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William S Burroughs

William S. Burroughs, The Man Within. Directed by Yony Leyser screening Sat June 5th, 6pm

People must of thought I was a weird kid. I carried around a torn, stained copy of Naked Lunch in my backpack for months during high school in Utah. It was a difficult book to understand but the reading was made easier because I recognized the science fiction tropes he used and I forgave him the graphic, homosexual imagery. William S. Burroughs wasn’t someone just any young student could idolize. His prose was abstract and difficult. He was a junkie, and had been for forty years. He wrote about strange creatures that fed off the ejaculations of the human race. He developed avant garde methods of prose construction such as the cut-up technique. His influence reverberates through the generations. He inspired queers all over the world to rebel against a society that controlled and punished them. He was celebrated in his later years as the Godfather of Punk. How did this strange, queer junkie worm himself into mainstream American culture and become that dark renaissance man?

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