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A review by emissaryorca
Queer by William S. Burroughs
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Really struggled on the star rating because I do see value in singularity, and the prose itself has a jagged bluntness I can admire. I'll copy-paste my immediate thoughts down below:
I guess I can say my heart aches for the folks of my generation who go into the movie adaptation (soon to release in about 2 months at the time of this writing) expecting something soft, demure, a love in the desert unreciprocated, perhaps in the style of the Hollywood romcom where there must always be a resolution even in the pits of human loneliness. Is Burroughs, the real man perhaps lusting after Ecuadorian boys, "absolved" in the all-seeing panopticon of the modern day gay experience, men seeking love scarred the only way they know how? I got the sense that Lee is a pit for flies, not too dissimilar to Moor and his rampant fixation on matters he deems unhealthy. The specter of judgment attracts and lingers, within and without the text. If Lee is a vector for Burroughs himself, can the movie or book survive the separation from the rest of his work? The modern context itself might have a great deal to say of the title, the new and recent softening—perhaps a tad reductive—toward reclamation balking at the currents beneath. Too bare and bitter, but I believe it is time nonetheless.
I guess I can say my heart aches for the folks of my generation who go into the movie adaptation (soon to release in about 2 months at the time of this writing) expecting something soft, demure, a love in the desert unreciprocated, perhaps in the style of the Hollywood romcom where there must always be a resolution even in the pits of human loneliness. Is Burroughs, the real man perhaps lusting after Ecuadorian boys, "absolved" in the all-seeing panopticon of the modern day gay experience, men seeking love scarred the only way they know how? I got the sense that Lee is a pit for flies, not too dissimilar to Moor and his rampant fixation on matters he deems unhealthy. The specter of judgment attracts and lingers, within and without the text. If Lee is a vector for Burroughs himself, can the movie or book survive the separation from the rest of his work? The modern context itself might have a great deal to say of the title, the new and recent softening—perhaps a tad reductive—toward reclamation balking at the currents beneath. Too bare and bitter, but I believe it is time nonetheless.
Now with hindsight I am more intrigued than ever to see what is cut, pared down, or otherwise removed and lambasted. I am not confident in the welcoming reception but I think that's part of my curiosity. "Middle-class morality" is a phrase I'm all too familiar with, and seeing its ghost—and Lee's subsequent disdain—carried through time from a 50s biopic invites a strange warmth. Yes, indeed, for a man of some lived authority sees something to despise there, too! Still I believe it a crime to parse an ultimate morality especially from this text. Lee is not "right", not in any relevant sense, but he's lonely, desperately so. In this I find a kind of lightness, a soul kindred despite the separation of our desires and the frame of my own experience exploring masculinity.
At the very least I anticipate dissociation when the movie releases, if it at the very least does its damnedest to convey accuracy: my reaction to the weight of a lived reality stilted and desperate, cracked up against the dam. Inspired by such starkness I would ache to be closer to that sense in myself too, even through the hurting.
"In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality." In that case, I welcome the haunting.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug use and Pedophilia