Retracing his journey as a working-class gay man in rural France, Édouard Louis asserts: “I’d narrowly escaped death, I’d experienced death, felt its reality” (Louis 2021). While Louis is internationally acclaimed as an advocate for the working class, this chapter attends to the author’s reading of queer proletarian life as inherently deadly and traumatic. Analysing The End of Eddy (2014), History of Violence (2016), Who Killed My Father (2018) and Change: A Novel (2021), I explore Louis’s instrumentalisation of his experiences of homophobia and PTSD for the fulfilment of a neoliberal self-optimising project. Reading Louis’s observation: “I don’t think the others […] suffered as much from village life” (Louis 2014), I contend that his writings adopt a traumatological approach which feeds into today’s capitalist “hypercompetitive individualism” and makes trauma “more deserving of attention than other forms of […] suffering” (Davis and Dean 2022). Deciphering his associations of proletarian life and queerness with PTSD, death and moral regression, I argue that Louis utilises trauma to reframe his desire for social elevation in terms of vital escape. As traumatology reproduces the “intensification of the liberal paradigm of security” (Davis and Dean 2022), I analyse how the author polices himself and others to escape the impropriety of the working class, turning his queerness into a tool for neoliberal achievement.