Was william burroughs gay

I found one clip above all others to be highly illuminating. What is clear by the caliber of the musicians, filmmakers, writers, etc, interviewed, is that Burroughs influenced a great many people in a great many artistic disciplines — and of course continues to do so.

And those aspects are there, they truly are, albeit buried under strata of sex and drugs and madness. It is partially a sequel to his novella Junkie. Because they are sure to be there. The dark side of William Burroughs, wife killer behind Daniel Craig’s Queer The renowned author murdered his wife before going on to become one of America’s most influential figures in literature.

This film answers that question, at least for me: a truly lonely and damaged and confused individual barely capable of sustaining a loving relationship with another human being any age or sex, from wife to lovers to son. A deeply shy and tragically schizoid man within the myth is sketched by expertly chosen clips of Burroughs speaking.

Of course, given the author under discussion, we see nothing of the sort. And on and on. I personally had wondered for years when somebody was finally going to go beyond the crazy-smackhead-god bullshit and talk about Burroughs as a human being first and foremost, and finally somebody has done it.

If you ever thought there was no more mileage to be gained from WSB and expository films about him, think again. So you know…. Anybody in the last half century with a bone to grind or an axe to pick seems to have gravitated towards the inescapable black hole of his iconoclastic rebellion almost automatically whether they initially know it or not, his influence has been so widespread and long-lasting and unassailable.

It was first published inand adapted into a feature-length film of the same name in Some key facts about late American novelist William S. Burroughs whose short novel, Queer, is the basis of Luca Guadagnino’s new film. Good to see you on here.

All the major life-tropes and threads are present and occasionally deeply unpleasantly correct here: his privileged upbringing, rebellion against s middle class mores, the Beats, his horrific killing of his wife, the tragic death of his son, lifelong drug addiction, literary experiments, etc.

Enough time has obviously elapsed for younger artists away from ever-receding WSB Epicenter Central to be able to examine El Hombre Invisible as a suddenly visible capital H for Human not Heroin entity, to hesitantly-but-ever-more-forcefully begin to restore a humanity to the tragic-life writer he often lacked when he was alive — much of the time through his own obscuring-smokescreen doing.

I had always been personally fascinated and confused by William S Burroughs as a maybe un feeling human being first and foremost, wondering what sort of person and personality hid behind such a formidable volatile and inviolable manufactured-persona wall.

Putting it mildly.

Lee and the Boys : Like most of Burroughs’s fiction, Naked Lunch is semi-autobiographical

The tortured writer truly was a man fated to walk along alone in life, albeit with sustaining artistic and companionship-based relationships from significant others like Grauerholz and painter Brion Gysin. Quite apart from anything else, I think what makes this documentary such an sterling piece of work is the deep and seemingly almost effortless insight it gives us into the love less life of the writer it examines.

Or, more specifically, the image forms only one part of the truth. Jello Biafra gives examples from his exemplary Dead Kennedys work of how he was lyrically influenced by the cut-up method, as does a hilariously madly ranting Iggy Pop, who is probably wearing a Stooges t-shirt to remind him of who his old band were back in days of more-braincells yore.

He was not easy to like. But lying behind all the bluff and bluster and marijuana smoke and shattered internal mirrors lay a real living feeling human beinga man trapped within his mythical counter-cultural-tornado image and far removed from its worst excesses and exaggerations and lies.

Queer is a novella by American author William S. Burroughs. David Cronenberg talks about working with the writer. This doc should help rectify that, hopefully.