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“Lee and the Boys” – a Queer Look at William S. Burroughs 299 and I’Ve Certainly Never Been Part of Any Movement” (Davis 2013: 270)

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“Lee and the Boys” – a Queer Look at William S. Burroughs 299 and I’Ve Certainly Never Been Part of Any Movement” (Davis 2013: 270) Anna Białkowska Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland “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, “Lee and the Boys” – A Queer Look at William S. Burroughs 299 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: 300 Anna Białkowska 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- “Lee and the Boys” – A Queer Look at William S. Burroughs 301 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 302 Anna Białkowska 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.
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