Queer

by William S. Burroughs

Satyricon of Petronius is the oldest extant novel,” and that “this gives the homosexual the distinction of being the protagonist in the first novel to survive the passage of time.”9 Burroughs never made the connection in quite this way, but it is no coincidence that in later years he would often identify his 1950s trilogy—Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters (1963)—with the picaresque tradition and date it back to Petronius. More immediately, it’s striking how little Burroughs had to say about the contemporary literary context established by Cory. In his letters at the time of writing Queer, Burroughs makes passing references to Jean Genet and Gore Vidal, while in the prologue to Junky, also written in the summer of 1952, he lists Gide and Wilde among his adolescent reading. But his brief discussion in early April of Vidal’s recently published The Judgment of Paris gives no hint that Burroughs had found anything of interest in Vidal’s more notorious novel of homosexual experience, The City and the Pillar (1948).10 Then again, The City and the Pillar has its place alongside other postwar novels such as James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950) and Fritz Peters’ excellent Finistère (1951)—both discussed by Cory—in a gay literary tradition that Queer simply doesn’t fit into. Nor does it seem useful to make comparisons with Isherwood’s Berlin stories or those of Firbank, or with Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye (1942), Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), or John Horne B...

Lee walked directly to the bar and ordered a drink. He drank it and ordered a second before looking around the room to see if Allerton was there. Allerton was alone at a table, tipped back in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, holding a bottle of beer on his knee. He nodded to Lee. Lee tried to achieve a greeting at once friendly and casual, designed to show interest without pushing a short acquaintance. The result was ghastly. As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child’s smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and place, mutilated and hopeless. Allerton was appalled. “Perhaps he has some sort of a tic,” he thought. He decided to remove himself from contact with Lee before the man did something even more distasteful. The effect was like a cut connection. Allerton was not cold or hostile; Lee simply wasn’t there so far as he was concerned. Lee looked at him helplessly for a moment, then turned back to the bar, defeated and shaken.

Lee’s body was moving in rhythmic contractions, every muscle caressing the smooth hard body of the other, the amoeba reflex to surround and incorporate.

Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars. He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through the invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar . . . suffering without despair and without consent.

Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink.

‘No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.’ The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together. Reet?”

“They have maleness, of course. So have I. I want myself the same way I want others. I’m disembodied. I can’t use my own body for some reason.” Lee put out his hand. Allerton dodged away.

feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation. As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage when a weakened virus has created alerted antibodies. So I achieved some immunity from further perilous ventures along these lines by writing my experience down.