William S. Burroughs enjoys a reputation of a major postmodern author, literary innovator and legendary counter-culture figure. Although it is a well-known fact that Burroughs was gay, his works are rarely associated with or read from the perspective of queer theory. A literary outlaw and an outlaw in a literal way, a social misfit, Burroughs would seem to be a perfect icon for the gay movement. His disruptive, innovative, radical texts directly and unabashedly challenge the heterosexual dominant, so it would also seem natural that queer theorists and critics should express a lively interest in Burroughs's fiction. Why is this not the case?

Queer studies, queer theory and queer criticism flourished in the 1990s, heavily drawing on Gay & Lesbian studies. Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire are deemed to be the founding texts of the queer movement. Queer studies were supposed to be more comprehensive and far-reaching than their precursor, so when Gay & Lesbian studies focused mainly on the opposition between hetero- and homosexuality, queer studies intended to encompass all “non-normative” sexual activities and also attempted to explore “such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender-ambiguity and gender corrective surgery” (Jagose 1996: 3).

How can one try to establish a niche in the queer canon for an author that once publicly declared: “I’ve never been gay a day in my life, and I’ve certainly never been part of any movement” (Davis 2013: 270). Among the few critics that ventured to put an all-encompassing queer interpretation on Burroughs's work is Jamie Russell. In Queer Burroughs, Russell examines the possible reasons for Burroughs's exclusion from the queer canon. Of course, Russell is not the only scholar dealing with topics of sexuality in Burroughs's life and fiction – Timothy S. Murphy in Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (2000), Richard Dellamora in Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (1995) and Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (2012) also offer an overview of the function of “queer desire” in Burroughs's works (Murphy 2000: 102).