For Eribon, Foucault’s friend and first biographer, the tracing of his own life history in Returning to Reims reveals to him something he had repressed from conscious analysis, from a fuller recognition: that his departure from home was marked not just by his desire to live queerly but just as much by the desire to escape from the working class. Eribon traces the many pressures to conform to class identity that would have kept him, like most other members of his family, in Reims. Being both queer and bookish, though, he sought ways to move beyond the homophobic provinces that were (often justly) skeptical of the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the bureaucrats of the capital. Eribon’s queerness and intellectual interests were incommensurable, or so it felt to him, with his working class roots, even as committed as he was—and remained—to socialist principles and social justice for the working class. As he puts it (225):

"In one case I needed to become what I was, but in the other I needed to reject what I was supposed to have been. Yet for me these two activities went hand-in-hand."