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And so I was truly dreading seeing Luca Guadagninos $53 millionQueer, anadaptationof this unfinished autobiographical novel.
But it was all that and more: Guadagnino directing a Burroughs adaptation just seemed wrong to me.
Burroughs and I were family, in the queer sense.
We met one morning in the summer of 1981 when I had to pee.
program to join them later that year.
James and I remain close to this day.
Queers protagonist, William Lee, is living in Mexico City doing then kicking junk in the novel.
In real life,Queers author, William Burroughs, was doing exactly the same thing.
I wept when I first read that.
It does has a firm foundation in the text and plotline of the novel.
The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels.
But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well.
It is, essentially, a gay location film.
But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me.
This is the work of the director as any film should be.
Even after I returned to New York, I never stopped visiting Kansas.
At some point they became business visits too.
Burroughss career took off with the publication ofNaked Lunchby Maurice Girodiass Olympia Press in 1959 in Paris.
The Boston trial heard testimony from Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer.
It became a cause celebre.
But beforeNaked Lunch, there was another book,Junky.
The Swiftian interludes that would come to define his work became known as routines.
Ace acceptedJunkyfor publication but rejected the unfinished manuscript ofQueer, precisely because of those routines.
Burroughs threwQueerin a box and split for Tangier.
The box was kicking around for about 30 years.
The box went to Vaduz.
I was getting regular reports from James.
Burroughss genius had finally been acknowledged by the literary Establishment.
It was the kind of fuck you we all relished.
I can count on two hands the lovers I had in my life.
But how, exactly, never became that clear to me.
Then he got to his central point about the love seen in the film.
For Guadagnino, its deeper, though also perhaps in a trite way.
This book was about connection.
Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952;The Yage Letterschronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg.
He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy.
At the same time, it makes no sense.
Thats the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end.
I think I must have seenNaked Lunch20 times, Guadagnino tells me.
I saw it when it came out in 1991.
It was a very revolutionary revelation for me.
Its a Cronenberg movie.
Its a Cronenberg world.
And I hope that we did not eventually end up making Guadagnino.
This is not what I expected to be talking with Guadagnino about but is inevitable.
I asked him about the amulet.
I dont think that centipede is there because its in relationship with Cronenbergs work.
I think its more because of, its in relationship with Burroughss, Guadagnino said.
I wondered if the centipede would wind up asQueermerch designed by JW Anderson?
I could see buying one, but the prices of thoseDavid Wojnarowicz sweatersare nuts.
The typewriters are straight out ofNaked Lunchas well.
And some of those special effects in the ayahuasca chapter?
Um, uh, Cronenberg too.
The film repeats the Duc de Ventre routine The Lees have always been perverts.
I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators Id seen in a Baltimore nightclub.
Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things?
And I have a carnal relationship with Cronenbergs cinema.
He talked about his relationship to CronenbergsThe Fly, which feels foundational for him.
CronenbergsNaked Lunchwas less about that particular book than it was an homage to the writers entire oeuvre.
I understood this film better using that rubric.
Still, 39 years later, this terribly stylish new film feels tepid.
Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didnt feel Burroughss spirit.
I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed.
Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.
I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the romance the director referred to.
Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago.
That was Guadagninos gift to me.
Guadagnino liked hearing that.
My life with James and Burroughs set me on an unexpected path.
Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, and Dennis Cooper are my ABCs.
On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy.
In response, some signifiers were mentioned.
The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking.
I move on, disappointed.
Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers be they queer or not?
Thats what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers.
But willQueer,the movie, matter in the queer lives of future generations?
If it saves one, it has done its job.
