Today in Gay History: William Burroughs Turns 100

[William769]

In Kill Your Darlings, director John Krokidas's movie starring Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan as Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, we see a young William Burroughs (played wonderfully by Ben Foster) who is already beginnig to influence a generation of Beat writers. With so many recordings of that raspy, Mid-American accented voice and movies with actors trying to impersonate him, it's a refreshing portrait of a notorious man, godfather to a generation of queer men and women and poets and artists and madmen. It's before he would go on to accidentally murder his wife by shooting her in the head during a dinner game, become sickenly addicted to heroin and other drugs, and write groundbreaking works such as Queer, Junkie, and Naked Lunch.

Today marks what would be the 100th birthday of Burroughs and for those looking for a new, definitive biography, Barry Miles—both a friend and a biographer for Burroughs—has produced Call Me Burroughs (out now). It's a masterpiece, describing in-detail Burroughs’s childhood in St. Louis, the pre-War Harvard gay scene, the birth of the beat movement at Columbia University, his travels through Mexico, Peru, Colombia to find the rare yagé vine, his life in Tangier, the 1970s punk scene in London, his status as a cult icon and celebrity in Manhattan and his ultimate retirement and death in Lawrence, Kansas.

It contains fascinating vignettes about his early life, such as this moment in Chapter 4 about the time he attended Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, with its motto: "Boys become men more easily when separated from oversolicitous mothers." Gore Vidal would attend the same school 10 years after Burroughs. Miles writes:

"Every month all the boys were subject to naked physical examinations in the nurse's office by two of the teachers. They were weighed and measured to see how much they had grown and to check their muscle tone. [School master Albert James] Connell took a close personal interest in this and was almost always there to supervise, touching their arms, chests, and buttocks though never anywhere else. His sexual interest in the boys was generally recognized by the staff and boys, and many were concerned by it."

http://www.out.com/entertainment/today-gay-history/2014/02/05/william-burroughs-100-barry-miles-gary-indiana

[Behind the Aegis]

1. OOOO...Ben Foster.