Why Reclaiming Literary Outlaw and Beat Generation Founder William S. Burroughs as Queer Is Fraught
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There is no question that William S. Burroughs, one of America’s greatest post-modern writers, founding member of the Beat Generation, and iconic influence on everyone from rockstars Patti Smith, and Kurt Cobain to trailblazing gay GenX novelists James Robert Baker and Scott Heim to comic book legend Grant Morrison, was homosexual.
Gay culture is so weakly insecure today that they often reject him outright.
In its 2010 review of the documentary William Burroughs: A Man Within, Slant observed: “Of the four writers that composed the most visible works of the Beat canon, William S. Burroughs was arguably the grittiest and most bedeviling; Harvard educated, a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and far better acquainted than either with the perils of hard narcotics, Burroughs played equal parts wicked mentor and cautionary Father Time to his cohorts. Due in part to this and to his obstreperous iconoclasm (his “cut up” novels remain intermittently fascinating examples of deconstructive philology), his later association with punk and grunge is unsurprising (Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain were disciples). What’s mostly neglected, however, is how lyrically plaintive the raunchy, episodic exploits of Naked Lunch and Junkie are; Burroughs’s fetid groans make a lament like “Howl” seem like calmly blue scribbles. Only the icon’s inimitable voice provides a sufficient window to his ineffable sadness; the sonic equivalent of rancid sour mash dripping off a rusty nail, Burroughs’s worldly dialect is secularly incantatory musique concrète.”
His first book Junkie, a first person account of being a criminal heroin addict and drug dealer in New York City published in 1953, and his seminal great American literary novel Naked Lunch bookend a career and life of a man whose impulses and influences are as incongruent as the aforementioned titles.
Burroughs, I would argue, is so pivotal to legendary On the Road and The Dharma Bums author Jack Kerouc’s career that said career wouldn’t have existed without the older man’s influence.
Make no mistake, the patrician Harvard educated Burroughs may have hailed from one of America’s wealthiest families (his grandfather invented the modern typewriter), but he was also a wanted felon implicated in multiple homicides (he killed his wife Joan Vollmer and was a co-conspirator in the cover-up of Columbia University student Lucien Carr’s murder of David Kammerer), as well as an unrepentant unapologetic junky, and boy lover. He was also a husband and father, and fervent and lifelong supporter of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
One of Burroughs’ most famously known quotes stems from his love and fetishization of firearms: “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”
That cultural tension and those contradictions are at the heart of writer and literary critic Brian Alessandro’s new book (co-edited with Tom Cardamone) Fever Spores: the Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs.
And it’s a legacy Burroughs intentionally wrought.
Above: Brian Alessandro + Photo: Anthony Scutro.
In a profile in Interview Magazine, Alessandro says that the many contributors to the book, among them Fran Lebowitz, Debby Harry, Tony Kushner, Dave Cronenberg, and Edmund White—all heavy hitters themselves—wanted to be involved 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.”
Everything but gay.
Yet Burroughs prose was so pervy and lewd that it almost felt pornographic.
Interview:
“Almost all of the Beats were bisexual and one another’s lovers,” writes Edmund 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 life 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 light. 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.
Alessandro adds: “I’m very good friends with Edmund White, the living emperor of gay literature, who has an essay in the book as well. He and I were talking about how Burroughs often isn’t included in the canon and how that might be due to the fact that the language he used when talking about himself and his community wouldn’t be considered politically correct today.”
Alessandro comically understates in his astute observation that modern gay sensibilities are anathema when he says, “It was probably more palatable to sell him as someone who had a punk rock sensibility or someone who had—I don’t want to say that he fetishized or sexualized drug addiction, but certainly he infused some romance in it. The institutions who curated his life’s work, I think they realized there was a larger market of buyers for those kinds of books.”
Indeed.
Burroughs’ cultural import is sublimely woven into canon American arts, letters, music, and counterculture.
He was “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius,” said Norman Mailer.
A very prejudiced Kerouac proclaimed him the “greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift” and owed this reputation to his “lifelong subversion of the moral, political, and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism.”
Yet Naked Lunch was prosecuted as obscene by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, followed by other states. In fact the case against Burroughs’ novel still stands as the last obscenity trial against a work of literature – that is, a work consisting of words only, and not including illustrations or photographs – prosecuted in the United States.
The novel was featured in a 1959 LIFE magazine cover story, in an article that heralded the arrival of the Beat literary movement.
Alessandro succinctly summarizes when he says, “contemporary gay culture has been a little bit squeamish about embracing him is because of that. Edmund White once said that he would like to see more bad gay guys in literature. That gay characters only get to be victims or saints in a lot of contemporary media and literature, and it’s kind of boring. We want to be viewed as complex multi-dimensional people. We want to have permission to do bad things and be punished like anybody else.”
The greatest biographical account of Burroughs’ life is called Literary Outlaw for a reason.
Alessandro underscores that tension in the last three sentences of his essay, which is the conclusion of the book: “As I get increasingly acclimated to a quiet adulthood, to my own bourgeois comforts—the comforts that kept me disingenuous all those years—I seek again a channel to sate a secretive, extremist hunger, to look again at the world and at myself, no matter how ugly, how unappetizing, regardless of my metabolism.”
However that spirit of lawlessness, indeed Burroughs’ menacing predatory dark chaos magic, endures and drives the energy of the provocative gay sexuality found in the meth using hacker drug cultures thriving on Telegram and Discord servers, and is a testament to his legacy.
