Re-Queering William S. Burroughs
On June 14, the world welcomes Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs edited by Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone from Rebel Satori.
I have spent much of my academic life studying the work of William S. Burroughs. My Hampshire Division III was on “male+male askesis in the work of William S. Burroughs.” I produced the queer occult zine mektoub for a while back in the rich pre-internet days where zines were everywhere. So when Brian and Tom approached me last year with the concept for an anthology re-focusing Burroughs as a LGBTQI+ literary icon, I said “OF COURSE!” I can’t think of much that would be more in my wheelhouse than this.
The editors have compiled a wide ranging collection of interviews and essays featuring emerging and established writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and critics.
Interview subjects include Blondie founders and musicians Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, cultural critic and author Fran Lebowitz, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Tony Kushner (Angels in America), filmmaker David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence, Naked Lunch), multiple Hugo-Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany (The Mad Man, Nova, Babel-17).
Along side are essays by National Book Award-winner Edmund White, PUNKmagazine founder and former SPIN and NERVE editor, Legs McNeil, Gregory Woods (A History of Gay Literature), Paul Russell (The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov), and Burroughs’s bibliographer and literary executor, James Grauerholz, among many others. Some offer critical assessments of Burroughs, while others share personal experiences. In addition, the collection includes several members of the Rebel Satori extended family: Charlie Vazquez (Dreaming Out Loud: Voices of Undocumented Writers), Peter Dubé (Madder Love and Conjure), Trebor Healey (Sweet Son of Pan), Jerry L. Wheeler (Pangs) and myself (The Star Set Matrix).
My contribution focuses on the important intersection of Burroughs writing and his interest in the occult out of which he forged a queer magical praxis and underpinning mythology. In Burroughs’s cosmology, there is a magical universe along side our own—a corollary realm populated by a multitude of feuding and fucking gods exacting their whims on a helpless humanity. Burroughsian Wild Boys create being from Chaos; his hardboiled detective invokes Egyptian gods through ritual sex; Joe the Dead is a NO, a natural outlaw, breaking the laws of nature.
Excerpt
William Burroughs had a deeply rooted interest in the occult and fringe science. This fascination was kindled at an early age when his Irish nanny taught him the secret of calling toads and a simple curse to cause the target to fall down a flight of stairs. The latter would reoccur in his works all the way through his monumental final Cities of the Red Night trilogy. At age four, he describes how, while walking in a park, he saw a small green reindeer that he would later identify as a totem animal.
Burroughs and his literary alter egos were outspoken in their belief in the Magical Universe and the existence of an afterlife. For him, the world, as well as his novels, consisted of a universe populated by diverse gods, spirits, and ghosts. The threat of possession was very real and ever present. He personally felt himself stalked by an entity he termed the Ugly Spirit. He blamed his accidental shooting of his wife Joan during a William Tell act on possession by this malevolent spirit.
To Burroughs, the One God Universe, with its bearded benevolent father figure who yet lets bad things happen, was a logical impasse—“irrevocably thermodynamic.” For him the only cosmological model that made sense was a universe populated by numerous gods often operating from points of competing interest. Likewise, he viewed coincidence as a mechanism of control used to obscure the universe’s true magical nature. In Burroughs view there are no accidents. “Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”
SVEN DAVISSON “QUEERING CHAOS”
“Like The Great Gatsby, Kim believes in the green light the orgiastic future. He believes in a magical universe, unpredictable, spontaneous, alive. A universe where anything is possible.”
William s. burroughs, GIORNO POETRY SYSTEMS The Best of William S. Burroughs
Additional Reading
The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs, Matthew Levi Stevens