. Coluche sang a song a few years ago about poverty.

Misery, Misery!

It’s always about the poor people

That you persist stubbornly

Misery, Misery!

Poverty is a cancer that ruins society; men who have known it have fought it like Father Joseph Wresinski by founding the ATD Fourth World movement.

Jim was educated at the Jules Haag high school in Besançon, for a BEP in micromechanics. Within this establishment at that time, in this field, you could have a CAP in small mechanics, this BEP, or a microtechnology technician baccalaureate. The college directed him there without asking his opinion. He will meet William there. An attraction will arise. A story will begin…

Professional training leads to the world of manufacturing,

A place built of iron and concrete, where you are locked up for eight hours a day, you breathe sludge and hot tallow. At the end of school, the world of the factory opens its doors. The sparks there are not fireworks. When you enter it, all you think about is escaping. In the 1970s, were we talking about LGBT rights? I don’t remember that term being branded to me. Discrimination existed, but I don’t think the right to be different was taken into account. The battle of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, to have their right to live like everyone else recognised, had not yet begun.

The Orchamps-Palente of the city of Besançon in the years recovered poorly from the LIP affair. Even the children around the turnstile were singing, ‘Giraud, bastard, the people will have your skin’. Giraud was the negotiator of this social conflict. This is the social climate of the time. Today, the Orchamps District is made up of housing with the lowest rent in the city.

Drugs Are an Indicator of Unhappiness

Jim lets himself be tempted by narcotics, an underworld gravitates around them. This world perhaps prohibits an attraction, certainly a need to differentiate oneself from others. Do we undoubtedly commit suicide by devoting ourselves to artificial worlds?

Smoking a joint or a ‘tarpé’ is surely an expression of freedom. Drug addiction is often the path taken by these smokers of badly rolled cigarettes. Addictions can be numerous, repeated consumption of a product – tobacco, alcohol, drugs – can lead to a loss of control over consumption, we lose our freedom of choice with regard to the product. Disruptions in family, social or professional life may result. Today, other behaviours can be considered addictions, such as games and time spent on social networks, at the time my story is set, the digital world did not exist.

One day, Jim witnesses a murder.

Some young people murdered one of his friends who was a prostitute. They don’t want him to talk. These young people have a North African origin. We are in the ’70s, we were not talking about Islam, Islamism, Islam leftism, Islamophobia. This is ordinary violence. The explanation for delinquency is linked to the personality of the officer and not to his ethnicity or religious beliefs. The exogenous causes of delinquency are known, we can cite inequalities and social origin, economic development, poor countries experience less delinquency, urban type, large housing estates, promiscuity favours crime. We generally oppose this with endogenous causes, what is due to the personality of the offender, what comes from heredity, family, illness or morphology.

For Lombroso, the criminal is an abnormal person, biological or morphological causes explain his deviance on the path to crime. The multiplication of causes which leads the agent to commit an offence can lead to an error of interpretation. The difficulty of determining the main cause of the criminal act leads to seeking the reason for the behaviour in religion.

This book is also the story of a sordid crime, it is a detective book, we do not encounter a Hercule Poirot there. We are far from a work by Agatha Christie. It’s just a crime that disrupts a budding story.

Male prostitution

Male prostitution is the guest of this story, it provides the crux of the plot.

The story of Jim and William is a story of deviance, and of choices, we do not always choose our life, facts which escape our will condition it. Are we really free? Followers of a religion perceive homosexuality as an offence to their God. Does the believer believe himself to be God to decide whether a behaviour offends the supreme being? Faced with violence, will ask for help from the police provide a solution? When you are a victim of physical violence, will file a complaint be enough to put an end to the violence, insults and harassment? Misdemeanour and crime are just words that do not stop delinquency. The fear of prison no longer acts as a brake on the behaviour of violent people. In cases of violence, the attackers always believe they are smarter than a police officer or a prosecutor. They are convinced of escaping imprisonment.

Emotional Rescue

This book could have been called Emotional Rescue. Maybe! In the early ’80s, The Rolling Stones sang ‘Emotional rescue’, is this a nod to this song? This manuscript is not dedicated to voyeurism or political propaganda. It’s a story of two boys who love each other. I wrote this story without being homosexual. Should we be like the main characters when we write? I answer no, otherwise where is the imagination? Did I write about homosexuality?

No, two people who love each other, gender doesn’t matter. But a cycle of violence sets in. Jim is unable to stop him. He is a victim of violence without being white as snow. The world is not perfect, fortunately, otherwise why would we write? Urban violence creates a universe where fear reigns as a sadistic master.

Homophobia is not the subject of the story.

Homophobic violence exists, but this is not a book about it. Homophobia is present, it is a social fact, it is not the plot of the work. It’s a thriller. The story takes place in the years 1976–1977, at the same time, the punk wave was breaking. The book doesn’t mention it, it also tells the story of lives shattered by drugs. A violent time, we rub shoulders with drugs and sometimes death. Is it different today? I don’t know.

The ‘sex pistols’ are not the story of this book

I don’t tell the story of Syd’s life Vicioux and Nancy Spungen. Jim and William are not punk or drug addicts. As far as Syd and Nancy are concerned, it’s a real cold case.