William S. Burroughs

Queer 

Rick Powell

"While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer." (William S Burroughs, Queer)

"Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink." (William S Burroughs, Queer)

"But, surely, the novel still “works” for us today because Lee is a prisoner of love rather than a victim of historically contingent homophobia. Or to put it another way, you don’t have to be queer, or to have lived through the 1950s, to recognize Queer as an exceptionally dark and compelling anatomy of human (or at least male) desire. Paradoxically, the reason why Queer has such a corrosive political as well as emotional power is that Burroughs wrote it out of desire, for a single reader, to a personal audience of one—bluntly stating in October 1952: “I wrote Queer for Marker.” The queerness of Queer, in short, lies not in the facts behind the fiction but in the writing behind the written." (William S Burroughs, Queer)

Queer

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