Queer

“I’m not queer,” he thought. “I’m disembodied.”

Lee walked on, thinking, “What can I do? Take them back to my hotel? They are willing enough. For a few sucres …” He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. “Someday I am going to have things just like I want,” he said to himself. “And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.”

I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation

Gonzalez and I went through the where-is-so-and-so routine. Mexico City is a terminal of space-time travel, a waiting room where you grab a quick drink while you wait for your train. That is why I can stand to be in Mexico City or New York. You are not stuck; by the fact of being there at all, you are traveling

There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

They went to a little saloon run by a mulatto woman. She pretended not to know what Ayahuasca was. Lee asked if Ayahuasca was illegal. “No,” said Morgan, “but the people are suspicious of strangers.”

Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman’s body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other’s body. “I’m not queer,” he thought. “I’m disembodied.”

The superego, the controlling agency, gone cancerous and berserk. Incidentally, there is a connection between schizophrenia and telepathy. Schizos are very telepathically sensitive, but as strictly receivers. Dig the tie-in?”

Allerton did not recognize friends who made six-hundred-peso gifts, nor could he feel comfortable exploiting Lee. He made no attempt to clarify the situation. He did not want to see the contradiction involved in resenting a favor which he accepted. Lee found that he could tune in on Allerton’s viewpoint, though the process caused him pain, since it involved seeing the extent of Allerton’s indifference. “I liked him and I wanted him to like me,” Lee thought. “I wasn’t trying to buy anything.”

Now Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out toward the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief