Wealth & Money Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs weaponizes the language of laboratory “conditioning” to puncture the mid-century confidence that sexuality is a tidy problem solvable by technique. The gag about the “old boot” isn’t just shock humor; it’s a scalpel aimed at behaviorism’s blunt instruments and at the therapeutic-industrial impulse to treat desire like a miswired circuit. By dragging both homo- and heterosexual subjects into the same absurd experiment, he strips the categories of their moral and medical prestige. If everyone can be trained to lust after footwear, then the supposed difference between “normal” and “deviant” starts to look like a bureaucratic fiction propped up by clinics, grants, and social panic.

The sentence is structured to sound like a reasonable concession (“Admittedly...”), then it swerves into farce. That rhetorical trap matters: Burroughs mimics the calm, institutional voice of experts, only to let it collapse under the weight of its own logic. The throwaway punchline - “you can save a lot of money that way” - turns the whole enterprise into an accounting joke, implying that the true engine behind “curing” homosexuality isn’t science or compassion but thrift, control, and the desire for social compliance at the lowest cost.

Contextually, it sits in a postwar world of conversion therapies, psychiatric pathologizing, and Cold War policing of bodies. Burroughs, writing from the fringes of respectable culture, doesn’t argue for identity politics so much as sabotage: if the system claims it can reprogram you, he replies by showing the system’s methods are indistinguishable from fetishistic absurdity.