“Queer” is Burroughs’s second novel after “Junkie.” Set in decadent Mexico City of the 1940s, it’s the semi-autobiographical story of Lee who has fled from a drug bust in New Orleans. In Mexico City Lee wanders around the city’s clubs and bars populated by American expatriate college students, discharged soldiers, and other characters on the edge of society. He becomes infatuated with a discharged American Navy serviceman named Allerton, a drug user, who, though indifferent to his advances, eventually relents — but only enough to make Lee’s sexual yearnings become even more of an obsession. Eventually they go on a trip to South America in search of a drug known as “Yage” which Lee believes will make him psychic.
(Source: Variety.com)