Was william s burroughs gay

According to Russell, Burroughs's life and writing suggests a gay subjectivity which has been deeply troubling to many in the gay community. Burroughs reputedly said in a press interview, in response to a question regarding the gay rights movement, "I have never been gay a day in my life and I’m sure as hell not a part of any movement.". Was William S. Burroughs gay? Burroughs’s sexuality has been the topic of continued debate, some asserting that he never identified as gay while others noting that it was a well-known fact that Burroughs was gay.

In the summer of , I published an essay by a writer named Tom Cardamone who wrote about William S. Burroughs, his radical queerness, and how it helped him through a rough patch when he was facing homophobia as a young man living in Florida. William S. Burroughs was an American writer of experimental novels that evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world.

His sexual explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken homosexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the. 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.

This week marks the st anniversary of William S. Along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac , Burroughs founded the Beat Generation, the s movement that developed new ways of writing about sex, drugs and creativity, and paved the way for the counterculture of the s. Burroughs was a prolific writer, producing a dozen or so novels and numerous novellas, short stories, essays and letters over the course of 40 years.

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Another tale of drug use and paranoia if you're not keen on novels about drugs and paranoia, Burroughs definitely isn't the writer for you , The Soft Machine draws from the same manuscript as Naked Lunch and developed out of Burroughs's cut-up method see more below. If you haven't read any Burroughs at all but want to start somewhere other than Naked Lunch , go right to the beginning with his first published novel, Junkie yup, more drugs.

See Burroughs talk below about the impact of drugs on his work and on himself. In , Burroughs balanced a glass on the head of his wife, Joan Vollmer, declaring that he could shoot it off with a gun. He missed, hitting her temple instead; she died a short while later. This makes enjoying his work an uncomfortable experience. It's one thing to accept that you're bound to read writers who held reprehensible views or did reprehensible things your reading experience would be pretty impoverished if you didn't - no Dickens, no T.

Eliot, no Woolf ; it's a little more difficult when the writer himself believed that his works were a direct result of manslaughter. Burroughs pushed the fragmentation of his early work to new extremes with the ' cut-up ', a method he hit on shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch. Developed in collaboration with artist Brion Gysin, the method involved taking the work of other writers and literally cutting it up to produce new meaning.

In his biography Call Me Burroughs , Barry Miles describes Burroughs taking a page of text from a magazine, book or newspaper and cutting it into four. He would then move the four pieces around until an appealing phrase or sentence emerged from the connections between the pieces. He would type up the phrase, and the accumulation of such found phrases became its own text. Burroughs called his discovery of the cut-up a 'major revelation', and The Soft Machine and several of his other novels make wide use of the technique.

While an undergraduate at Harvard Burroughs became interested in witchcraft, and his investigations into the occult continued throughout his life. He spent hours staring at mirrors and crystals in order to experience visions and believed that soulmates could achieve perfect telepathy. He also believed in demonic possession, and that he himself was possessed by an 'Ugly Spirit' who had invaded him the moment before he killed his wife, and took root in his soul.

In the s he spent a few years as a Scientology enthusiast, but he never left behind his interest in the occult, and shortly before his death he was dabbling in Indian shamanism. Burroughs owned numerous cats at one point, he and Joan had 13 and kept a journal of all those that had passed through his life, which he later turned into the novella The Cat Inside.

Long before the internet forced us all to confront such problems, Burroughs knew that talking about cats 'tread[s] the very thin line between the mawkish and the sublime. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri and went to school in New Mexico, to university at Harvard and, briefly, to medical school in Vienna.

He moved with his wife to Mexico City; after her death he settled for several years in Tangier, where he wrote Naked Lunch and took advantage of the relaxed drug laws. Burroughs had the title Naked Lunch even before he started writing the novel. While reading aloud the manuscript of one of Burroughs's earlier works, Allen Ginsberg misread the phrase 'naked lust', and Kerouac pointed out that it would make a good title for a novel.

In David Cronenberg turned the novel into a film. Check out the trailer below. Burroughs was married twice but knew he was gay by the time he hit puberty. As a teenager he kept a diary of a crush he had on one of his schoolmates; he was later so humiliated by the diary that he gave up writing altogether for several years.

Looking back on his adolescence, he said that he 'just didn't know how to do it [attract other boys]