Putting It All the Way In:
Naked Lunch and the Body Horror of William S. Burroughs
I first encountered William S. Burroughs’ work on film at roughly ten years old. My father would take me to the video store, and I would run my fingers along the slick VHS boxes and admire the lurid cover art of screaming mouths, rotting zombies, and unnamable things emerging from basements, satellite dishes, and body cavities. Like most budding horror fans born after the ‘70s, my love of the genre was built on videos rather than late night horror hosts or EC comics.
The box for Naked Lunch was different. It wasn’t the imagery (a sharply dressed Peter Weller looking up at a reptilian mugwump) but rather the title. The words didn’t make sense to me. “Naked” aroused my interest. Even prepubescent, I was aware of and fascinated by sexuality. But what did that have to do with “lunch?” Just as incongruous, the back of the box featured an image of a hovering typewriter that was perhaps eating a man’s face.
My dad, a postflowerchild, let me rent and watch it. My mother was furious.
The film, a surreal amalgamation of several Burroughs texts as well as his wild biography, fascinated me with its insect fetishism and its thoroughly unglamorous presentation of narcotic addiction. Even more fascinating than that was the exploration of homosexuality.
Although the film stuck with me throughout my life, I didn’t read Naked Lunch or any of Burroughs’ writing itself until grad school at age twenty-four. Nonetheless, the intersection of horror and queerness was there for me long before. Throughout high school I read Clive Barker and Anne Rice, devouring but also studying the way they normalize and even romanticize male homosexuality in their work. When I finally read Naked Lunch (and The Wild Boys and Junky and Queer) for a Burroughs reading group, I was revolted, more than a little triggered, enraptured, and hooked.
Naked Lunch is absolutely a work of horror, even though it’s many other things as well. It’s difficult (and unnecessary) to categorize, slipping between detective noir, caustic and hilarious satire, gleeful science fiction, occult fantasy, throat-spasming body horror, and addiction memoir. Burroughs demonstrates just how arbitrary the genre can be—and what could be queerer than that?
It’s precisely the body horror, not despite but in addition to his humor and absurdist satire, that shows us how truly queer his body of work remains.
The simple and pure homosexuality was enough to horrify the readers of the ‘50s. To many overly sensitive and fundamentally conservative readers, a dick in an ass is body horror. So are rimjobs, which Burroughs never shied away from. Had he lived long enough, it would be priceless to hear his thoughts on newly emerging fetishes such as pup play.
But of course the sexuality in Naked Lunch almost always leads into the fantastic, usually a dark fantastic. One of the most memorable scenes of the book starts with a heterosexual encounter (albeit quite focused on Johnny’s ass) between Johnny and Mary, which leads into a homosexual one between Johnny and Mark, which then leads into several sexualized executions by hanging. Deadly sexual hangings are common scenes in the book, all the more freakish and frightening as some of them appear to be consensual or at least enjoyed by those whose necks are breaking.
When Burroughs chose to defend his work, he explained that scenes such as these were a satire of the American bloodlust for capital punishment. This claim fits the tone and content, though I think he also got off on writing it. Those characters hanged while getting fucked are often very young red-haired guys. At the time I first read the book, the fact that I myself was very much Burroughs’ type was not lost on me, causing me to set the book down and take a breather several times during the reading of it.
I soon discovered that erotic body horror can be found across the scope of Burroughs’ work. The Wild Boys contains a passage about the ectoplasmic zimbu, reincarnated entities created through occult sex rituals, their colorful ectoplasm clinging to the cocks of those who brought them back into form. Before the zimbu, the wild boys cloned themselves through cell samples biopsied from the inside of their rectums. All of this is told in painstaking detail as Burroughs deftly mingles science fiction with fantasy into his raunchy comic-bookish universe.
But queer sex is only one way into body horror in the Burroughs canon. Burroughs is as well known for his excruciatingly confessional descriptions of heroin addiction as he is for his carnivalesque sex. He describes shooting up in pus-weeping veins, or if he can’t find a needle, using a pin to open up his vein and squeezing a medicine dropper full of heroin or morphine or god knows what narcotic into the ragged hole.
Plenty of existential horror permeates the work as well—Burroughs wrote frequently about Control, a shadowy force that constantly seeks to keep people from exploring, expressing, and being what would now popularly be called “authentic.” Telepathic, drug-induced, and/or occult means are used to keep characters in line or frame them, torture them, and do all manner of nasty things. Burroughs weaves in Lovecraftian cosmic horror at times and just as easily employs Sartrean and Nietzchean nihilism. The most palpable horror in his work, however, is grounded in the body.
His monsters are also a mindfuck delight. In Spare Ass Annie, a spoken routine set to music in collaboration with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Burroughs describes the title character as having “an auxiliary asshole in the middle of her forehead like a baleful bronze eye.” She lives in a town full of monsters that also includes Centipeter, a man-centipede chimera that constantly sexually harasses the townsfolk. These monsters are born to women who’ve been caged in fresh human bones, somehow touched by malevolent gods that enjoy watching human debasement and humiliation.
The talking asshole with its hook-like teeth, the mugwumps with their black boney beaks and addictive semen, the Reptiles with their flexible bones and green fans of cartilage: the monsters are everywhere in Burroughs, whether magical or science fictional or human or just plain inscrutable.
He was such a bizarre genius that the only director to ever successfully adapt his work into a feature film has been David Cronenberg. Cronenberg reigned through the 80’s as the undisputed king of body horror on film, especially science fictional body horror with Scanners, Videodrome, and his brilliant remake of The Fly. Cronenberg’s film treatment of Naked Lunch features a buffet of squishy Burroughsian perversities: beetles with talking rectums, centipede sex murder in a giant birdcage, and people sucking psychotropic jism out of the phalluses growing from aliens’ heads. Fittingly, Cronenberg described Burroughs’ sexuality as an “alien sexuality.” Burroughs’ art, like Cronenberg’s, fetishizes the capital-O-Other.
Cronenberg, it should be noted, has frequently employed homoeroticism in his work, knowing how psychologically disquieting and arousing it can be to many audience members. However, unlike Burroughs or Samuel R. Delany, Cronenberg whips his crypto-gay cock out but, as Delany would say, never puts it all the way in. In Naked Lunch, for instance, main character William Lee (Burroughs’ early pen name) wakes up in bed with another man and constantly explores the idea of homosexuality, but we only ever see him make out with a woman—while getting dry humped by a typewriter-turned-fleshy-sex-mutant, but still.
The takeaway? Even the director of Rabid, in which porn star Marilyn Chambers undergoes experimental plastic surgery that gives her a phallic, blood-draining tentacle that turns people into contagious zombies (like ya do), has shied away from getting too gay on screen, even when homosexual identity crisis is a core theme of the work.
But gay isn’t the same as queer.
Burroughs disliked the term “gay” and rejected the label in favor of “queer,” one of the earliest people to do so. “Gay” is a euphemism. “Queer” is a reappropriated slur; it’s outré, unapologetic, and frequently considered offensive. While “gay” conjures a specific subculture with specific tastes, “queer” is a word that implies homosexuality but goes far beyond that. “Queer,” like Burroughs and his work, is transgressive, intentionally positioned against category and easy definition, and grounded in the body. Queerness is about unstably gendered (and non-gendered) bodies and the sexual anatomy and activity of those bodies. Queerness does not conform, even and especially to a homosexual mainstream. Queerness destabilizes gender and sex just as Burroughs’ work destabilizes grammar and genre. Queerness disrupts the status quo—like horror and science fiction.
William Burroughs remains one of the most dangerous and important intellectual perverts of the twentieth century. His perversions were philosophical, a popular literature of obscenity eroding the conservative norms of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s from the ground up. He was certainly a proto-cyberpunk and -splatterpunk, but more importantly, he was a proto-punk, influencing such rockstars as Iggy Pop, Throbbing Gristle, The Dead Kennedys, Kurt Cobain, and even David Bowie.
William S. Burroughs blazed for decades like a junky-fag Godzilla, an iconoclast for whom nothing was sacred but human life and freedom. He isn’t remembered as a “horror” writer because he never allowed himself to be ghettoed into a specific genre. We should all be that good at what we do.