Also Read
Two things were informative influences in William Burroughs’s life. His experience as a drug addict and a homosexual is spent in the claustrophobic moral climate of Cold War America. Two of his books dealt with these circumstances - one is Junkie published under the pseudonym of Bull Lee in 1953 and Queer which was written in 1953 but not published until thirty-two years later. Starting from his own experiences as drug addiction, Burroughs began to develop a whole mythology of need and control. “The algebra of need,” as Burroughs calls it which means that need creates subservience, allowing malign forces to enter and exploit the individual consciousness.
In the very beginning of The Naked Nautch (Paris, 1959, New York, 1962) is always the face of total need.” And his experience as homosexual, in homophobic postwar culture that identified gay people with other, repressed enemies of the state like communists, allowed him to recognize the forms of control could be exercised in the body politic and the American body politic. For Burroughs, the malign forces bent on absorbing or exploiting the uniqueness of the individual are omnipresent, waiting to do their parasite work:” I can feel the heat closing in,” The Naked Nautch begins “feel them out there making their moves.”