William burroughs gay

It is partially a sequel to his novella Junkie. Tom and I stayed in touch, and in the fall ofwe started talking about possibly turning it into a book. Burroughs’s best-known novel, Naked Lunch (), follows a heroin addict as he travels round the US, Mexico, Morocco and a fictional totalitarian state; it was controversial for its graphic depictions of drug use and gay sex.

Edmund White once said that he would like to see more bad gay guys in literature. So many musicians knew him. So much Beat writing is by definition unpalatable. It seems like Burroughs embodies a lot of that lawlessness. I think they were also intent on reclaiming him into the gay canon because for the past 40 or 50 years he was co-opted by punk literature, by drug addiction literature, by science fiction fan boys and girls literature, by psychedelic and surreal literature.

Would he have a shot? So why has one of the most lionized members of the movement been snubbed by the gay literati?

Things you might not

William S. Burroughs had a wife whose life he took, allegedly by accident, but he also waxed poetic about the gay erotic experience. Tony Kushner never met him, but he was able to give us a really thorough critical analysis. Why do you think they were drawn to this project specifically?

Whatever young generation, as they emerge and find their way, they invariably happen upon Burroughs because he had punk rock, revolutionary ideas. We want to have permission to do bad things and be punished like anybody else. Burroughs gave him permission, as he put it, to write frankly about things he would have been too shy to write about otherwise.

We want to be viewed as complex multi-dimensional people.

Brian Alessandro on the

The dark side of William Burroughs, wife killer behind Daniel Craig’s Queer The renowned author murdered his wife before going on to become one of America’s most influential figures in literature. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein were very close with him. Burroughsliterary critic and Interview contributor Brian Alessandro brings together a roster of emerging creative voices and countercultural superstars including Fran LebowitzDebbie Harryand Samuel R.

Delany, to recontextualize the work of the infamous writer as defiantly queer. In the summer ofI published an essay by a writer named Tom Cardamone who wrote about William S. Burroughs, his radical queerness, and how it helped him through a rough patch when he was facing homophobia as a young man living in Florida.

He said yes, and that opened the door to Debbie Harry and Chris Stein talking to me about being friends with Burroughs and hanging out in Kansas and shooting guns with him. They seem to be very careful. Queer is a novella by American author William S.

Burroughs. Like most of Burroughs’s fiction, Naked Lunch is semi-autobiographical. Another reason why maybe contemporary gay culture has been a little bit squeamish about embracing him is because of that. 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 including Fran Lebowitz, Debbie Harry, and Samuel R. Delany, to recontextualize the work of the infamous writer as defiantly queer.

It was first published inand adapted into a feature-length film of the same name in Some key facts about late American novelist William S. Burroughs whose short novel, Queer, is the basis of Luca Guadagnino’s new film. We were talking, Fran Lebowitz and I, about how he would fare in this climate, with social media and cancel culture.