Novel: Queer

Overview

Queer, published in 1985 but written in the early 1950s, follows William Lee, Burroughs’s alter ego, as he drifts through Mexico City and then south toward the Amazon in a raw, unvarnished account of fixation, humiliation, and longing. It is a companion to Junky: where that earlier novel tracks addiction’s routines, this one depicts the exposed nerves of desire after junk has been stripped away. The result is a short, candid portrait of a man who tries to convert need into adventure and romance into a quest for a visionary drug.

Plot

In postwar Mexico City, Lee is recently off heroin and adrift among expatriates, hustlers, and sailors. Into this fog steps Eugene Allerton, a young American whose handsome reserve and cool, clinical detachment capture Lee’s attention and quickly become an obsession. Lee starts to orbit Allerton’s days and nights, buying drinks, proposing schemes, and delivering rambling comic monologues meant to entertain and hook him. Allerton remains courteous but elusive, a companion more than a lover, tolerant of Lee’s attention while giving almost nothing back.

The imbalance pushes Lee into erratic performances. He picks fights, collapses into jealous sulks, and then reappears with elaborate “routines, ” improvised speeches full of grotesque humor and satirical violence. He imagines himself dazzling Allerton into intimacy, but each routine underscores the gap between them. Meanwhile the bars, cheap hotels, and cafés of Mexico City provide a dim stage: a world of hangovers, petty scams, and expat gossip where Lee’s need thrums louder than the music.

The second half follows Lee and Allerton south through Central and into South America, ostensibly in search of yagé, the hallucinogenic vine rumored to grant telepathy and vision. The journey threads through ports, river towns, and jungle outposts. Lee quizzes professors, doctors, and local guides, chasing hearsay and half-promises. The quest serves as a pretext to keep Allerton near, but the farther they travel, the more tenuous the bond becomes. Allerton drifts, sometimes amused, sometimes impatient; Lee’s hope flickers in the same rhythm as rumors about the elusive drug.

The novel ends without consummation or revelation. The yagé search remains inconclusive, and Allerton remains a mirage at arm’s length. What lingers is the ache of pursuit and the self-knowledge that pursuit has exposed.

Characters and dynamics

Lee is needy, mordant, and self-sabotaging, quick with savage jokes and sudden tenderness. Off junk, he is hyperaware and unshielded, his desire unmediated and compulsive. Allerton is cool, polite, and opaque, a young man whose passivity exerts a gravitational pull. Their relationship is a seesaw of dependency and distance: Lee bankrolls and performs; Allerton abides and withholds. Around them, minor figures, expats, dealers, drifters, float in and out, reinforcing the sense of a transient colony perched on the edge of legality and purpose.

Themes and style

Queer is a study of unrequited desire and self-exposure. It treats queerness not as scandal but as a condition of visibility and risk in a hostile world, where every approach might be a performance and every performance a plea. Addiction haunts the edges: having abandoned junk, Lee replaces one compulsion with another, chasing a person and then a plant that might offer communion or control. The yagé quest complicates the colonial fantasy of discovery; Lee wants a substance that will fuse minds even as he remains unable to bridge the distance to the man beside him.

Stylistically the book is direct, unsparing, and often very funny. The manic “routines” puncture pomposity and authority while exposing Lee’s need to be seen. The prose is pre, cut-up Burroughs: tight scenes, deadpan dialogue, flashes of hallucinated menace, a steady undertow of dread and comedy.

Significance

As a portrait of a man stripped of his narcotic buffer, Queer is one of Burroughs’s most vulnerable works. It captures the humiliations and small hopes of desire with a frankness rare for its time and sketches the bridge from the street-level realism of Junky to the visionary terrain that would culminate in Naked Lunch and the later yagé writings. What remains after the journey is not an epiphany but a clear view of the costs of wanting.