William S. Burroughs: A Man Within Page #2

and everything.

You know, you see a movie

like Blade Runner,

and then you find the phrase

"blade runner" came from him.

The term "heavy metal"

is attributed to him.

"Soft machine."

You know, there's so many

phrases, names of groups that

come from William's work.

He's like another kind of Bible.

[ Victor Bockris ]

He's a great pioneer of

the gay liberation movement,

or the whole position,

standing of gay people

around the world really now.

Where'd you learn about sex

originally, from friends?

Books.

Books? Yes.

The book called The Plastic Age

by Percy Marks was sort of

a daring book for the '20s.

Mm-hmm.

And The Green Hat

and Coming of Age in Samoa.

Mm-hmm.

This is the '20s

I'm talking about,

which is a very different era.

[ Bockris ]

Burroughs once said to me,

"If one man stands up

and, you know, rejects..."

the bullshit of society,

"it makes it possible for

everyone else to follow on."

And he was that man

to some extent.

And here is Reverend Braswell

in the Denver Post...

"Homosexuality is

an abomination to God..."

and should never

be recognized...

as a legal human right any more

than robbery or murder.

At the present time

in Colorado where

this was written,

approximate

MOB conditions prevail.

And by MOB,

I mean 'My Own Business.'

No sex crimes on the book.

You can f*** a cow right

in front of the sheriff,

and all he can say is 'Moo!'

But you can hardly expect

to bring down the barn

with an act like that.

With the right virus offset,

perhaps we can get this whole

show out of the barnyard

and into space.

"This is the space age,

and we are here to go."

They asked him at a press

conference what he thought

of the gay rights movement.

And his response was,

"I have never been gay

a day in my life,

and I'm sure as hell

not part of any movement."

But Burroughs

was a deconstructor of labels.

You know,

that was just another sort of

amalgalmized effort to, uh...

to not be marginalized.

And he was

one of the very few...

maybe Jean Genet

and maybe Pier Paolo Pasolini...

who had the balls...

way before it was, like, vogue,

and certainly

when it was dangerous,

to say "I'm queer."

But he was way beyond that,

because he didn't respect any

of the rules of the gay world

at all either.

He was hardly

a Boys in the Band.

He would have hated that.

That culture would have been

very foreign to him because

there were so many rules.

There were so many rules

in the straight world too.

And he violated the rules

of even junkies' worlds.

He opened up to me

not gay culture.

He opened up gay rebels that

couldn't fit in gay culture.

Very different.

And I have to say that

Burroughs to this day

and his work...

have an uneasy, uh,

relationship with

"queer culture in America."

Or queer writing or whatever.

Burroughs was never seen

as part of that.

He was still too transgressive.

Even when it became

sort of okay to be queer,

he was beyond queer.

[ Andy Warhol ]

On this thing right here.

Right here. Here. Go on...

Oh, my God.

[ Bockris ] And I have to take

Burroughs and Warhol

as parallel figures.

Two people who,

in the late '50s

and early '60s,

stood up for

what they believed in.

Made no pretense about it.

Were totally out front about it.

At that time, that was

absolutely outrageous.

I mean, it's hard for people

who didn't live in those times

to know.

When I moved to America

in 1965,

you could not mention

the word "homosexuality"...

without everyone thinking

you were gay.

And it was really

just verboten.

And it's because of Burroughs

and Warhol and what followed

in their wake...

that the whole gay liberation

movement sprung up.

[ James Grauerholz ]

William's boyfriends were

a series of obsessions,

usually more or less foredoomed.

Well, first of all, his cousin,

Prynne Hoxie in St. Louis,

who went off to a different

university, Princeton,

and then died

a year and a half later...

in a drunken accident

in New York.

He was decapitated by...

a tunnel.

And then

he fell in love with a boy

at Los Alamos Ranch School.

And there was a big disgrace,

and little Billy ran away home

to St. Louis...

and couldn't go back

Los Alamos at all.

Sent off for his diaries.

And as he wrote,

when the box arrived with

the fearful diaries in them,

he couldn't wait to rip it open

and make sure he could destroy

the offending pages.

Some of these things

were examples of how

he had tried to write...

and why he had given up.

He says, "Fact is,

I had gotten a 'sickener.'"

Meaning like a jail sentence.

I mean, his boyfriends

like Jack Anderson,

the one that he cut

his finger off over...

and who helped him wreck

the family car.

Lewis Marker, the American

student at Mexico City College,

who was probably pretty

good intellectual company,

but was not gonna commit

his life to Bill Burroughs.

So he very much was thinking

of boyfriends as members of

a class different from him.

After I had lived with William

for several weeks...

and then began my relationship

with Richard Elovich,

my first lover,

I remember William

commenting once,

"See, you and Richard,

you have this idea

about, uh,

intellectual and social equals

being a couple."

He says, "In my day,

that's just unheard of."

I mean, you know,

it was an interclass thing."

[ Marcus Ewert ]

In the fall of '89,

I met him at his old place...

his old stomping grounds

in the Bowery... the Bunker.

And at that time, I was 18.

I was a freshman in college.

I was already basically

Allen Ginsberg's boyfriend.

Um, but I always kind of planned

out that I would still hook up

with William...

when and if the opportunity

presented itself.

Were you sexually interested

in me at that time?

Uh, I don't...

Not particularly.

Because I don't

remember any...

I don't remember any, um...

any such thing.

Mm-hmm.

How come?

'Cause I was kind of cute.

Looking back

with hindsight.

Well, I don't know.

If it was

like an ordinary

relationship...

in one of his novels,

it was usually

the theme

of, um,

chasing after somebody

that didn't quite...

want to have anything

to do with...

the author of

what you were reading.

Which was, I think in Queer,

something that was shown

like what his writings

were for.

They were love letters

to make the person that

he was interested in laugh.

'Cause they were

almost comedy routines.

[ Genesis Breyer P-Orridge ]

In a way, he was somebody who

appeared to be incredibly sad...

to me as time went by.

Someone who'd been hurt.

For example, you read...

that William was crazy in love

with Allen Ginsberg...

and that it was almost always

an unrequited passion.

And I think that that

disappointment that he had...

when he did fall in love,

which was so rare for him,

made him a lot

more withdrawn...

sexually and emotionally.

A lot more afraid of being

vulnerable and then being hurt.

So he started to close down

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