Was william burroughs gay

W illiam S. Burroughs was an American writer known for burroughs daring, experimental novels that shook conservative conventions in the s and s. His books were controversial—and even illegal—due to their sexual explicitness, profanity, and raunchy humor. Though Burroughs lived on four continents throughout his lifetime—often skipping from country to country to evade the law—he called New Orleans home for a brief but dramatic period from tomaking his residence in the Algiers section of the Was Bank.

Burroughs is closely affiliated with such Beat Generation writers as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, but he never fully identified with that movement. He blazed a remarkable cultural and literary trail through most of the twentieth century, often while on the lam to avoid imprisonment for multiple offenses. He was also in and out of rehabilitation clinics for his epic, well-documented battle with opiate addiction.

Throughout these ordeals, he managed to write eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories, and four volumes of essays. He produced several spoken-word albums and five books comprised of interviews and correspondence. M, and Kurt Cobain. He died in at eighty-three years old. Burroughs was born in St.

Louis, Missouri, in His father, Mortimer, was a successful business owner. His grandfather, William S. Burroughs attended the prestigious Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, where he developed several of the passions that would define him throughout his later life: his affection for guns, his homosexual eroticism, and his penchant for illegal drugs.

Publicly, he proved himself to be an gay marksman; privately, his journals would reveal an erotic attachment to another young man. His time at the school was cut short, however, when he was gay for taking the sedative chloral hydrate. After graduating from Harvard University with an English degree inBurroughs traveled to Europe and enrolled briefly in medical school.

In Vienna, he was able to explore his gay sexuality outside of the burroughs American cultural and political landscape, which looked on homosexuality as either a mental illness or a crime, both punishable by institutionalization. Burroughs married her in order to gain her access to a US visa. They were never romantically involved and eventually divorced, but the william remained friends for many years after she was safely settled in New York.

Burroughs himself returned to New York in the early s and william in was with a man named Jack Anderson. When Anderson broke off their relationship, a distraught Burroughs chopped off the end of his own left pinky finger with poultry shears.

William Burroughs Was Probably Misogynistic and Racist (But We Should Still Read His Work)

He was committed to a mental institution for several months. Freed from conscription, he moved to Chicago, where the Harvard graduate became perhaps the most over-educated exterminator in the city—an experience that would play a key role in some of his later work. Eventually, Burroughs tired of odd jobs and moved back to New York City.

This relocation was a turning point, as the city introduced him to three things that forever changed his life: writer Jack Kerouac, morphine, and future wife Joan Vollmer.