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...