(Disem)Body Talk: Guadagnino Pays Homage to the Paradoxical Beat Pariah
If Ayn Rand had dared to write a character who was a genius gay white male unable to reconcile his hedonistic tendencies and is thus thrown out of the heavenly refuge of Galt’s Gulch back to the hellishness of Earth, he might have resembled someone like Williams S. Burroughs. A non-conformist who set himself apart from the already non-conformist Beat generation he rose out of in the 1950s, Burroughs more readily identified as a heroin addict than a gay man, despite blatant suggestions to the contrary in his writings. Perhaps most famous for his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, and the subsequent obscenity trials it overcame in the ensuing decade (notably adapted into a pretty damn good film by David Cronenberg in 1992), he has long been a bruised icon for the social refugee.… Read the rest
