Queer Burroughs

Rating:
Summary: Finally!!
Review: It's amazing that it's taken this many years for someone to actually consider about Burroughs as a gay writer. All those Wild Boys are finally talked about as gay heroes in this excellent book. Jamie Russell made me return to the novels with new eyes. Of course Naked Lunch is about power and sex, of course the Wild Boys want to create a world without women. . . This book is a must-read for all Burroughs fans. Absolutely fantastic!!

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Though it's good to see that at last someone has written a book on Burroughs from a queer perspective, the author has such a limited and rigid idea of what counts as queer criticism that the book ultimately ignores most of what is interesting in Burroughs's fiction. The chapter on Naked Lunch, for example, focuses entirely on some rather questionable ideas about how to historicize the queer identity available in the 1950s, and thus ends up ignoring everything that is funny or satirical in a novel that is essentially comic and satirical (as well as being savage and caustic). The result is that every novel is viewed from a partial perspective that makes the book seem entirely thesis-driven, to the point that it simply ignores whatever is not grist for the author's mill.