William s burroughs gay

It’s a gentrification story in a different way.

ALESSANDRO: Exactly.

INTERVIEW: I have one more question. Written in the 1950s but not published until 1985, its title and themes were bold for an era when such writing could result in blacklisting.

All that to say, it’s easy to see why this novella hasn’t garnered the acclaim or legacy of James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” — it’s, objectively speaking, not very good. 

From the start, “Queer” felt exhausting. 

The 25th-anniversary edition’s lengthy introduction by Oliver Harris, combined with Burroughs’ original preface, occupies nearly 40% of the audiobook and, though occasionally insightful, feels more like a lecture than a companion piece. 

Harris explored the novella’s troubled history — written during Burroughs’ protracted literary contract negotiations and in the aftermath of his wife’s death (caused by his own hand) — but these insights do little to elevate the work, and reeked of self-importance. 

For the story itself, it follows William Lee, Burroughs’ stand-in, as he drifts aimlessly through Mexico City’s 1950s expatriate scene, pursuing his infatuation with a younger man, Allerton.

That gay characters only get to be victims or saints in a lot of contemporary media and literature, and it’s kind of boring.

Yet the exploration of these ideas feels shallow. Tom and I stayed in touch, and in the fall of 2020, we started talking about possibly turning it into a book. Unfortunately, these moments are buried beneath layers of bluster, resulting in a character you can’t root for.

Thematically, “Queer” explores addiction — both to substances and to people.

On trains and buses hurtling through Panama into the Andes, Lee shivers in his overcoat due to high altitudes and detoxification. By the end, I was simply relieved to be finished.

This novella has solidified my disinterest in Burroughs and, perhaps, in the Beat Generation as a whole. In the city, there’s a different wild animal at play.

INTERVIEW: For so long, the fight was for permission to live exactly how you’re living.

I mean, the fact that Roe v. Guadagnino is Italian, after all, though he has called Queer an homage to British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and especially their 1948 film The Red Shoes—he speculates that they would appreciate the sex scenes in Queer, “which are numerous and quite scandalous.” In Powell and Pressburger’s film, sexual tension is sublimated through dance; in Queer, Lee has not yet discovered the power of art to deflect libido, and thus all that remains to fill the void is sex and drugs, whose visual potential Guadagnino unleashes in special effects and choreography that would not have survived enforcement of 1940s censorship codes.

I realize that we finally got this far, and a lot of writers who are gay, who are in the public eye, don’t want to screw anything up for anybody else in the community so they’re always on their best behavior. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were very close with him.