This paper investigates how the AIDS-crisis manifests itself affectively and temporally in the work of the controversial French author Guillaume Dustan (1965-2005), whose works certain AIDS-activists think we would be better off forgetting. Marking a historical shift in gay men’s attitude toward sexual promiscuity, the AIDS-crisis raises a number of theoretical questions regarding the intersection of (homo)sexuality, affect, and time. In my reading of Dustan’s autopornographic trilogy, I address three affective temporalities: a melancholic backwardness, an ecstatic perpetual present, and hope for a different future. If, in the light of the AIDS-crisis, promiscuity becomes ‘a thing of the past’, in Dustan’s novels, this melancholy and backward sexual practice can also serve as a critique of a hetero- and chrononormative orientation toward a ‘happy’ future. In Dustan’s novels, the future seems devoid of meaning because of AIDS. In a relentless search for ecstatic pleasure, however, Dustan articulates a perpetual present, in which time is wasted. This waste of time suspends timely progression and paves way for a queer abandonment of the future as a meaningful and redemptive project. I argue, however, that the temporality of ecstasy is not only a perpetual present, but also a utopian hope that gestures toward futurity. What is central to the literary work of Dustan, I suggest, is not only the representation of a homosexual desire and sex culture, but rather the articulation of an attitude toward desire itself as a pleasurable education. Herein, I propose, lies a utopian impulse, a hope for a different world.