140815: pathetic truth, not particular to sexual gender / orientation: whomever you love, there is no limit to abasement you will eagerly suffer, for you will have no pride... though why this was not published and naked lunch was? no idea. here is the beginning of those vicious outrageous horrific hilarious routines, from lee to his audience...

Written in the early 50's, this novel was only published in 1985, because of its scandalous content which, by today's standards, is non-existent. There is almost nothing shocking here, just WSB's literary alter ego William Lee (see Junky, Naked Lunch etc.) doing his Beat thing - roaming around, hanging in Mexico, spending time in sleazy bars with sleazy characters - and desperately falling for a young man named Allerton, a fictionalized version of Burroughs' real life love interest Adelbert Lewi...

I have a passionate hatred for William Burroughs. I think even his fans have to concede that he's a degenerate piece of shit. I admit my prior experience with him consists of 5 pages of Naked Lunch and a couple biographies of various sorts, none of which fail to mention the pedophilia and him murdering his wife (I'm from Detroit, don't think for a second I buy his bullshit story), not that I'd hold that against him when rating this book. I went into this book expecting it to be about heroin abu...

seriously, Lee, will you give it a rest? stop trying to get into the pants of that straight guy. get some dignity. try getting into the pants of some dignity! Lee, i hate to tell you this, but you are embarrassing yourself. you're desperate and that is highly unattractive. even worse, you surround yourself with the same decay that is present in your decayed view of the world. and when that isn't enough, you seek out even more decay, until the novel becomes a travelogue of depressing decay, decay...

Lee, Chapter 4: "Got an idea for a new dish. Take a live pig and throw it into a very hot oven so the pig is roasted outside and when you cut into it, it's still alive and twitching inside. Or, if we run a dramatic joint, a screaming pig covered with burning brandy rushes out of the kitchen and dies right by your chair. You can reach down and pull off the crispy, crackly ears and eat them with your cocktails."Junky is tougher, and Naked Lunch is weirder, but this is the best Burroughs' book I've...

This was great and actually eclipses a lot of other Burrough's books I've read in the sense that it's very different and actually garners a lot of sympathy for him even though he's depicting himself - knowingly and self-deprecatingly - as a pervy, sad old man hiding out in Mexico after running away from murdering his wife. That last part isn't explicit in the text, but everyone knows by now why he was there. It's strange as I can't really excuse his actions, and at no point does he try to. In ma...

Certain “cult” writing earns this status because the prose is so transparent and simple it instantly appeals to teenage males done with Easton Ellis and Kerouac who want to up their shock quotient before attempting to read Gravity’s Rainbow for the first and last time. Queer fits the bill except, by today’s standards, the book is a little prude in tight Speedos with its danglies between its thighs asking us to love it if we’d only give it a chance. Will Lee is a homosexual-in-training in pursuit...

I tried. I effing tried.I can appreciate the book for what it is. Publishing (even writing) a queer-themed book was daring and subversive in that era. Living that life was dangerous. So in that respect, I can appreciate it for breaking ground, etc. That said, I hated the book. Or I should say, I hated the half of the book I managed to get through before I finally gave up because...I hated it. Lee is obnoxious, judgmental, entitled, and at times downright creepy in his pursuit of Eugene. I don't

My love affair with Burroughs started at a young age due (mostly) to this book.This is one of my all time favourite books and has lost nothing with time.I like to think of this as one of the greatest beat era love stories, that isn't a love story.

3.8 I had a big four paragraph review written about this novella but I can do myself better: THIS BOOK WAS BIG SAD. There. That’s all I really needed to say about this book. Now here, take my favorite images and let me cry about loneliness:“Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the progress of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetic to geometric progression seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cook...

I really enjoyed this book. "Queer" is interesting to me as you can see Burroughs' evolution as a writer and the novel also has a foreboding quality that many attribute to Burroughs' accidental murder of his common law wife. The actual plot of the book is pretty basic, it involves William Lee's infatuation with a young man in Mexico. The novel is unflinching in it's portrayal of blind lust; Burroughs' character makes a fool of himself on many occasions, but the novel shouldn't just be seen as on...

Here's the thing that puzzles me about this book: why was it not published until 1985 while the far, far more offensive Naked Lunch was published (not without obstacles) in 1959? One idea is that Burroughs put the manuscript for Queer away for many years and chose not to revisit it because it reminded him of a extremely terrible time in his life, the time surrounding the well-known (and unfortunately adapted to the screen) accidental killing of his wife during a drunken game of William Tell (a "...

I thought the audiobook of this was good although I didn't like that it took so long for the actual book to start with it having an intro. I don't like that in my audiobook and I have to admit I didn't listen to that part very carefully. While reading some reviews on this book I realized I might need to do some research on William S Burroughs as I don't know anything about him except from the books I've read by him

I think the title of this book is a bit of a misnomer, and it appeals to everyone, regardless of sexuality. Why? Because everyone has been in the situation where they find themselves pining over, or maybe even loving someone, who doesn't reciprocate emotionally. The fact that Burroughs is gay, is irrelevent, because the hurt and sadness is real, and everyone has felt it. I found myself really identifying with Lee in this way, more so than I could in Junkie ... and Allerton read like a Bret Easto...

A conservative reader might ask his Goodreads friends , “ Is William Burroughs gay? “ as if Burrough knows how it feels like being queer, an offensive slang for homosexual. If he is, it is neither here nor there because he is able to depict the reality of the homosexual world , categorically, the desire to establish an intimate relationship with a straight guy. So if you are gay, you might be able to empathize the situation of the protagonist. But if you are a straight guy, you might end up real...

I have wanted to read Burroughs for a while and was going to start with Naked Lunch, but I kept hearing mixed opinions, so I continued to push it to the back of my TBR. Then I came across this thin novel at a used bookstore and figured this was a good place to start. Not only did I enjoy the novel, I loved that Burroughs had written the introduction. Queer was written in 1949, but wasn't published until 1985. Burroughs explains the reasons behind this and other info. that was fascinating. I'm a

A short novella mainly about unrequited love and loneliness. William Lee, a homosexual drug addict spends his days in a number of bars and gay joints. He becomes interested in Eugene Allerton, who shows passing interest in Lee. Lee persuades Eugene to travel with him to South America in search of yage, a drug with supposedly telepathic qualities. Written in 1952 and first published in 1985, the novella is semi autobiographical. Readers new to William Burroughs should firstly read 'Junky' and 'Th...

Burroughs used the evocative word "Queer" when the word was mostly a pejorative. In that alone, he was decades ahead of the times. He wrote about things which were unmentionable and supposedly unpublishable, and built a career around saying things which were not to be mentioned. The unsuccessful prosecution of his novel "Naked Lunch" for obscenity changed the censorship laws in the U.S. To the very end of his long life, Burroughs' hatred for the so-called "polite society" was an incredibly motiv...

This is pulp fiction at its finest, and the perfect companion to Burroughs better known "Junky." I have always loved the introduction to the 1985 re-issue: "When I lived in Mexico City at the end of the 1940's, it was a city of one million people, with clear sparkling air and the sky that special shade of blue that goes so well with circling vultures, blood and sand -- the raw menacing pitiless Mexican blue." If you are turned off by his post-Naked Lunch writing style, one might consider this as...

This is my first time reading Burroughs even though I've been meaning to for years. I admit that the generation of writers that he was a part of- the beat generation- has never greatly appealed to me. I can't really relate to being on the road and high all the time. But, at the same time, it does lead to great story telling. Queer had a bit of that crazy on the road feel. But, for me, it also had a ton of very intimate, private emotions that I could relate to. Lee's desperation for any kind of a...