The Beat writer William S. Burroughs began his second book, Queer, just months after killing his wife, Joan Vollmer, at a party above the Bounty Bar in Mexico City. Though he completed the novella in 1953, Queer was not released to the public until 1985, after Burroughs’s new agent, Andrew Wylie, had secured a $200,000 deal with Viking-Penguin for the rights to his back catalog, which kept him afloat until his death, at 83, in 1997.
Naked Lunch, Burroughs’s third novel, brought literary fame when the magazines that published excerpts of it were charged with obscenity in 1959, but the author’s reputation, just as thorny, has often overshadowed his output. He wrote in the introduction to Queer, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death,” acknowledging “the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing.” Burroughs was an advocate of guns, pederasty, racialism, and mind control; in the 1970s, word of his nearly lifelong addiction to heroin lured a new generation of users to his Lower East Side apartment, the Bunker, where shooting up with the elder statesman became a sort of punk-era pilgrimage.
Burroughs’s unapologetic politics are not the only challenge that a commercial filmmaker faces when tasked with adapting his work. His experimentation with language frequently resembles avant-garde poetry or notes for a deadpan stand-up routine more than it does narrative prose. Constant shifts in perspective, chronology, and planes of reality result in novels that feel both unfinished and insane, as they cut up and rearrange the conventions of noir, science fiction, esoterica, anthropology, and conspiracy theory into a style that is alternately enlightened, prophetic, anarchic, misanthropic, and crass.
Queer is a mostly straightforward confession of illicit yearning that takes after Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and inspired Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy. It fits more neatly into the canon of gay literature than many of Burroughs’s other efforts, even if its protagonist is as antiheroic as they come. William Lee—a Harvard-educated expatriate from St. Louis on the run following arrests for drug and gun possession in New York and New Orleans—spends his sojourn in exile drinking hard with other American barflies, many of whom are also semi-closeted homosexuals passing as students on the G.I. Bill. When Lee catches the eye of one of them, Eugene Allerton, his insatiable thirst for booze is surpassed by a still more violent desire to possess the much younger man, which propels the two toward a desperately one-sided affair and eventually to South America in search of the mythical substance yage, more commonly known as ayahuasca.
Algerian Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino first read Queer at age 17, and his own interpretation (adapted by screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote this year’s Challengers) elevates “the adolescent lust of junk sickness,” as Burroughs describes the increased sex drive during periods of heroin withdrawal, from a transitional novella that anticipates the radical evolution of its author’s technique into a polished fantasia of romanticized squalor. Out of this comes a love story that is sordid, pathetic, affecting, and true, exonerating the Burroughs of reckless paranoia with a portrait of a man striving to live authentically in inhospitable circumstances.
Burroughs once said that all writing is, in a sense, autobiographical, and many of the details of his own background map perfectly onto Lee’s. But they differ in several important particulars. In his introduction to the novella, scholar Oliver Harris notes that when Burroughs met Adalbert Lewis, upon whom Allerton was based, Burroughs was recently “readdicted to heroin and still had to report every Monday at 8:00 a.m. to the Lecumberri prison, while waiting for the interminable legal process surrounding Joan’s death to take its course.” Lee may not have the justice system hanging over him in Guadagnino’s film, but in the final sequence, images of his wife’s death flood back to haunt an elderly Lee, imposing a psychological explanation for his obsession.
Portrayed by Daniel Craig, who sheds the finesse of James Bond for a cruder expression of hypermasculinity, Lee is a manic iconoclast in white linen with the Ivy League vocabulary and studied cowboy drawl of an aristocrat’s son. Lee’s persona is further exaggerated in contrast with the tired ambivalence of Drew Starkey’s Allerton, whose gaunt frame marks him a dead ringer for the young Burroughs himself. “The limitations of his desires,” Burroughs writes of Lee, “were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars.” Craig communicates this hunger through filthy rants and disaffected cool, his holstered revolver keeping his patrician charm in check. “I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” he tells his wife’s ghost in one of the film’s surrealist sequences, just as a centipede crawls up feet no longer attached to his body.
Despite the occasionally nightmarish vision, Guadagnino’s approach to the source material is aesthetically seductive. He has recreated Lee’s Mexico City on a soundstage in Rome’s Cinecittà with meticulously crafted sets for Burroughs’s fictional watering holes—Lola’s, the Chimu Bar, the K.C. Steak House, and especially the Ship Ahoy—and painted backdrops evoking Burroughs’s “raw, menacing, pitiless Mexican blue” skies. Guadagnino’s longtime cinematographer, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, sharpens his lens on how the city “appealed” to Lee, “a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train,” as he opines in the novella. Guadagnino’s Lee is not stuck, but in limbo, keeping a low profile in an idealized refuge from “the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people” stateside, as Burroughs puts it, “who kept him from doing what he wanted to do.”
The film’s initial chapter is set in and between bars in Mexico City, where Lee courts an indifferent Allerton, downing martinis, tequila shots, and rum and Cokes in a frenzy to command the attention and overcome the indifference of his prey. Improbable stories of war and sexual conquest intended to circumvent the obvious sadness of their raconteurs wash over Allerton like so much Napoleon brandy, which he vomits into Lee’s toilet after Lee succeeds in coaxing him away from the chessboard in the Ship Ahoy.
The moment when Mukdeeprom’s camera first meets Allerton’s gaze is searing and indelible: Smoking in slow motion past a row of brothels, Lee comes upon a cockfight in the middle of the street, beyond which he spots Allerton, who leers back. Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” plays in the background—a sly nod to Burroughs’s acquaintance with Kurt Cobain, who worked with him on “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him” in 1992. The anachronistic music emphasizes the timelessness of Lee’s longing: Queer presents male desire as universal across ages and continents, staging a drama that is not only contemporary or modern, but classical, primordial.
But Allerton remains mysterious to Lee, exacerbating Lee’s yearning for access to and ultimately control of his mind. Early in the film, we see Lee wince, as one of Lee’s would-be pickups tells another, “Thanks for running interference for me, Tom. I like the guy, but I can’t stand to be with him alone.” As Allerton succumbs to and then retreats from Lee’s advances, Guadagnino rightly depends on Craig’s mannered affect to communicate Lee’s insecurities, which intensify under the scrutiny of his drinking buddies (including an uncharacteristically chunky and grotesque Jason Schwartzman, cementing his status as a master of comic relief), who debate the prudence of his pursuit. Left vulnerable, confused, and depressed by Allerton’s inconstancy, Lee ups his levels of self-medication, graduating from alcohol to cannabis, amphetamines, and opiates in rapid succession. Cooking up heroin alone in his room, Lee’s machismo is comprehensible and sympathetic: It is only through substances that he can muster confidence, and like most addicts, he goes too far.
A triumph in the cinema of alcoholism, Queer gives way, in its second act, to a road movie: Lee descends into the Amazon on the pretense of chasing the ultimate high, yage, but the objective of ensnaring Allerton, whom he pays to accompany him (with twice-weekly sexual encounters stipulated in their agreement), is evidently just as pressing. On trains and buses hurtling through Panama into the Andes, Lee shivers in his overcoat due to high altitudes and detoxification. The availability of cheap, pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and paregoric assuages his symptoms for a spell, but when a suspicious, German-accented physician (Michael Borremans) pegs him for a junkie, Lee must accept Allerton’s hesitant consent to share his bed as his only consolation. As they push forward on the trail of an American botanist named Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), their journey figures desire as a self-perpetuating affliction, an urge for annihilation as much as transcendence.
In order to forge a semblance of resolution for Lee’s odyssey, which ends abruptly in the novella with the couple’s failure to procure yage, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes draw from The Yage Letters (1963), a book largely compiled, like Queer, from correspondence between Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg, his sometime lover, agent, and friend, that describes Burroughs’s acquisition and experience of the drug. Comedy bits lifted verbatim from these letters, absurdist monologues that mutate into imagined dialogues, serve as the backbone of Kuritzkes’s script, but Lee’s ramblings come to a halt once he convinces Cotter to allow him and Allerton to sample the drug. As is pro forma in cinematic depictions of psychedelic experimentation, what was once verbal now is visible, and upon returning to Mexico City two years later, Lee understands that the effects of yage have permanently altered his consciousness: Allerton is gone, but “the Ugly Spirit” that “invaded” him when he killed his wife will stay.
Guadagnino is well versed in the agony of desire, and like Lee, lacks what Burroughs called “the American reluctance to meet the gaze of a stranger.” I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015), and Call Me By Your Name (2017) together constitute the “Desire Trilogy” that first brought Guadagnino international acclaim, and in more recent films—Bones and All (2022), Challengers (2024)—he gives his characters’ cravings for human flesh or athletic victory an erotic charge, reframing all conflict as sex. Guadagnino is Italian, after all, though he has called Queer an homage to British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and especially their 1948 film The Red Shoes—he speculates that they would appreciate the sex scenes in Queer, “which are numerous and quite scandalous.” In Powell and Pressburger’s film, sexual tension is sublimated through dance; in Queer, Lee has not yet discovered the power of art to deflect libido, and thus all that remains to fill the void is sex and drugs, whose visual potential Guadagnino unleashes in special effects and choreography that would not have survived enforcement of 1940s censorship codes.
The more obvious reference point for Queer, however, is Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), which Burroughs mentions in the novella. In his film, Guadagnino mimics Cocteau’s use of double-exposure as his characters watch Orpheus: as the on-screen poet walks through the mirror, entering his own reflection, a translucent double of Lee envelops Allerton in an imagined embrace, a projection of Lee’s fantasies that is at once cinematic and psychoanalytic. Later, high on yage in the Ecuadorian jungle, the men’s bodies merge at last into a two-backed beast that might have been conjured from the Black Sabbath in Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018).
The telepathy Lee sought from hallucinogens has brought him in contact not only with the living, but the dead—though, in another era, Lee’s creative and sexual liberation may not have required the sacrifice of a woman. Many of the Ship Ahoy’s denizens are military veterans drawn to Mexico for the relative freedom of expression there: In this milieu, “sex tourist” is just a dirty word for “political refugee.” As improbable as a cohort of white men seeking asylum across the southern border may seem today, the anxieties over CIA and Soviet surveillance they discuss in casual conversation raise a good question. Why shouldn’t these Americans, who served their country in the European and Pacific theaters, enjoy the freedom they fought for?
For Guadagnino, the era of McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare is closer to the present than we might like to think. Premiering at a moment when a triumphant MAGA threatens “un-American” values, lifestyles, and identities with hostility and oppression, the film’s argument against conformity could not be more germane. As Lee recalls in the film, a “wise old queen,” once told him that a man like him has a duty, still, “to live and bear” his “burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love.”
