As a word, queer has a very large semantic scope. It is diagonal, open to difference. It often means fluid identity, especially as far as gender is concerned. One of the greatest protagonists of the Beat generation, William S. Burroughs was born a hundred years ago. He belonged to the generation of Ginsberg and Kerouac as well as those of McCarthyism and the Korean War, the generation that feared homosexual conspiracies and removed gay people from positions of power.
Burroughs had a cursed life. He started off very much on the right foot: a Harvard graduate, he earned his master’s in Vienna, and came from a rich family. Later, he would experiment with drugs and esoteric rituals. He got married, but had to flee to Mexico to run from a drug charge. On a drunken night, he shot his wife dead. That’s when he started his wandering around Central and South America, and then on to Africa and Europe.
Fleeing a drug raid in New Orleans, Lee finds refuge in a decaying 1940s Mexico City. In what is known as the “crime capital of the world,” Lee navigates increasingly sordid locales populated by society’s outcasts. Enveloped by the coils of ...
He started writing Queer in 1952, but the novel would be published only in the 1980s. Kerouac visited him, and commented on his appalling living conditions. Burrough’s experimenting with drugs touches all bases, including Ayahuasca, famed as a telepathy-enabling drug. The novel’s protagonists appears as a person who fell apart, insecure, and needy. Though also, Burroughs said of himself: “The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar […] He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door…” Not an easy novel – at all. Dreamless, hopeless.
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