On 6 September 1951, Burroughs shot his wife Joan Vollmer in the head and killed her during a party. This was, as far as is known, the first of Burroughs’ brushes with things Lovecraftian. where I collect my $75 per month, knocked himself off a few days ago with an overdose of goof balls. Burroughs remarked:Ī queer Professor from K.C., Mo., head of the Anthropology dept. Barlow, who took an overdose of sleeping pills after a New Year’s Eve party ringing in 1951. It is believed that fear of being “outed” may have been the reason behind the suicide of R. Burroughs: 1945 to 1959, 69ĭespite Burroughs’ assertion, homophobia was still present in Mexico in the ’50s, and many homosexuals remained closeted. Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg,, The Letters of William S. It simply would not occur to a Mexican to expect criticism from a stranger, nor would it occur to anyone to criticize the behavior of others. It is not that people here don’t care what other’s think. Boys and young men walk down the street arm in arm and no one pays them any mind. If a man wants to wear a monocle or carry a cane he does not hesitate to do it and no one gives him a second glance. This is basically an oriental culture (80% Indian) where everyone has mastered the art of minding his own business. On the atmosphere of Mexico City, he remarked: Burroughs studied the Mayan codices and mythology, suffered opiate withdrawal, experimented with orgone, and engaged in homosexual affairs. Burroughs II, his wife Jean Vollmer, and their children.
Bill made Mexico City College a popular destination for American expatriates, including a young William S. Low tuition and cost of living combined with the G. Barlow became an expert in Nahuatl and Mexica anthropology, a professor at Mexico City College, taught classes on Mayan codices and language. After Lovecraft’s death, Barlow had gone to university in Kansas City, MO and Berkeley, CA, before emigrating to Mexico in the 1940s. Burroughs, who would become the godfather of the Beat generation and punk, and R. Somewhere in that grainy black-and-white photo are William S. Thirteen years and change after Lovecraft’s death, in Mexico: In August 1931, teenage Bill could have gone to a news-stand in Los Alamos town and picked up the latest issue of Weird Tales, there to read about “the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth” from Lovecraft’s ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. When Lovecraft began to hit his peaks in the late 1920s a young William Burroughs was cultivating a lifetime hatred of authority during his tenure at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico.
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