The 2024 film Queer
is inspired by a novella by Beat Movement co-founder William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs wrote Queer in 1952, but it was not published till 1985. Queer
is directed by award-winning, 53-year-old Italian director Luca Guadagnino.
Guadagnino has won praise for his films Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All,
and Challengers. Between 2006 and 2021, star Daniel Craig played
James Bond. After retiring as Bond, Craig took on the role of detective Benoit
Blanc in the "Knives Out" franchise. Co-star Drew Starkey is a newcomer.
He has made an impression playing a troubled teen on the Netflix drama Outer
Banks.
Queer's thin plot: an American, William Lee
(Daniel Craig) is pursuing a life of casual hook-ups and drug use in Mexico in
the 1950s. There, Lee encounters the much younger Eugene Allerton (Drew
Starkey), a former sailor. Craig is 56; Starkey is 31. Starkey appears to be in
his early twenties in Queer. Lee lusts after Allerton, but Allerton
keeps his emotional and physical distance from Lee, even while they are having
sex.
Many read the
film as a treatment of unrequited love. Wikipedia classifies Queer as a
"period romantic drama." For director Luca Guadagnino, Queer is
"about connection. When you meet someone with whom you know you have a connection, no matter what
complications arise, no matter what the cultural or emotional interruptions …
the strength of it is eternal." Guadagnino says Queer is "a
story of unsynchronized love." Daniel Craig insists that "Allerton is
as in love with Lee as Lee is in love with Allerton … Allerton just can't show
it." Queer, Craig says "deals with many universal themes about
love, desire, loneliness and the need to connect."
Queer the book is based on Burroughs' own life. Eugene Allerton is based on a real former serviceman, Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was fifteen years younger than Burroughs. Professor and author Tim Gilmore writes, "Reading the novel alongside Burroughs’ letters and diaries shows that he made up almost nothing in Queer except for names." Marker died in 1998, leaving behind a wife and two sons.
Queer is 137 minutes long. It was released in
the US on November 27, 2024. The National Board of Review named Queer one
of the top ten films of 2024; the Board awarded Craig its best actor award.
Craig has also been nominated for a best actor Golden Globe and Critic's Choice
award. The New Yorker's Justin Chang named Queer one of 2024's
best films. Prominent directors John Waters and Agnieszka Holland have praised Queer.
Queer enjoys a 77% positive professional
reviewer rating at Rottentomatoes. Amateur fans, though, award the film
only a 59% positive rating. The critical consensus reads "A
phantasmagorical distillation of William S. Burroughs' preoccupations that's by
turns meandering and vital, Queer marks one of Daniel Craig's most
sterling performances yet." Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times writes.
"This hypnotic, often moving film speaks eloquently — in some scenes,
graphically — about queer carnal ecstasy, and about the difficulty of its
pursuit. It is a remarkable achievement." Rebecca Tucker in the Globe
and Mail calls the film "a remarkably beautiful portrait of
agony." Christina Newland writes, "a sense of the vast beauty – and
sadness – a fleeting love affair might provide." Peter Travers says that
the film is "is lifted to the heights by Daniel Craig who captures his
character’s sexual heat and yearning heart in a performance he seems to tear
from his insides. Is an Oscar nomination next?"
Amateur
reviewers are not as enthusiastic. A fan reviewer at the Internet Movie
Database writes, "At no point did I have any idea what was going on
… I was drawn to this movie as a queer person myself and also … it is an A24
film with a star studded cast … This film tried too hard to be something
different and deep … There's no romance despite it focusing on a relationship …
trippy dream-like sequences are uncomfortable to watch. Overall I hated this
movie and could not wait for it to be over." Another amateur reviewer
advises, "Seeing Daniel Craig grab a guy's bare ass while giving a blow
job was hot but not worth struggling through this movie … Save your time and
money, wait for it to come to streaming, fast forward to the sex scenes and
then turn it off." A Google review reads, "a weird, pretentious,
self-indulgent, unwatchable film. With no story, no real plot, incoherent story
line, bland and flat dialogue, too long and too slow."
National Public
Radio's "Pop Culture Happy Hour" brought in a
couple of gay and/or transgender men to add to two regular reviewers who are
also gay men. Even this defense team observed that the film is
"long-winded," "exhausting," "self-indulgent,"
and that the movie made them "cringe" and feel
"suffocated." "The story is thin. It just felt like, why am I
sitting through this? What was the point? … Queer critics are actually hating
it." One such "queer critic" is Ira Silverberg, who knew
Burroughs. Silverberg dismisses Queer as
"commodified" "pay dirt." Another, Keith Uhlich, calls Queer "pitiable
and mawkish … exceedingly shallow … ludicrously surreal … calamitously
sentimental." In the film, Burroughs is merely "the kind of
blubbering, nostalgic old man you'd expect to see in a Sundance prizewinner.
The queer, tragically, becomes quotidian." One can say this much.
Silverberg's assessment of Queer as too commercial, and Uhlich's
assessment of it as too normal are both comically inaccurate.
What follows is
a summary of Queer; my thoughts about the film are below that summary.
Queer opens to a shot of a bare mattress. A
centipede crawls across the mattress. The very loud soundtrack plays Sinead
O'Connor singing "All Apologies," a song written by Kurt Cobain in
1990. Melody Maker magazine called "All Apologies" a
"supremely resigned, supremely weary f--- you to the outside world."
That "f--- you to the outside world" is as good a summary as any of
Burroughs' own attitude, and to much of the Beats. In the song, Cobain
self-pityingly whines that he is "buried" and that people blame him.
"Everything is my fault / I'll take all the blame." This initial song
sets up the gay main character as the victim of a hateful society. Cobain, a
heroin addict like Burroughs, traveled to Kansas to meet Burroughs in 1993. The
two collaborated on a project called "The Junky's Christmas." Cobain
shot himself to death in 1994.
Queer contains many such references to
material outside the film. It is "allusive," says Robbie Collin in The
Telegraph. In other words, there is a lot of disjointed visual and auditory
stimuli onscreen and most viewers won't understand any of it till they get home
and Google it. For example, Drew Droege appears in the film. Who is Drew
Droege, you never cared enough to ask? His website reports, "Drew Droege
is best known for his online parody videos of Chloë Sevigny." Chloe
Sevigny is an actress who appeared in the transgender-themed 1999 film Boys
Don't Cry.
As for the film's
centipedes, even Google might not help. The screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, says that it is up to the
viewer to decide what they mean. Guadagnino says that the centipede is "a
metaphorical signpost of the dangers of repression within both Lee and
Allerton." He does not explain how an image of a centipede will call up
homophobic repression in the mind of the viewer.
Daniel Craig,
in retro period costume, cruises through a Cinecitta Studios backlot set of
Mexico City circa 1950. Guadagnino has said that he wanted his set to look, not
like a real Mexico City, but rather like a movie set of Mexico City. In an
essay, Guadagnino writes, "the world
described by Burroughs had to be staged as an artificial place – a projection
of the author’s total imagination rather than a period drama … we lined up long
rows of fake trees designed to steep Lee and Allerton in the desperate romanticism."
Juxtaposing a 1990's era Nirvana song with an overtly artificial 1950's Mexico
set creates a jarring anachronism and takes the viewer out of any sense of
verisimilitude.
Lee is shown
drinking, smoking, and sweating. He chats with his fellow ex-pat, Joe Guidry
(Jason Schwartzman in a fat suit). Guidry is a fictional version of Burroughs'
real fellow Beat writer, Allen Ginsberg. Given that Ginsberg was thin, why is
Schwartzman in a fat suit? One fan says that Guadagnino is responding
to criticism that films about gay men tend to focus exclusively on well-built
men and ignore fat gay men. Again, what one sees onscreen is a reflection of
offscreen material, rather than real life. In this case, it is a reference to
online conversations about gays in film. Again, the viewer is pushed away from
any story the film contains, and into a funhouse hall of mirrors that reflect,
not real life, but only other mirrors.
Guidry tells
amusing stories about his sexual adventures, usually involving his partner
robbing him. After he has sex with a police officer, the cop writes "El
puto gringo" on Guidry's window. "I left it there," Guidry
says, "It pays to advertise."
Lee passes
brothels and cock fights. The film does not comment on these antisocial
behaviors. Lee is above it all; the brothels and fighting cocks are just movies
he is watching; they exist to amuse him, the ex-pat, sex-and-drugs, adventure
tourist. At the cock fight, Lee catches sight of a young American man, Eugene
Allerton. The cock fight meeting of two men who will have unsatisfying sex is a
metaphor. Allerton looks to be about 22. He is slender and pale. His short hair
is carefully clipped, combed, and pomaded. His clothing is the conservative
uniform of a 1950's Ivy League grad student. He is wearing glasses. He looks
not a little bit like a younger version of Lee, who also dresses conservatively
and wears glasses. In real photos of Burroughs and Marker, Marker looks like a
younger version of Burroughs; they could have been father and son. From the
expression on Lee's face, he may as well be witnessing a beatific apparition.
There is no such transcendence or even much interest on the younger man's face.
In a bar, Lee
bows to Allerton in an effeminate style. Allerton's face is blank. Lee picks up
a Mexican man (Omar Apollo, a gay Mexican-American singer). The unnamed pick-up
is wearing a centipede pendant. The two go to a hotel where the hallway and
doors are painted red. They immediately have sex. Lee offers the unnamed man
money. The man declines.
Lee looks at
images in one of those retro "Viewmaster" devices that allow the user
to see images in a simulacrum of 3-D. This scene, perhaps, is a way of
communicating that he is a dilettante tourist, divorced from his surroundings,
merely observing things.
Lee and
Allerton are in a theater watching Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orpheus. Onscreen,
Orpheus walks into his own reflection in a mirror. This is, ostensibly, how he
will enter the underworld to rescue his lost love. In fact, though, he's
entering his own reflection. Lee's transparent arm reaches around Allerton's
shoulders in a semi-embrace. Lee is not really embracing Allerton; he is
imagining doing so.
Lee says that
his "proclivities" are a curse. It had been in his family for
generations. Female impersonators are "subhuman things." "It was
a wise old queen who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden
proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with
knowledge and sincerity and love."
Lee invites
Allerton to his room. Allerton vomits there. Lee wonders if that is because he
dreads gay s--. "Do I smell like vomit?" Allerton asks. No matter;
they kiss. Lee f------s Allerton. Allerton m---------s Lee. While Allerton is
servicing Lee, Lee never releases his cigarette.
Lee and
Allerton peruse a menu. Lee explains the concept of baked Alaska. "It's
hot on the outside and cold inside." Lee describes eating a live pig, one
still snorting. Allerton laughs. This scene is meant to show that Lee is older
and sophisticated and knows about things like baked Alaska. Allerton is but a
callow youth and expanding his culinary horizons does not interest him. He
does, though, laugh at Lee's hideous imitation of a pig snorting while being
eaten alive. This shows the tragedy of a sophisticated man like Lee obsessed
with a lowbrow man. Baked Alaska here is a metaphor for Allerton, who is
"hot on the outside" – he looks sexy – but he's cold inside. He does
not reciprocate Lee's tragic love.
Joe Guidry
compares Allerton to a fish. "Cold, slippery, and hard to catch."
Lee watches
Allerton as he plays chess with a red-headed woman named Mary. Mary glares at
Lee. Mary is played by Romanian artist Andra Ursuta, known for "nihilistic
scenarios" of "obsessive compulsions and violent desires; submission
to sexual and political dominance; the fragility of human existence; identity
as construction and fiction." No doubt the filmgoer will not have heard of
Ursuta, will not recognize her, and will not be aware of any significance her brief
and silent appearance contributes to the film.
A naked woman,
whose body is only a torso, appears and mocks Lee. He fondles her. "Aren't
you queer?" she asks. "I'm not queer; I'm disembodied," he says.
Guadagnino denigrates the woman by depicting her as a homophobic bully, and also
by denying her clothing, arms, and legs.
Lee proposes to
Allerton that they travel together to South America. Lee will pay for
everything. "All I'm asking is that you be nice to me twice a week."
What follows is
a lengthy, single shot. Lee sits alone in his room at a table. Laid out on the
table are all the tools he requires to prepare heroin for injection: needle,
bent spoon, flame. The shot depicts Lee prepping his heroin, injecting it, and
a close up of his face after he has injected. The soundtrack for this scene is
the 1983 song "Leave Me Alone" by the post-punk band, New Order.
"Leave Me Alone" addresses themes of "interpersonal disconnection." Reviewer
Matthew Liedke calls this "one of the best scenes in
cinema from 2024."
Lee is in a
hotel room in South America. He is shivering and moaning. He is going through
withdrawal from heroin. Allerton seems uninterested. Lee begs a doctor for
opium. The doctor is played by Flemish painter Michael Borremans. According to
Artsy.net, Borremans' work "rejects narrative clarity in favor of wry
commentary on painting itself." Again, an actor onscreen rips the viewer
from the narrative onscreen and drags the viewer offscreen. That a caring but
frustrated doctor dealing with a junky going through withdrawal is played by a
painter who rejects "narrative clarity" but would rather engage in
the head game of "wry commentary on painting itself" teaches the
audience not to care about the narrative onscreen; it's all just so much
"wry commentary."
Lee and
Allerton have a--- sex. Allerton pushes Lee to the floor. Lee snaps and
complains about how people judge him because he is a junky.
Lee and
Allerton arrive at the back lot jungle hut of Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), an
American botanist. Cotter's CGI watch-snake (in lieu of a watchdog) comes close
to biting Lee and Allerton. She also has a security sloth in her hut. Her much
younger husband is played by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, a maker of
"trippy, time and genre hopping films."
Lee requests
yage, what is more commonly known as ayahuasca. Cotter warns that ayahuasca has
magical powers to open the mind to a degree that damages some who indulge. Lee
is insistent. Lee and Allerton drink ayahuasca. They vomit up their hearts.
They then merge their naked bodies. Allerton leaves Lee in the jungle and goes
off by himself.
Lee falls out
of a star-filled sky onto earth. He enters seedy Mexico City hotel rooms. He
sees a black, white, and red snake, in a figure eight shape, swallowing its own
tail; the snake is crying. He sees a giant eye looking in the window. He sees
Allerton and shoots him. He is now an old man, dying on a bare mattress.
Allerton, still youthful, comes to him and snuggles up against him in spoon
position; Lee dies.
My thoughts? Queer
is garbage. Queer is a failure as a feature film. It is a success at
other accomplishments, accomplishments that have nothing to do with what is
required of a feature film. Feature films must meet criteria to be successful.
A feature film requires characters, convincingly played by charismatic
performers. A feature film requires action that is believable within the world
created by the film, and applicable to the world outside the film, either as
potentially real or symbolic of some truth. The main character, through the
action, must undergo some significant change.
The majority of
both positive and negative reviews of Queer acknowledge that Queer does
not meet these criteria. Even positive reviews acknowledge that the film has
virtually no plot, and that its hallucinatory scenes don't add up to much. Even
the screenwriter can't or won't explain one of the film's key symbols, a
centipede.
Given that
positive reviews acknowledge the film's lack of coherent narrative, what do
they praise about the film? They praise aspects of the film that aren't
pertinent to the criteria for a feature film. They primarily praise Daniel
Craig, previously the successful star of five James Bond films, for his
"courage" in playing a pathetic, aging, homosexual drug addict
hankering after a blandly handsome, unavailable youth. They praise the macho
star for playing a gay man. They praise him for simulated gay sex scenes. They
praise Craig for defying homophobia and societal norms.
From Variety: "the fact that
Daniel Craig lent himself to a couple of very explicit erotic sequences is a
sign of great courage in an era in which these behaviors are still rejected by
a significant part of the audience. "You're so brave to do this," people kept telling Daniel Craig. "The
movie is a reminder of how good an actor Craig is and how brave he can be …
You'll be shaken and stirred," says the Associated Press. Makeup artist Donald
Mowat says, "My dear friend Daniel Craig gives a raw and truly brave
performance."
The
Next Best Picture Podcast is a team of mostly young film
geeks. They talked about Queer for over two hours. I listened to their
podcast twice. I was trying to figure out what I missed. Their podcast was, for
the most part, a listing of the film's allusions. They were over-the-moon
delighted by references within the film to pop culture outside of the film. Oh,
a New Order song! Hey, Sinead O'Connor! Oh, a trans-related celebrity! Queer
is a grab bag of references film geeks can award themselves for understanding. Queer
made them feel like pop culture insiders.
Luca Guadagnino
and Daniel Craig are peddling Queer as a "romance," as a
"love story." Lee and Allerton, they insist, face an implacable
enemy: conventional society and homophobia. Because of that enemy, they just
have to retreat to drugs, unsatisfying sex, and empty drifting. Guadagnino,
Craig, and everyone else peddling this narrative is full of baloney.
William S.
Burroughs was mentally ill. He had hallucinations as a child. As a young adult,
he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He was institutionalized after an
episode of self-mutilation – he cut off part of his finger with poultry shears.
He believed in conspiracy theories, magic, and demonic possession. He believed
he could put curses on people. He spoke with a flat, nasal, monotone, without
affect. This kind of speech is correlated with mental illness. Burroughs was a
lifelong user of a cornucopia of drugs. His drug use was not romantic. It was
the unsuccessful attempt of a mentally man at self-medication.
Contrary to Queer,
drugs, including ayahuasca, did not liberate, enlighten or deepen
Burroughs. He lived and died an addict who could experience life only as an
addict, and in his own words, Burroughs says that addicts think only about
themselves – not others – and their next fix. That obsession is not liberatory
or enlightening; it does not, contrary to Queer, allow for greater
connection. It precludes such connection. Burroughs said that heroin locked him
in "stasis." Drug addiction retards and can halt the maturation of
the practitioner. Queer's marketing and romanticizing of drugs is
criminal. Matthew Liedke's praise for the graphic scene of Craig prepping and
shooting heroin is a criminally idiotic and irresponsible statement.
Burroughs
condemned America as beneath him. See his "Thanksgiving
Prayer." It begins, "Thanks to the wild turkey and
passenger pigeon destined to be s--- out through wholesome American guts."
It goes on and on, the KKK, the massacre of bison, the American
"invention" of AIDS in a lab. In a letter to Ginsberg, Burroughs
rails against the U.S. Army; he was convinced the Army was conducting secret
experiments to create telepathically-controlled zombies. He blamed the
government for his and others' heroin addiction. "Those bastards Stateside
don’t want people [addicts] to cure themselves. They aim to incarcerate all
undesirables, that is anyone who does not function as an interchangeable part
in their anti-human Social Economic set up. Repressive bureaucracy is a vast
conspiracy against Life." Like the other Beats, who felt America to be
beneath them, who disdained work and committed relationships, paying rent and
obeying the law, Burroughs was an economic parasite on the very America he felt
himself to be superior to.
The Beats
stole, they dealt drugs, they exploited women, they couch-surfed, and they
lived off of others' work and government programs, including the G.I. Bill and
welfare. Burroughs was William S. Burroughs II, the grandson of William Seward
Burroughs I, who invented an adding machine. Burroughs' uncle, Ivy Ledbetter
Lee, was known as the founder of public relations. Burroughs was born into
money. His parents provided him with an income. He could afford to spend his
life cruising and taking drugs.
Queer doesn't tell key truths about Burroughs
that might discomfit modern audiences and disturb the film's image as a
courageous statement against bigotry. Burroughs was a white man who trolled
poor countries full of dark-skinned, desperate people. In Latin America and
North Africa, he hired boy prostitutes. In his novella, he writes of a typical
attempt to connect with Allerton / Marker. "Lee began making love to
Allerton, but he rejected Lee's advances and said he wanted to go to the Ship
Ahoy and drink a rum Coke. Lee turned out the light and embraced Allerton
before they started out the door. Allerton's body was rigid with
annoyance." Silverberg, who knew Burroughs, characterizes the Allerton of
the novella as a "savvy hustler" engaging in "transactional
sex." Silverberg "wept" contemplating the transactional
relationships he had with "younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes
of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James [James Grauerholz, Burroughs' much
younger long-time companion]; and James’s with me." Silverberg
acknowledged the "painful impact" of these "transactional
relationships." In real life, Burroughs repeatedly attempted to force
himself, physically or emotionally, on Marker, who continued to rebuff him.
And, in real life, Allen Ginsberg was a member and vocal defender of NAMBLA,
the North American Man Boy Love Association.
Gilmore writes,
"Burroughs’s tone … is unrelentingly racist, smug, entitled and
elitist." In the novella, Burroughs "isn’t rebellious, he’s just
irresponsible, and his supposed counterculture is paternalistically
conservative: toward Latin America, toward Adelbert Lewis Marker, and toward
[his wife] Joan Vollmer."
Scholar Melanie Keomany writes of Burroughs'
contemptuous language for Third World people. She says that Burroughs was able
to recognize whites' injustice against non-whites, but Burroughs wrote of that
injustice with his usual lack of affect. In other words, he was just reporting
facts, not being personally troubled by, say, reports of American farm owners
shooting Mexicans who tried to leave their farms.
In one
observation, Burroughs speaks with contempt of whites and non-whites, both.
"I am speaking of the South American at best, a special race part Indian,
part white, part god knows what. He is not, as one is apt to think at first
fundamentally an Oriental nor does he belong to the West. He is something
special unlike anything else … They need white blood as they know—Myth of White
God—and what did they get but the f---ing Spaniards. Still they had the
advantage of weakness. Never would have gotten the English out of here. They
would have created that atrocity known as a White Man's Country." Even
Burroughs' experience of ayahuasca is interpreted as a race experience. The
drug "opens his very being to a world where the would-be [white] colonizer
is himself invaded and overrun by the [non-white] other." In Guadagnino's Queer,
ayahuasca provides Lee and Allerton a magical doorway to escape the only
barrier to their union, societal homophobia, and orgasmically join their bodies
into one. In Burroughs' own writing, ayahuasca overcomes a man's whiteness
through non-white others.
Lee, like
Burroughs himself, is a gun nut. In the movie, Craig is shown carrying a gun.
In the novella, a passing Mexican insults Lee. Lee responds, "'Chinga
tu madre … Here I come to your little jerkwater country and spend my good
American dollars and what happens? Insulted in a public street' … Lee
unbuttoned his coat and hooked his thumb under the pistol at his
waistband." The Mexican retreats. How would that Ugly American schtick go
over in a 2024 film? Would the film still be seen as a courageous stance
against bigotry? No.
Burroughs was a
drug dealer. In Junky, he writes of one of his colleagues purposely
addicting children to heroin. Burroughs didn't just sell heroin in one-on-one
encounters. He sold it via his writing to uncounted naive readers. Journalist
Nick Hilden writes, "His writing played no small part in popularising
heroin within the counterculture." Daniel Genis, a writer and addict, reports that "If anyone ever made me
feel that it was interesting and even noble to do smack, it was William Seward
Burroughs II." I knew one such reader, a friend named Charles, who admired
Burroughs' description of heroin addicts who cease defecating for months and
have to use apple corers to extract waste from their colons. Charles retreated
to an abandoned building where he took every drug he could find. He ended up it
the hospital. His immigrant parents rescued him. Others were not so lucky.
The Beats
didn't just hurt people through their selling of rampant drug use and a refusal
to work or form committed relationships. The Beats hurt people up close and
personal. "The Queer Crime That Launched the Beats" is the title of a
2019 Paris Review article.
In 1944, William Burroughs' friend David Kammerer was obsessed with Lucien
Carr, fourteen years his junior. Carr, like Burroughs, was from an economically
comfortable St. Louis family. In some versions, Kammerer stalked Carr,
following him around the country and trying to have sex with him. In other
versions, Carr and Kammerer appeared to be "the best of friends." One
night in Manhattan, Carr stabbed Kammerer to death with a Boy Scout knife.
Afterward, nineteen-year-old Carr visited both Jack Kerouac and William
Burroughs. Kerouac helped Carr dispose of evidence. Coverage of the killing was
Kerouac's first appearance in the press. Burroughs' rich parents got him out of
trouble. The parents of Edie Parker, Kerouac's girlfriend, said that they would
bail Kerouac out if he, Kerouac, would marry Edie. Kerouac did so but quickly
abandoned her.
In 1951, in
Mexico City, Burroughs shot his wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, to death. "I
was very drunk, of course," Burroughs said of that night. Vollmer had been
a key catalyst in the birth of the Beats. She "was seminal in the creation
of the Beat revolution; indeed the fires that stoked the Beat engine were
started with Joan as patron and muse … Brilliant and well versed in philosophy
and literature, Joan was the whetstone against which the main Beat writers …
sharpened their intellect," writes author Brenda Knight.
There is much
debate about how and why Burroughs shot Joan. Some decided it was murder; Allen
Ginsberg blames Vollmer – she had a death wish. Burroughs' family money got him
out of trouble, as it did after the Kammerer killing. Unless I missed it,
Joan's killing is not mentioned in Queer, even though Marker was present
for it, and even though Burroughs himself attributes the killing to his writing
Queer. From the novella's introduction, "the book is motivated and
formed by … the accidental shooting death of my wife, Joan … I am forced to the
appalling conclusion that I would never become a writer but for Joan’s death …
the overwhelming feeling of doom and loss ... walking down the street I
suddenly found tears streaming down my face." In a letter to Ginsberg,
Burroughs wrote, "How I miss Joan!" He had, he said, "nobody to
talk to." Flawed though their relationship was, all acknowledge that
William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer talked to each other. They shared
an intellectual and cultural life. Burroughs could not recapitulate that life
with Marker.
Some deaths
were slower. In 1971, William and Joan's 24-year-old son Billy Burroughs
published an exposé in Esquire magazine entitled "Life with Father:
Mother's Milk Was Mixed with Speed." While pregnant with Billy, Joan
continued her heavy Benzedrine habit. After killing his son's mother, Burroughs
handed his son to the child's grandparents to raise. When Billy was fourteen
years old, his father summoned him to Tangiers, where he introduced his son to
drugs and where Burroughs' friends invited the boy to engage in gay sex. In
1976, when he was 29, during a dinner with Allen Ginsberg and his father, Billy
vomited blood. William Burroughs Jr managed to live all of 33 years before
dying of cirrhosis.
Jan Kerouac,
Jack Kerouac's daughter, died of the cumulative effects of heavy drug and
alcohol use at age 44, after a rough life that included prostitution. Author Judith Moore describes Jan's final days,
all fully funded by Medicare. Jan "had a catheter implanted in her
stomach. She put this big gallon jug of sterile solution up on an IV pole. She
had to flush this liquid into her body cavity and then drain it out, 4 times
every 24 hours."
When Jan was a
child, Jack Kerouac denied paternity because he didn't want to support his
child financially. Jan met her father only twice; the first time was the day of
the blood test. "Jack asked where the nearest liquor store was … Jan
recalls taking him by the hand and leading him down the street from her
tenement house toward the nearest store, where he bought a bottle of Harvey’s
Bristol Cream." Sarah Viren describes the father and
daughter's second and final meeting. "Jack Kerouac was sitting in a
rocking chair watching the Beverly Hillbillies and drinking whiskey when she
arrived." At that point, Jack Kerouac was living in Florida with his
third, "caretaker wife," Stella Sampas, four years his senior and the
sister of his childhood friend. Stella cared for both Kerouac and his mother,
who lived with them. In October, 1969, Kerouac began to vomit blood. His
drunkeness killed him when he was 47 years old.
Neal Cassady
did not publish but he was the Beat Generation's pretty muse and their car
thief boy toy. Burroughs and Cassady once drove a harvest of pot from Texas to
New York – it was too green and they made no profit. Sometimes Burroughs said
"I liked Neal very much;" other times Burroughs assessed Cassady as a
"cheap con man."
"I know
I'm bisexual, but I prefer women" Cassady wrote in a letter to Allen
Ginsberg as part of their passionate correspondence. Authors Ronald K
L Collins and David M Skover, in their book Mania: The Story of the Outraged
& Outrageous Lives That Launched a Cultural Revolution, offer a
colorful snapshot of Neal Cassady's performance level. "Cassady
triple-dipped with Carolyn, Allen, and Neal's first wife, Lu Anne Henderson,
who still had the hots for him … Neal satisfied Carolyn in the daytime and
early evening hours, satiated Lu Anne later the same evening, resumed with
Carolyn at night, and then hooked up for occasional sex with Allen at six in
the morning, when Ginsberg returned to his apartment after his graveyard shift
as a janitor at the downtown May Company department store."
Carolyn
Robinson, Cassady's second wife, was the highly educated daughter of a college
professor. The combination of a member of the intellectual elite, Carolyn, and
a boy, Neal, who had been raised by a drunken father on Skid Row, in reform
schools, and in prison, epitomizes the Beat pattern – elites slumming with the
criminal underclass. Of Neal, Carolyn said, "Neal, having been raised in
the slums of Denver amongst the world's lost men, determined to make more of
himself, to become somebody, to be worthy and respected. His genius mind
absorbed every book he could find, whether literature, philosophy, or science.
Jack had a formal education, which Neal envied, but intellectually he was more
than a match for Jack, and they enjoyed long discussions on every
subject."
After Neal got
Carolyn pregnant, he blew the family's money on a new car for another road trip
with Beat pals. Eventually Cassady was again imprisoned; Carolyn took care of
herself and their three kids by going on welfare. In her book, she complains about welfare.
She wasn't receiving enough; she blames "the government" that
"created my need." Her own choices and the man she married are of
course responsible.
After Cassady
inevitably left her, Carolyn managed to raise three kids who have lived normal
lifespans. The Cassady children's website depicts them as
– gasp – normal people with jobs and committed relationships. Neal Cassady,
their father, after consuming barbiturates at a party in Mexico, wearing only a
t-shirt and jeans, took a walk along a railroad track during a cold and rainy
night. He died of drugs and exposure at age 41. The "respected"
"genius" Cassady was cannibalized by the Beat con artist and addict.
There's a good
movie in all of this material. Queer is not that good movie. Good movies
require some version of honesty. Nowadays, a famous actor simulating gay sex
onscreen is no longer "courageous." What would be? Depicting the
Beats, including Burroughs, for what they were: adolescents in adult bodies,
criminals, and addicts, destructive to women, the vulnerable, and the young,
and economic parasites on the people they judged as beneath them. The Beats
were cowards and cowards are afraid of the elements that provide structure to a
story. Burroughs, in a letter to Ginsberg, admitted as much. "I am afraid
to go too deep into this matter," he wrote, when considering why he shot
his wife to death. Rather than take responsibility, he claimed to be possessed
by an "Ugly Spirit." How convenient – the devil made him do it.
Yes, the Beats
wrote and they published and they influenced the young, but their inability to
function as adults imprisons their writing in immaturity and pointlessness, in
"stasis," as Burroughs says. Queer's flaccid narrative
structure is a reflection of the refusal to invest in life as it is, to seek
the telos that gives stories – and lives – form. Burroughs said that heroin
allowed him "momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious,
nagging, frightened flesh." In fact there is no such freedom. In fact the
early Christians, who insisted to the Gnostics that, yes, Jesus did defecate
and expectorate, were correct. Our flawed bodies are our only route to the only
transcendence we can achieve. Heroin is no escape, but a prison cell of stasis.
Our bodies, fully inhabited and confronted, are also our only route to
narrative.
Danusha V.
Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
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