William burroughs gay
Brian Alessandro on the Defiant Queerness of William S. Burroughs
Brian Alessandro. Photo by Rose McGowan.
In Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs, literary critic and Interview contributor Brian Alessandro brings together a roster of emerging creative voices and countercultural superstars includingFran Lebowitz,Debbie Harry, andSamuel R. Delany, to recontextualize the work of the infamous writer as defiantly queer. “Almost all of the Beats were bisexual and one another’s lovers,” writesEdmund White in Fever Spores. So why has one of the most lionized members of the movement been snubbed by the gay literati? William S. Burroughs had a wife whose being he took, allegedly by accident, but he also waxed poetic about the gay erotic experience. “Calling all boys of the earth…We will show you the sex magic that turns flesh to illumination. We will free you forever from the womb,” he wrote in 1973. To celebrate Burroughs’s coming out of the literary closet, Alessandro rang Interview for a convo about Beat writers, cruising, and the pragmatics of orgies.
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INTERVIEW: I’m excited to catch about the book. Can you start by telling the reader why
The dark side of William Burroughs, wife killer behind Daniel Craig’s Queer
In the late months of 1949, aspiring American writer William S Burroughs evaded gun and drug charges in the Merged States by bringing his family to Mexico where he planned to learn while waiting out the statute of limitations on his crimes. Burroughs’ letters describe the initial days after their arrival – settling in the fashionable Roma district of Mexico City, kicking his dope behavior and immersing himself in the raucous expat community – with a gentle of euphoria.
Two years later, Burroughs was once again thick in the grip of heroin and prone to aggressive, pistol-waving outbursts. His marriage was in shambles. His wife, Joan Vollmer, was lost in depression, illness and alcoholism, driven to deterioration by her hold demons and the rigours of her unhappy, abusive partnership with husband “Bill”.
One stormy evening on September 6, 1951, the couple connected their usual coterie of literary drunks in an apartment above the rowdy bar they frequented. At first it was a representative get-together – lots of alcohol and drivel – but the situation changed abruptly when Burroughs produced a gun, announced “It’s period for our W
Kurt’s key literary idol was William S. Burroughs and, as we began to explore in part one of this piece, there are clear reasons why the connection was made. Kurt’s teenage descriptions are of hanging out with a gay ally simply as a rebellion against the local rednecks; searching out a fellow ‘reject’ to triumph freedom from their abuse and impositions.
William S. Burroughs had, by the Eighties, become the ultimate literary outlaw. Yet, increasingly downplayed was the importance of Burroughs’ homosexuality — even now, if you read his Wikipedia entry, it’s possible to look the drugs and guns and barely notice that he wrote book after book fixated on penises penetrated male anuses, it was gay fiction first and foremost. Most importantly, what Burroughs was attempting to write was the possibility of evade. Burroughs hated effeminate homosexuals and what he wanted to portray and elevate was the concept of the non-effeminate male homosexual; the result was, on the one hand, Burroughs’ own lifestyle with its guns, drugs, rock n’ roll and counter-culture vibe, and on the other hand a series of hero figures within his novels who were almost all explicitly gay while simultaneously being gun-to
Queer Quotes
“A diferença, claro, é simples: com o junk, Lee está encoberto, protegido e também sob severa limitação. O junk não apenas curto-circuita a energia sexual como, dependendo da dose, oblitera as reações emocionais quase a ponto de fazê-las desaparecer. Olhando agora para a ação em Queer, aquele mês alucinado de lancinante abstinência assume um halo infernal e ameaçador, o mal exalando de bares iluminados por neon, da violência repulsiva, a pistola 45 logo ali sob a superfície. Com o junk, eu ficava isolado, não bebia, não saía muito, vivia do pico e da espera pelo próximo pico.
Quando essa proteção é removida, tudo aquilo que era mantido sob controle pelo junk vem à tona. O viciado em abstinência fica sujeito aos excessos emocionais de uma criança ou de um adolescente, qualquer que seja sua idade real. E a energia sexual volta com toda a força. Homens de sessenta anos têm poluções noturnas e orgasmos espontâneos (uma experiência extremamente desagradável, agaçant, como dizem os franceses, desconfortável mesmo). Os leitores precisam ter isso em mente, caso contrário a metamorfose na personalidade de Lee parecerá inexplicável ou psicótica. Também é preciso