I know the story of Queer well — the book itself, the circumstances of it being written, and the mythology that preceded the publication of it, the “lost” William Burroughs manuscript. And so I was truly dreading seeing Luca Guadagnino’s $53 million Queer, an adaptation of this unfinished autobiographical novel. It wasn’t just the peculiar casting of a beefy daddy like Daniel Craig as the Burroughs character, William Lee, or pretty Drew Starkey as the aloof, younger love interest, Eugene Allerton, who spends the film looking great in fabulous knitwear by Jonathan Anderson, Guadagnino’s friend and the film’s costume designer, but nothing like the image of the character I had in my head. But it was all that and more: Guadagnino directing a Burroughs adaptation just seemed wrong to me. His bright colors and beautiful style, in films like Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, seemed antithetical to that which I imagined this book should be represented with onscreen.

Burroughs and I were family, in the queer sense. We met one morning in the summer of 1981 when I had to pee. I left the bedroom where I’d spent the previous night, in his windowless loft on Bowery, the “Bunker,” with James Grauerholz, his amanuensis. James and I fell in love; William was leaving New York for a quieter life in Lawrence, Kansas, where James lived; and I dropped out of a B.A./J.D. program to join them later that year. I spent two years there before I returned to New York to work in book publishing, and Burroughs remained a part of my personal and professional life until his death in 1997. James and I remain close to this day.

Queer’s protagonist, William Lee, is living in Mexico City doing — then kicking — junk in the novel. In real life, Queer’s author, William Burroughs, was doing exactly the same thing. The writing of Queer began soon after he accidentally killed his wife, Joan, at a party in Mexico City where they were living at the time, in 1951. (They were playing a game of “William Tell” involving his new gun and a shot glass on her head.) When the book was finally published in 1985, Burroughs wrote in its introduction, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So, the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” I wept when I first read that.

Guadagnino’s Queer — I realized after I saw it and was able to schedule a Zoom call with the director and Anderson — does not give much screen time to the Ugly Spirit, or anything all that ugly at all. It does has a firm foundation in the text and plotline of the novel. The craftsmanship of the film is sterling on many levels. But it is not the book I know by the writer I knew so well. It is stylish in the modality of fashion — having a “look”; it is beautiful in its entirety as a complete visual construction. It is, essentially, a gay location film. It is romantic, something of a travelogue — you might want to go where it is set, eat at the restaurants, while wearing the clothing, certainly in the company of some of the flawless boys cast. But it is not the world that the book conjures for most readers, certainly not me. This is the work of the director — as any film should be.

Still, a bad match of director and material renders confusion at best, emptiness at worst; I worried that this film could potentially misconstrue the importance of Burroughs’s role as a visionary queer writer for future generations.

I was incapable of explaining this to Guadagnino and Anderson, in our 20-minute Zoom, not to mention it might have stopped the interview. But I tried.

Even after I returned to New York, I never stopped visiting Kansas. At some point they became business visits too. I handled Burroughs’s PR for many years, published him on the lists of two houses where I had been an editor, and had various other projects through the years with them. On August 2, 1997, when James called to tell me Burroughs had died, I returned to help him arrange the funeral.

Burroughs’s career took off with the publication of Naked Lunch by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in 1959 in Paris. Barney Rosset’s Grove Press followed in New York, in its heyday, in 1962. Naked Lunch was banned in Boston and Los Angeles under obscenity statutes. The Boston trial heard testimony from Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. It became a cause célèbre. Both cases, ultimately, ended the bans, bringing further attention to his wry, dark vision of the world.

But before Naked Lunch, there was another book, Junky. Ginsberg helped Burroughs arrange a deal for two pulpy, thematically related novels told in the first person with Ace, a publisher whose primary market was reached through spinning racks in drugstores throughout America. They were to be packaged in one volume. Junky can be likened to a queer version of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters — merciless, taut — whereas Queer, which was never finished, was built around a story of obsessive gay love. It also presaged the Burroughs we know today as it previewed his emerging characteristic — dark, visionary, often outrageous, and decidedly queer satire. The Swiftian interludes that would come to define his work became known as “routines.” Ace accepted Junky for publication but rejected the unfinished manuscript of Queer, precisely because of those routines. Written under the pseudonym William Lee (also the name of Queer’s protagonist), Junky was published in 1952 in a mass-market edition, thus precluding serious review attention. Burroughs threw Queer in a box and split for Tangier.

The box was kicking around for about 30 years. In 1973, Burroughs was broke and sold a chunk of his archive to a financier in Liechtenstein, a collector of such things, perhaps a speculator. The box went to Vaduz.

It was “rescued” in 1983 in a complicated deal involving a Shaker Heights manuscript collector; a librarian in special collections at Ohio State University; Burroughs, as represented by the deal’s architects; James, who worked with Bradford Morrow, the well-known novelist and founder of the literary journal Conjunctions, who was then a dealer of rare books and manuscripts; and the Vaduz financier. I was getting regular reports from James.

Around the same time, Ginsberg suggested that Burroughs leave his agent for Andrew Wylie, who had just started a literary agency. He did. Wylie made Queer the jewel in the crown in a multi-book auction that would set a new tone for Burroughs in the publishing world. El Hombre Invisible would be further acknowledged by the Establishment with induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983; he was awarded the Chevalier d’Ordre Arts et des Lettres in France the following year. Burroughs’s genius had finally been acknowledged by the literary Establishment. It was the kind of “fuck you” we all relished.

The Queer manuscript was totemic, and when it was published in 1985, it closed a wound with Burroughs having reckoned with Joan’s death.

On the Zoom, arranged by the film’s PR team, there were many things I wanted to ask about, most of all why the director wanted to take on this particular project. At the premiere of the film in Venice, Guadagnino admitted, “I am a gentleman who goes to sleep very early, never take drugs in my life, never smoke a cigarette … I can count on two hands the lovers I had in my life.” So it surprised me to hear him say that he read Queer early and that “the second I stepped into the world of Burroughs, I was changed.”

But how, exactly, never became that clear to me. Yet I was tickled to learn that he wrote a spec screenplay of the book 20 years ago and had been tracking and chasing the rights on and off ever since. As he was filming Challengers, the rights — under option for years with Steve Buscemi, who planned to star in it, with a screenplay by Oren Moverman — became available. (I always loved the idea of Buscemi taking on the Burroughs persona in the sweaty, abject role of William Lee.)

Guadagnino reminded me that as we come of age, we decide for ourselves what informs us, and spoke to the first time he read Burroughs. “You enter into the language of Burroughs and you understand, at 17 years old, that there are ways we can express ourselves that are so wide, sophisticated, complicated, and that you never have to adapt to a logic that is preordained.”

Then he got to his central point about the love seen in the film. Where he sees a true connection, and there was indeed one between Burroughs and Lewis Marker, who was the inspiration for the fictional Eugene Allerton, I saw this more in terms of transactional sex — not that I have a problem with that. Allerton can be seen as a savvy hustler, a confused DL douchebag, or simply an enigmatic fictional character. For Guadagnino, it’s deeper, though also perhaps in a trite way. “This book was about connection. When you meet someone with whom you know you have a connection, no matter what complications arise, no matter what the cultural or emotional interruptions … the strength of it is eternal.”

Guadagnino gave the novel to Justin Kuritzkes, a trusted collaborator, to write the screenplay; he wrote a marvelous and trippy ending for the unfinished novel that took Lee and Allerton to Quito, Ecuador, in search of yage, an ingredient in ayahuasca. Burroughs in fact traveled there in 1952; The Yage Letters chronicles his experiments in his letters to Ginsberg. He was obsessed with the idea that yage could enhance telepathy. In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.

When the screenplay is his own, firmly in Guadagnino’s hands, it’s actually fabulous — and a relief after the earlier conflict between the director and his material. At the same time, it makes no sense. That’s the most Burroughsian nod in this film: the sheer randomness and trippy outrageousness of the end. It’s very Naked Lunch — both the book and David Cronenberg’s 1991 film inspired by Burroughs, which was clearly on Guadagnino’s mind.

“I think I must have seen Naked Lunch 20 times,” Guadagnino tells me. “I saw it when it came out in 1991. It was a very revolutionary revelation for me. I think there was something within me that felt that David’s version of the novel was a way for him to assess yet another beautiful obsessive tale of David Cronenberg, you know? It’s a Cronenberg movie. It’s a Cronenberg world. It’s a Cronenberg. And I hope that we did not eventually end up making Guadagnino.”

Guadagnino’s film’s reliance on Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch became apparent to me in the first sex scene, when Lee picks up a pretty hustler played by Omar Apollo, who is wearing a centipede amulet that is straight out of Cronenberg. This is not what I expected to be talking with Guadagnino about but is inevitable. I asked him about the amulet. “I don’t think that centipede is there because it’s in relationship with Cronenberg’s work. I think it’s more because of, it’s in relationship with Burroughs’s,” Guadagnino said. “and it’s a sort of signpost, like a metaphorical signpost of the dangers of repression within both Lee and Allerton.” I wondered if the centipede would wind up as Queer merch designed by JW Anderson? I could see buying one, but the prices of those David Wojnarowicz sweaters are nuts. Maybe not. Fashion and fringe culture, when combined and commodified, can create conflict, something I’d already seen and am now more sensitive to — but that would be a great necklace.

The typewriters are straight out of Naked Lunch as well. And some of those special effects in the ayahuasca chapter? Um, uh, Cronenberg too. The film repeats the Duc de Ventre routine — “The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: ‘I was a homosexual.’ I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I’d seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things?” — that, while first written for Queer the novel, was first published in Naked Lunch the novel and is in the Cronenberg film version. Guadagnino told me, “It was interesting for me and Justin Kuritzkes to play that in relationship to the same scene in Naked Lunch because, in a way, you are always in relationship with what is before you. And I have a carnal relationship with Cronenberg’s cinema. I’ve been growing up into his world … and I have … another artist [in addition to Burroughs] that gave me a very strong sense of self.”

He talked about his relationship to Cronenberg’s The Fly, which feels foundational for him. He hit a kind of pay dirt of inspiration with this adaptation — he got to play with both Cronenberg and Burroughs. This kind of inspiration/homage, in the postmodern age, should render a piece of art on its own terms. The problem is that when rendering a clone, it tends to turn out as a genetically imperfect creature, a mix of influences (part-fly, part-human, for example) that you didn’t entirely intend.

Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch was less about that particular book than it was an homage to the writer’s entire oeuvre. So perhaps Guadagnino was making Cronenberg making Burroughs, but based on a thin, unfinished Burroughs novel with an interesting history that made it mythological — until its release in 1985. I understood this film better using that rubric. Still, 39 years later, this terribly stylish new film feels tepid. It’s paying more of a tribute to an adaptation of a different Burroughs book, a film that feels genuinely Burroughsian but has less of a basis in the underlying text than his own. Something is off, the essential is missing, and this may be why I didn’t feel Burroughs’s spirit.

But still, I wept through scenes of Guadagnino’s film — including a hallucinatory reference to Joan’s death in which Lee does the same failed William Tell routine with Allerton — but it wasn’t for Joan or Burroughs; it was for James’s lover Michael Emerton, who  killed himself with a   gun. I wept as this beautifully designed movie, with gorgeous men in well-cut suits, gave me time to think about the karmic connections that both blessed and cursed me. I wept for Billy Jr., whose mother Burroughs had killed. Then I wept for Burroughs, and I wept for Joan.

I wept for the portrayal of transactional sex that was the “romance” the director referred to. I wept as I questioned notions of intent and integrity in transactional relationships: mine with younger, troubled men who lived on the fringes of gay culture; Burroughs’s with James; and James’s with me. Those relationships, for better or worse, follow the karmic path laid down for me 40-plus years ago. That karma, at least for me, as I flew through the past making sense of it, was neutralized by the acceptance of its very existence, its painful impact on me and those affected by it, and, finally, by releasing it. That was Guadagnino’s gift to me.

Most poignantly, I wept for James, who lives alone, unable to walk, with a brain injury that was inflicted during a gay bashing and made worse by his falls at home and sustaining further concussions. But there has been some nice news for him, as a double LP of his work as a singer-songwriter is being released on Lotuspool Records. And he told me he liked Guadagnino’s Queer — though he quibbled with the casting and look of Allerton — and that’s even better news. Guadagnino liked hearing that.

My life with James and Burroughs set me on an unexpected path. Despite bumps, it has been enormously satisfying as the impulse to serve underserved communities was realized not in a law practice but in one working with writers who gave voice to those living in the margins. Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, and Dennis Cooper are my ABCs. There were many others, from David Wojnarowicz and Diamanda Galas to Sapphire and June Jordan, to name a few.

On the Zoom with Guadagnino and Anderson, I wanted to ask about legacy. Are there responsibilities we who make art or work in the arts have to our elders, to the radical spirits who pushed open the doors? I mentioned the affluent gay men, usually heteronormatively married, who “rent a womb” and maybe buy an egg to drop in it so their children have their genes — all of which seems to me to be the furthest thing from queer. In response, some signifiers were mentioned. Anderson speaks to the look of the film, citing George Platt Lynes’s influence; they both chimed in about Powell and Pressburger (the Archers), of The Red Shoes; I mentioned Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s Querelle, which Guadagnino said, indeed, influenced him. The point has been missed, and the clock is ticking. I move on, disappointed.

Will this film ignite a radical spark in younger viewers — be they queer or not? That’s what Burroughs did for me and for many, many of his readers. But will Queer, the movie, matter in the queer lives of future generations? If it saves one, it has done its job.

Related

• Queer Looks Hot (Temperature-Wise)
• Luca Guadagnino’s Queer Is More Challenging Than You Might Expect

 I didn’t recognize the William Burroughs I knew in it. So I got on a Zoom with the director.