“LEE AND THE BOYS” A QUEER LOOK AT WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
William S. Burroughs enjoys a reputation of a major postmodern author, literary innovator and legendary counter-culture figure. Although it is a well-known fact that Burroughs was gay, his works are rarely associated with or read from the perspective of queer theory. A literary outlaw and an outlaw in a literal way, a social misfit, Burroughs would seem to be a perfect icon for the gay movement. His disruptive, innovative, radical texts directly and unabashedly challenge the heterosexual dominant, so it would also seem natural that queer theorists and critics should express a lively interest in Burroughs’s fiction. Why is this not the case?
Queer studies, queer theory and queer criticism flourished in the 1990s, heavily drawing on Gay & Lesbian studies. Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial De- sire are deemed to be the founding texts of the queer movement. Queer studies were supposed to be more comprehensive and far-reaching than their precursor, so when Gay & Lesbian studies focused mainly on the opposition between hetero- and homosexuality, queer studies intended to encompass all “non-normative” sexual activities and also attempted to explore “such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender-ambiguity and gender corrective surgery” (Jagose 1996: 3).
How can one try to establish a niche in the queer canon for an au- thor that once publicly declared: “I’ve never been gay a day in my life,
and I’ve certainly never been part of any movement” (Davis 2013: 270).
Among the few critics that ventured to put an all-encompassing queer interpretation on Burroughs’s work is Jamie Russell. In Queer Burroughs, Russell examines the possible reasons for Burroughs’s exclusion from the queer canon. Of course, Russell is not the only scholar dealing with topics of sexuality in Burroughs’s life and fiction – Timothy S. Murphy in Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (2000), Richard Dellamora in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (1995) and Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (2012) also offer an overview of the function of “queer desire” in Burroughs’s works (Murphy 2000: 102).
However, Russell’s study is definitely the most comprehensive.
William Burroughs was one of the first writers to break the bound- aries of queer and drug culture. He knew that he was gay since he was 13 (Portwood 2014). Then, since the 1950s (so since he was first published and started to get some literary recognition), he has been consistently writing about homosexuality and “the politics of oppres- sion” (Murphy 2000: 102). Burroughs began his literary career with Junky – an autobiographical account of his drug addiction. His second novel Queer also contains autobiographical elements and describes Burroughs’s infatuation with a heterosexual man. The book was written in the 1950s but not published until 1985, a fact that undoubtedly was one of the reasons why Burroughs was first considered a controver- sial “addict writer,” instead of a “gay writer” (Harris 1999: 245). It is also surprising how on point Burroughs has been with the title of the novel. Long before the re-appropriation of the word by gay activists or before the advent of queer studies, Burroughs deliberately used that
“simple, unassuming little word,” of course at that time, not knowing (but maybe sensing?) how powerful and meaningful it will become (Halperin 2003: 339).
Still in reference to the title, a quote from Burroughs’s letter to Ginsberg is the best illustration of the attitude he had toward the word “queer” at the time that he was writing his second novel. In the excerpt, Burroughs expresses his opinion on his publisher’s decision to change the title of the book from Queer to Fag:
Now look you tell [Carl] Solomon I don’t mind being called queer.
T. E. Lawrence and all manner of right Joes (boy can I turn a phrase) was queer. But I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a Fag. That’s just what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us strong manly, noble types and the leaping, jumping, win- dow dressing cock-sucker. Furthecrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somewheres or publishers will swarm all over her sticking their nasty old biographical prefaces up her ass. (Russell 2001: 9; my underscore)
Jamie Russell offers an in-depth analysis of the whole passage. He draws attention to the opposition between “fag” and “queer” seen as
“two different kinds of gay identity,” in which the “strong manly, noble types,” so the masculine model, can apparently be associated with queer, whereas the “leaping, jumping, window dressing cock-sucker” is evi- dently linked to the effeminate “fag” (10). Further emphasis is put on the effeminate model as Burroughs refers to himself, as to a “girl.” It seems to be made in a half-joking way and the overall tone of the passage is playful but in this context the word choice is very meaningful, because in fact, Burroughs is very much in keeping with the 1950s stereotypes of gay men being seen as “fairies” or “pansies.” For most American ho- mosexuals, the post war years made up for a very difficult period. On the one hand, the American Psychiatric Association had “officially cat- egorized homosexuality as a sickness, along with paedophilia, transves- titism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sadism, and masochism” (Eisenbach 2007: 2), basically reducing homosexuals to perverts. On the other hand, the Eisenhower administration, issued a Congressional report warning that “homosexuals were security risks because of their lack of ‘emotional stability;’ also the ‘weakness of their moral fiber’ made them ‘suscepti- ble to the blandishments of a foreign espionage agent’” (4). Essentially, the report implied that homosexuals are communist spies. Still on top of that, the most prevalent antigay stereotype of that time was that of a “quivering, giggling, mincing, screaming queen with eyelashes” (7, 34).
In light of all these examples and attitudes, Jamie Russell puts forward a theory that the “widespread deployment of the effeminate model by the heterosexual dominant in the postwar period . . . ren-
der[ed] the gay male subject ‘schizophrenic,’ as his masculine identity was usurped by the demand that he act as a woman” (Russell 2001:
13). The critic also suggests that Burroughs’s deep frustration with, or even hatred of the effeminate paradigm was central in shaping the homosexual identity of male subjects in his fiction.
To me, this is a convincing argument that is readily confirmed with many examples. In order to get away from the ubiquitous “effeminate fag” typecast, Burroughs creates masculine macho type protagonists – usually rugged, outdoors, gun-loving misogynists. If we look at it from that perspective, hints of Burroughs’s “effeminophobia” can be already detected in Junky. The main character, William Lee (Burroughs’s alter ego), is a though, masculine Raymond Chandler type of hero. He operates in an underworld of drug addicts, pushers and thieves. Although there is almost no mention of homosexuality in the novel, at one moment, Lee ex- claims: “. . . a room full of fags gives me the horrors” (Burroughs, Junky 60).
Junky gives only hints in that direction, but the homosexual theme of Burroughs’s second novel – Queer – cannot be denied. As mentioned be- fore, the plot revolves around Lee’s attempts at seducing a heterosexual man – Gene Allerton. As far as fear of effeminacy is concerned, in Queer Lee explains his sexual “proclivities” to Allerton in the following way:
‘[It’s a – A.B.] curse,’ said Lee. ‘Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands – . . . when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: homosexual. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion . . . (Burroughs, Queer 55; my underscore).
This is a very dramatic passage. We can see how Lee plays with the sentiments and stereotypes of the times. He says that his homosexuality is a perversion – following the APA’s categorization of same-sex desire.
He describes gay men that he saw in Baltimore as “painted, simpering, female impersonators” – an image in keeping with the heterosexual
dominant’s vision of homosexual men and the conviction that they are “subhuman things.” Clearly, Lee is being sarcastic – he mentions every possible antigay stereotype because he thinks that this is how Allerton sees him. However, he also wants to challenge that hurtful image and show Allerton how different he, and also other gay men are.
If in Queer the homosexual theme is undeniable, in Naked Lunch Burroughs is off the leash. The novel offers a cornucopia of same-sex sex acts, homosexual desire and pornographic episodes – perhaps the two most notorious ones being, “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” and “A.J.’s Annual Party ” (Hemmer 2007: 221).
The Rumpus Room episode describes a show in which a Mugwump (an alien-like filthy creature – a product of Burroughs’s vivid imagi- nation) first hangs and then has sex with a boy, in front of a cheering audience. “A.J.’s Annual Party” includes a description of a blue movie in which the male protagonist, Johnny, is raped by a female, Mary, who uses a strap-on dildo to sodomize him. The scene ends with group sex, a hanging, cannibalism and immolation (221-222).
The famous “Talking Asshole” routine also needs to be mentioned in this context. Usually, this episode is interpreted as a satire on the preposterous American bureaucracy (which is compared to cancer), but seen from the queer perspective it becomes a part of Burroughs’s
“body politic,” an act of “ventriloquy, viral growth, and the return of the anally repressed” (Harris 1999: 265).
The scenes and characters from Naked Lunch are to be found in the Nova/Cut-Up trilogy, as these books are formed from the same material that was “part of the Naked Lunch ‘word hoard’” (Hemmer 2007: 290).
The overall theme of the trilogy is that of control – political, religious, psychological – and also sexuality is placed in that framework, being seen as one of the powerful tools of manipulation. Another feature that dis- tinguishes the Nova trilogy from the previous novels, is the avant-garde cut-up technique developed by Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Burroughs saw language as an instrument of oppression. By employing the cut-up method he wanted to break away from the arbitrary connections be- tween words and destroy commonly accepted conventional responses and reactions. According to Jamie Russell, the cut-up technique was used
by Burroughs as a tool of queer liberation (Russell 2001: 69). Russell ex- plains that, “[i]f gay identity is made to conform to a cut-up relation of sex and gender, as the trilogy suggests, then Burroughs’ own gay-male-au- thorial appropriation of the cut-up strategy can be seen as a reclamatory challenge to the heterosexual dominant’s discourses” (81). Burroughs’s unique literary style is used as a weapon against the language created by the hostile – heteronormative – “power-knowledge apparatus.”
What is also noticeable in the trilogy, is that Burroughs refuses to cre- ate characters with a fixed identity – including sexual identity. The pro- tagonists have multiple selves – one character suddenly changes into an- other, puts on a disguise, gets cloned, dismembered and transplanted into another body or turned into a different species. The characters undergo sex corrective surgery, morph from men into women or the other way around. Such vision resonates with Judith Butler’s radical constructionist ideas which became the basis for her theory of gender performativity. In Queer, Burroughs developed a literary mode that he called, “the routine.”
These were short “performances,” in which the character assumed a dif- ferent personality and uttered a monologue, as that other person. Accord- ing to Kurt Hemmer, Lee’s desire driven routines “display a visceral black humor charged with not only sexual but with political energies” which
“allow him to perform his identity as the ‘Ugly American’ abroad.” In my opinion, these “insane monologues” (21), also allow Lee to negotiate his queer identity. He tries to find a method by which he can break away from the stereotypical model that society imposes upon him and tries to play out his own queer image of himself. Seen from that perspective, Lee’s routines can be linked to Butler’s perception of gender as a per- formance in which an individual agent acts in front of a social audience.
Burroughs’s early novels are dominated by homosexual men. In later publications, he focuses mostly on gay boys. Even though his Wild Boys and Red Night texts were published in the 1970s and 80s, so in the times of considerable advancements of the gay rights movement, Burroughs still seems to be fighting the “effeminate fag” stereotype.
The Wild Boys, depict a fantasy world in which most of the popula- tion is wiped out by an unknown virus, leaving the world to be raided by packs of roaming boys. The boys are a new species, incubated in
tubes, created and reared in a process that takes women completely out of the equation. The main protagonist, Audrey Carsons (another incarnation of Burroughs) is a deeply insecure 16-year-old homosex- ual boy. The novel is full of very graphic sex scenes between the “wild boys” and the “native boys.” It is also full of brutality and gratuitous violence. Burroughs assures that, “[t]he wild boys take no prisoners”
(Burroughs 1992: 148). Apparently, they also have no reservations about cannibalism as they feed on the bodies of the enemies they kill.
The boys are armed with all kinds of lethal weapons: bowie knives, machine guns, crossbows, cyanide injectors, and claws sewn into heavy leather gloves (152-153). “[They – A.B.] are repeatedly styled as animals, and bestial imagery is frequently used in the descriptions of them and their sexual acts” (Russell 2001: 128).
Finally, in The Place of Dead Roads Burroughs places his alter ego, Kim Carsons, at the centre of the Johnson Family, a group of good bums and thieves, with an honourable code of conduct. The opposite of the Johnson Family are the Shits – members, of straight, “virus-controlled,”
hypocritical society (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 37). The Place of Dead Roads is a Western. Timothy S. Murphy describes the novel as concerned “with the possibilities for a subversive social order along the
‘lawless’ American frontier” (qtd in Hemmer 2007: 258-259). Kim is a young gay “shootist” who fights against all forces that control the individ- ual. He is depicted as a rugged, outdoors, cowboy type who often boosts his self-esteem through violence: “Killing can become an addiction . . . He’s gotta get it one way or another” (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 77).
In the book, gratuitous violence is often equated with sexual gratification (Russell 2001: 127): “YESSSSSS, Kim’s 44 Russian leaps into his hand. He can feel his way into the kid’s stomach with the slug and the kid grunts doubling forward, a grunt you can feel. Is it goooood. Now the kid slumps to the floor in a delicious heap” (Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads 78).
Another disturbing element appearing in the novel is the explicit fascism.
Kim fantasizes that the boys are organized into “Shit Slaughter troops . . . the SS,” and “learn the theory and practice of Shiticide.” Their symbols are
“two phosphorescent spitting cobras,” their slogan – “Slaughter the shits of the world” (37). Throughout the book, Burroughs describes the ways in
which Kim wants to effect the extermination of the Shits. In this context, Jamie Russell notices that the “hyper masculinity” and excessive brutality of Burroughs’s characters becomes problematic “as it [is – A.B.] more than just a means to an end” (Russell 2001: 126). Russell suggests that most of Burroughs’s critics see his machismo not as a “parodic subversion” of the heteronormative dominant’s stereotypes of the masculine but as a desper- ate attempt at re-appropriation of the masculine. According to Rusell (and I fully agree with his assumption), unfortunately, Burroughs’s macho-type is still based precisely on heterosexual models, standards and stereotypes (135). That, in Russell’s opinion, is one of the reasons why Burroughs was not readily accepted by the queer canon. Russell suggests that Burroughs has failed as a gay writer because his vision of homosexuality is too old fashioned, rooted in an outdated heterosexual ideal of what a mascu- line man should be. What is more, Burroughs advocates “monosexed, monogendered” misogynistic, homogenic communes (ibid.), a vision of the world that is not exactly in line with queer celebration of all kinds of sexual diversity. Such notions are difficult to justify and it seems that the current queer theory has rendered the Burroughs kind of queer obsolete.
Some, if not most, of Burroughs’s notions on sexuality are difficult to accept by both homo- and heterosexual readers. Burroughs has al- ways been an outsider and refused to identify himself with any kind of social, political, religious, literary or cultural movement – even if those movements shared his sentiments or fought for the same cause. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Burroughs distanced himself from the gay movement and even refused to be called “gay.” However, it is a fact that his novels, his lifestyle, his opinions enabled and brought about important changes in the attitude towards non-heterosexual people and helped to revise the sexual politics of many countries. That is why I fully agree (even if Burroughs would not) with Jamie Russell’s opinion that Burroughs is not only a queer writer but also a writer of queer fiction. Whether he liked it or not, he supported a certain political cause; he was and to this day is, an eminent representative of the queer movement. To support this statement I would like to refer to a quote by Oliver Harris: “. . . there are no ‘straight’ books in the William Burroughs oeuvre – any one of them might be called Queer . . .” (Harris 1999: ix).
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Portwood, Jerry. “Today in Gay History: William Burroughs Turns 100.” OUT Magazine 5.2. 2014. Web. 14 Mar. 2017.
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