The Romanticized Squalor of Queer

 The Romanticized Squalor of Queer

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, afte…

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 ensna…