I’m Not Queer—I’m Disembodied

Maral Attar-Zadeh explores queerness, death, and desire in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s “Queer.”

By Maral Attar-ZadehDecember 29, 2024

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

MIDWAY THROUGH Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), Death’s chauffeur, Heurtebise, shows Orpheus how he can return Eurydice to the world of the living: “I’ll give you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes.” “But this mirror is a mirror,” Orpheus protests, “and in it I see an unhappy man.” Still, he puts on Death’s gloves and passes through the glass into the Underworld. Here are two things a mirror can be: a mirror, reflecting the self; a door, an opening toward the beloved and toward death. 

This scene is quoted by Luca Guadagnino in his new film Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novel of the same name—a semi-autobiographical account of the doomed affair between William Lee (Burroughs’s stand-in) and a young GI named Eugene Allerton, written in the wake of Burroughs’s infamous fatal shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer. In the adaptation, Lee (Daniel Craig) and Allerton (Drew Starkey) watch Cocteau’s film in a Mexico City theater; we watch them from behind. As Orpheus’s hands reach toward the mirror and pass through it, a phantom arm lifts off of Lee’s body and reaches toward Allerton, and a doubled phantom torso twists around to place a kiss on the side of the younger man’s throat. Allerton shifts in his seat as if he feels the ghost touch. 

For Lee, Orpheus is a mirror: the story of an unhappy man plunging into death after his wife, it represents one of the many ways Vollmer’s death haunts the film—as it does the novel—without appearing in it. Queer is full of similar mirrors, allusions to men hurtling towards death. Graphic covers of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra (1934), two novels about doomed protagonists, are tucked conspicuously in the corners of key scenes scored with music by Nirvana and Queen. Trapped among them, Lee, like Orpheus, sees an unhappy man, his own death at work. 

Through these multiplying mirrors—which at once constitute the self and foretell its destruction—Queer poses questions about the relationship between queerness, representation, and death. What can doomed queer figures do for one another? Can adaptation, allusion, and emulation turn reflecting mirrors into open doors, leading to something other than the destruction for which these characters seem to be fated?

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In a Q and A at the film’s New York Film Festival premiere, Guadagnino recalled that he was “a very bizarre, lonely kid,” and Burroughs’s Queer, titled Diverso in Italian, “was like a call to [him] […] like a mirror.” His encounter with the novel “revealed something about [him]self,” he added; it reflected his deep interest in “desire and connection to a very […] profound degree.” At the same time, it was an opening to different ways of seeing, to the aesthetic and literary tradition of the Beat Generation. Guadagnino first wrote a “terrible script” at 20, and nothing came of subsequent efforts to adapt the novel—until the spring of 2022, when he gave a copy of the book to Challengers (2024) screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes. Kuritzkes wrote a script; the rights to the book, which had been difficult to secure, suddenly became available. Introducing Queer at the BFI London Film Festival, Guadagnino expressed his delight that “a film that was a wish for 33 years was made in six months.”

By accident or design, Guadagnino’s account of Queer’s serendipitous production echoes the publication history of the novel—the sort of symmetry that his films recognize as the rare and coveted synchronicity of lovers. Though Burroughs wrote Queer in 1952, it was not published until 1985. During those 33 years, he referred to Queer as juvenile, unpublishable. The eventual publication of the book was only made possible when Burroughs (re)gained access to the only surviving copy of the manuscript and found new collaborators to support its publication—a new agent, Andrew Wylie, and a new publisher, Viking Penguin.

As an adaptation, Queer is—like a lover—preeningly faithful in the first two acts. Dialogue appears nearly verbatim, with the notable exception of Lee’s more eyebrow-raising “routines”: manic rehearsed monologues, sometimes hilarious and often shockingly distasteful, which he uses to keep his audience captive at the Mexico City bars and restaurants where he spends most of his time. Craig is terrific as Lee: wearing thick-frame glasses, an increasingly soiled white suit, and a semipermanent sheen of sweat, he is helplessly pathetic, actively disintegrating, menacing in brief flashes; most of his expressions are open wounds. Starkey, who was advised by Guadagnino to play Allerton as a “nasty bitch,” is beautiful and opaque in a rotation of really excellent shirts. He has Allerton’s straight black eyebrows and coy distance (“hot on the outside and cold inside,” as Lee puts it bitterly, only pretending to describe a baked Alaska). The soundstage recreations of Mexico City and Ecuador, shot in the famous Cinecittà Studios in Rome, are as unreal as they appear in the novel.

Queer’s decisive departure from its source material comes in its final act. While Burroughs’s novel ends abruptly during Lee and Allerton’s frustrated search for ayahuasca in the Ecuadorian jungle, Kuritzkes’s script imagines them finding it, and experiencing, during the resulting trip, the wordless, incorporeal union Lee has been dreaming of achieving with Allerton. The coda references the epilogue of the 1985 manuscript but goes beyond it, ending in a dream sequence that concludes with the death of an elderly Lee, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Burroughs at the end of his life.

This new ending was, according to Kuritzkes at the New York Film Festival, one of the first decisions made in the writing process: if Burroughs was “opening a door and then quickly closing it” with the ayahuasca plot, the film would go “through the door and [see] what was on the other side.” As an adaptation, then, Queer wants to be both a mirror and a door: a dutiful reflection, a radical opening.

This final act will be, I suspect, what causes the most trouble with audiences, and not just with die-hard Burroughs purists. There is a sudden tonal shift as Lee’s desperate plunge into addiction, inflected with moments of painful tenderness between him and Allerton, turns into a machete-wielding romp through the rainforest in search of the grotesque, witchy (and gender-swapped) Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville). There are a few frankly outrageous visual effects. Lee and Allerton’s ayahuasca trip includes an extended psychedelic dance sequence, simultaneously dreamlike and precisely choreographed, where they climb into each other’s skin, their faces merging.

When I watched it at the Toronto International Film Festival, this was the point in the film’s 137-minute run when I started to feel the audience shift and squirm with impatience. During the Q and A, someone asked Guadagnino if he’d tried, and cut out, any other ways of shooting the ayahuasca trip; someone else asked if the scene was inspired by his 2018 remake of Suspiria, since “it definitely came across […] like body horror.” Guadagnino was audibly annoyed. He responded testily to the first question: “We did cut the movie. Every movie gets cut.” To the second, he protested, “I don’t know if I carried Suspiria into this movie. […] I thought it was very romantic!”—referring to the moment, at the beginning of their hallucinations, when Lee and Allerton puke up their hearts encased in pulsing, bloody sacs. 

Easy mistakes to make. While those who have read the novel might be disappointed that Guadagnino doesn’t go far enough—that he sanitizes the surreal cruelty and abjection so central to Queer’s world (more on this later)—others less familiar with the source material might find the film at points incoherent, mopey, and convoluted. It may well induce tonal whiplash after the tightly paced, charming, life-affirmingly thrilling Challengers. Advertising would be partly, in that case, to blame: Queer has been marketed on the star power of Craig and Starkey, and the return of Guadagnino and Kuritzkes’s Challengers collaborators—cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, composers Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, and costume designer Jonathan Anderson. A new Loewe campaign inaugurates Starkey as one of “Luca’s boys”; Craig is having his own fashion moments in photo shoots and on the red carpet. With awards season approaching, Challengers fever is taking hold again, if it ever subsided, the massive commercial success of that film having attracted new fans and set high expectations for Queer—including for its sex scenes featuring Craig, Starkey, and Omar Apollo, which Guadagnino has described as numerous and scandalous.

For these fans, Queer may not deliver on its promises. During my long descent from the nosebleed seats of the Princess of Wales Theatre, I saw the festival audience—younger gay people in Uniqlo JW Anderson shackets and Challengers T-shirts, older gay people in scarves and clear-frame glasses, a lot of girls with heavy bangs—shuffling down the stairs slightly dazed, telling their friends they weren’t sure what they’d just seen, that they liked it but wouldn’t watch it again, speculating that people would love “Drew” but not the movie, logging it on Letterboxd with three-and-a-half stars and no hearts. They didn’t get it, I thought, being silently insufferable, or they got it but didn’t buy it. 

Despite his incredulity at the body horror question, I couldn’t help but suspect that Guadagnino saw this coming, and must take some kind of Burroughs-like, misanthropic pleasure in the uncomprehending reactions of audiences who were expecting a tender romance like Call Me By Your Name (2017), or another glossy, fast-paced love story like Challengers. It’s hard not to see the parallels between the pairing of Challengers and Queer and that of Burroughs’s Junkie (1953) and Queer, a sequence Oliver Harris has described as a work of “sustained coherence” and “commercial viability” followed by a work of “rapid disintegration.”

In this light, Queer starts to appear as a continuation of Guadagnino and Kuritzkes’s explorations of queer love, embodiment, miscommunication, and synchronicity in the negative, a wayward conceptual sequel to Challengers. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the climax of both films. In Challengers, the final stretch of Art and Patrick’s tennis match is the culmination of the film’s engagement with the erotic and its relational affordances. Tennis, here, has all the powers that Audre Lorde associates with the erotic act: communicative richness, orientation towards excellence, opening to joy. A wordless, embodied exchange, it provides a channel for the expression and release of the layers of tension accumulated among Art (Mike Faist), Patrick (Josh O’Connor), and Tashi (Zendaya), whose relationship has broken down over the years due to their inability to play what Tashi calls “actual tennis.” Art, the most successful of the three, has been competing joylessly, covered head to toe in sponsors’ logos, for the sake of Tashi, who has become more of a brand manager than a coach to Art, meticulously controlling their image because she can’t control his playing. Even Tashi and Patrick’s covert meetings take place near blown-up promotional images of Art: tennis—and so their relationship to each other—has been made inert, robbed of its erotic value, turned into an alienating performance.

In the final scene, a return to tennis as a site of erotic encounter—and a particularly expressive serve by Patrick—proves to be miraculously reparative. We watch the match from below, from the perspective of the court, the net, and the “eye” of the ball: tennis itself provides formal, narrative, and aesthetic coherence, perspectival vantage, ways of seeing and meaning. Though it’s not clear what happens after the ecstatic embrace that ends the film, it is obvious that all three characters have won the match. The eroticism of tennis has occasioned a reinstatement, a reopening, of their relationships to each other and to their own desires.

The psychedelic sequence in Queer features the same elements—embodied communication, queer desire, uninhibited connection—but takes them to their extremes, where they are negated. In the novel, Lee’s experience of desiring Allerton is as far as one can get from constitutive, communicative eroticism: he has been disappearing, becoming translucent, turning into ectoplasm; he is utterly shattered and unself-possessed, “an hombre invisible,” in Harris’s words. “I’m not queer […] I’m disembodied” is the refrain with which he declares his condition, an expression of homosexual desire as an alienated and alienating force, desire in search of a body. “I want myself the same way I want others,” he confesses to Allerton. “I can’t use my own body for some reason.” In its departure from Burroughs, the film insists, in this negative and negating desire, on what Guadagnino, at the New York Film Festival, called “the impossibility in the possibility or the other way around”: it is with this same ectoplasmic, spectral body that Lee reaches out to Allerton and can be, finally, touched in return.

I’m not queer; I’m disembodied: in what is one of the film’s most touching moments, Allerton telepathically repeats this line back to Lee as they hallucinate together, confirming not only that they have reached the union for which Lee has been so desperate but also, more importantly, that there exists a real and uninduced commonality of feeling between them. Allerton’s confession demonstrates that the two men can find this mutuality only by denying a positive identity (queer) in favor of a negative one (disembodied). Theirs is a coming-together in abjection, through a shared sense of alienation from their own bodies, identities, and desires.

This is a vision of queer negativity that urges us, in Tim Dean’s words, “to accept that the death drive does not exist as such,” that what appears to be the death drive is in fact one of the two “Janus faces of sexuality: the familiar countenance that reflects erotic identities (including queer ones), and the countervailing aspect that splinters and unbinds.” Kuritzkes and Guadagnino are interested, above all, in moments where these two faces begin—like Lee’s and Allerton’s—to merge and resemble one another, in the concentric circles of possibility and impossibility, encounter and disintegration.

Speaking about tennis (as she always does), Tashi puts it in the simplest terms: “It’s like we were in love, or like we didn’t exist.” That this uncanny pairing of love and disintegration in Queer’s ayahuasca scene invokes the shadow of horror and the grotesque—especially for a progressive audience for whom the explicit staging of gay sex would not provoke the same negative response—means that the film has succeeded at showing what haunts every encounter with the other, even when this encounter is joyful and liberating: the splintering force of desire that unbinds us, an enjoyment that is literally an unbecoming.

On November 7, MUBI canceled its annual festival in Istanbul after the Kadıköy District Governorate banned the screening of Queer, the festival’s opening film, on account of its “provocative content that would endanger the peace of the society.” It was a reminder of the obvious: that a rise in “queer representation” and “visibility” in contemporary cultural production has done little to displace contempt for depictions of homosexuality and the belief in their corrosive effects on “society.” These phobic invocations of public good place an external claim on queer desire and thus, as Garth Greenwell argues, define the queer subject as one who has no entitlement to desire—for whom desire “is, from the start, the experience of exclusion.”

A desperate refusal to yield to this lack of entitlement is one of the defining characteristics of Burroughs’s Lee. Suffering defiantly “without despair and without consent,” he yearns not just for the fulfillment of his desires but also for total mastery over himself and the world so as to be free from permission entirely. “Someday I am going to have things just like I want,” he fantasizes. “And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.” 

Craig plays Lee’s suffering with searing sensitivity, but the film excises almost completely the psychological consequence of this suffering: Lee’s fantasies of violent exploitation and control, intimately bound to his obsession with possessing Allerton. These fantasies, expressed most vividly in Lee’s routines, and which grow increasingly sexually and racially violent, expose the way in which experiences of abjection have led, paradoxically, to a redoubling of his libidinal investment in dehumanizing power relations upheld by empire and capital.

That the film omits these complexities of Lee’s character is without a doubt its greatest shortcoming. Conceptualized as a “straightforward love story,” Queer’s insistence on the universality of its emotional themes is indeed a “straightening” of what is most queer—strange, abject, out of place—about Lee and his unbecoming desires. 

The most provocative instance of this straightening is Kuritzkes’s rewrite of a routine in which Lee breaches the topic of his homosexuality with Allerton for the first time. The script follows Burroughs closely at first: “Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things?” Lee opens, from a position of disbelief and disavowal. He recounts his wish “to die a man [rather] than live on, a sex monster,” and how—inspired by a “wise old queen” called Bobo—he decided to “bear [his] burden proudly for all to see”: to become visible, an embodiment of the communitarian values of “knowledge and sincerity and love.” What the script cuts out from this speech (an abridged version of which is included in the film’s trailer) is its grotesque ending: Bobo “was riding in the Duc de Ventre’s Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted […] Even the eyes and brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound.”

Lee’s gleeful account is a literal evisceration of what Bobo stands for, a rejection of his communitarian vision of queerness and of the role of the gay man as noble martyr. Lee’s knowing and ironic disavowals of homosexuality—“Think I’m queer or something?” he teases Allerton in another scene before getting into bed with him—echo Burroughs’s own. According to actor Peter Weller in Yony Leyser’s 2010 documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, when asked a question about the gay rights movement, Burroughs responded, “I have never been gay a day in my life, and I’m sure as hell not part of any movement.”

Just as Lee implicitly recognizes but violently rejects his affinity with other queer men, so the film recognizes Lee’s phobic view of queerness but represses its return at the end of his speech. Bobo’s grisly ending is transfigured, instead, into a positive image of queer desire, his gutting echoed in Lee and Allerton’s throwing up their hearts.

Guadagnino, ever the romantic, insists that Lee and Allerton’s disavowal does not keep them from experiencing each other’s love. Spat out and rejected, their hearts go on beating on the ground next to one another. His is a more optimistic version of disavowal: one that overflows affirming representations and finds, instead, an aesthetic liquidity that Greenwell characterizes as inherently queer in its resistance to “ideas of male bodies and male selves as being bound or contained.”

In Guadagnino’s utopian vision, Lee and Allerton become liquid in order to venture, like Orpheus, to the other side of the glass that separates them from both their desire and their disintegration. In his hands, I’m not queer; I’m disembodied turns into a defiant refusal of identity, a commitment to an existence that dissolves sexual and gendered coherence. 

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The morning after their ayahuasca trip, restored to solidity, Allerton decides to leave Cotter and Lee, seemingly renouncing what he has just experienced. “You should’ve seen yourself last night,” Cotter tells him, adoringly, trying to convince him to stay. The only person besides Lee to acknowledge Allerton’s desire for the older man, she offers him permission and an imperative: “Door’s already open […] All you can do is look away, but why would you?”

This appeal, another significant departure from Burroughs, reflects the film’s belief in the possibilities of identification and representation. Unlike Call Me by Your Name, which shies away from its sex scenes by turning its gaze toward the window, the camera pans away from Queer’s sex scenes—toward windows, skylines, the sea—before returning to them with a lingering gaze. Like Cotter’s appeal, Queer’s manner of seeing desire professes a belief in the rehabilitative power of representation, in the power of the aesthetic to instruct the self through recognition: if only you had seen yourself; if only you could identify with your beauty.

But what Allerton seems to feel is precisely the terror of being seen—caught out in unbecoming desire. As the reference to Cocteau has already shown, seeing oneself reflected is always perilous. Looking through Cotter’s eyes, Allerton would not have even seen himself, but rather him and Lee melted into one body—the uncanny effect of sameness in homosexual desire psychedelically compounded. “You should’ve seen yourself” is, then, an imperative that Queer suggests is necessarily impossible to follow. This impossibility, which even the retroactive seeing of aesthetic representation fails to amend, is felt most keenly by queer subjects—disembodied, invisible, out-of-bounds—whose desire comes with no sanction.

Desire and identification, Anne Anlin Cheng reminds us, are “contaminated zones.” “You should’ve seen yourself” is a reminder that we are always already turning away from the site of this contamination, from the beloved objects that make and unmake us, these mirrors that are also doors, opening us up to ourselves but only when our selves cease to be.

Queer’s ending has always been troublesome. As he was starting work on the first draft of the novel, Burroughs read Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (1951), one of the earliest sociological studies of the cultural and political lives of gay men. Oliver Harris suggests that Queer might have been Burroughs’s response to the central question posed by Cory in that book: “What role can a fictional portrait of homosexuality possibly play?” “The issue of how gay novels ended,” writes Harris, “was one of Cory’s central topics,” and his discussions of “the seemingly mandatory ‘tragic endings’” of gay characters must have been on Burroughs’s mind when, a few weeks after reading Cory’s book, he admitted that he had “not decided on ending for second novel.”

The enduring trouble with Queer’s ending, then, is that it’s bound to say something about where queerness leads—which is to say, about the ends of queer representation. In Guadagnino’s loving adaptation, queerness leads to new ways of touching and seeing. But his approach, ultimately less reparative than indulging in its desire to repair, has something of Lee’s ectoplasmic caress: “You should’ve seen yourself,” it seems to say to Lee and Allerton, to the novel, and to Burroughs, lovingly smoothing out their unseemly edges.

Far more promising than Queer’s new ending is its invocation of queer artistic collectivities past and present: references to the queer fashion archives of the 1940s and ’50s; Guadagnino’s homages to beloved filmmakers; his inclusion of fellow directors, artists, and friends in the supporting cast. So too is the loving effort to introduce Burroughs to younger readers and induct him more fully into the queer canon—a knowingly self-defeating gesture on the part of Guadagnino, who has always recognized that Burroughs is “diverso,” other, apart.

At its best, Queer offers a vision of queer art not as a pile of flattened, affirming, positive representations but as a diverse and eclectic—truly queer—set of artistic communities, influences, aesthetics, archives, and collaborators.

“None of us,” Lee Edelman reminds us, “can avoid the recuperative impulse,” least of all when it comes to what we love. Queer ends with Lee’s death, but it holds on to a specter of Allerton’s tenderness to the very end. Following Lee to the end of his disintegration, the film disintegrates a little itself, but it is ultimately too invested in in its own emotional and aesthetic coherence, too hesitant about risking reproach, to follow Burroughs through the glass and into the void.