In Luca Guadagnino’s recent adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novella Queer (2024), Eugene Allerton expresses this sentiment to William Lee during their shared trance on the psychoactive ayahuasca beverage. Through the characters of Lee and Allerton, Guadagnino and Burroughs explore the latter’s complex experience of being a queer American man in the 1950s. While some may feel that the film’s portrayal of queer experience fell short of expectations,
I was drawn to the subtle tension that pervades the narrative.
We see that although Lee and Allerton are enamoured with one another, they cannot express their feelings honestly: a circumstance I can relate to. Growing up in Singapore meant learning to communicate in alternative, implicit ways to avoid triggering censorship, especially when discussing politicised issues. Perhaps my intrigue with the film stems from recognising a parallel: While I acknowledge my romantic, sexual attraction to other men, my desire for a monogamous relationship creates distance between myself and other gay men who subscribe to the dominant belief that loudness, promiscuity, and hedonism are the defining traits of being gay.
But is that a valid conclusion?
I want to take a moment to consider what has shaped these dominant beliefs about gay identity. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states,
“Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over
again, and that is what they become.”
Contemporary representations of gay experiences have primarily centered on Western narratives, often excluding the diverse realities of queer lives that do not fit this mold. Coupled with the presence of censorship in many Asian societies that obscures local queer experience, exposure is often limited to repetition and perpetuation of Western portrayals, which contribute to the formation of dominant expectations around gay identity. Inscrutable looking, or the practice of perceiving realities that extend beyond the visible frame of an image, has the potential to be a strategy that gay individuals living in censored environments can adopt to circumvent restrictions on freedom of speech, allowing for localised queer experiences deemed too sensitive for direct engagement to be introduced into public discourse subtly, fostering space for critical discussion to happen.
What does the act of looking inscrutably mean? And how can it challenge dominant beliefs of the gay experience? Rooted in Phillip Brian Harper’s definition of abstractionism, or what he describes as “the resolute awareness that even the most realistic representation is precisely a representation, and that as such it necessarily exists at a distance from the social reality it is conventionally understood to reflect”, Vivian L. Huang notes inscrutability as a “minoritarian mode” of perception, sensible through the different aesthetics.
She posits inscrutable surface readings as “an alternative method to rigor” that occasions other relationalities illegible to a majoritarian gaze, building her definition of the term on the writings of Sara Ahmed, Tina M. Campt, and José Esteban Muñoz. While Huang discusses inscrutability in the context of Asian American identity, her findings can also help us decode a photograph’s hidden message.
Inscrutable looking challenges us not to accept our immediate interpretations of what we see as the complete and only truth, granting us the opportunity to recalibrate our senses to what is opaque and obscured. While obscurity could be dismissed as unimportant for its “loss of legibility”, Huang points us towards Campt’s notion of Black visuality and its “ability to engage negation as generative” to remind us that “loss is formative”. Of the various aesthetic modes Huang proposes in her book, I specifically focus on her research on distance to inform inscrutable looking. As she notes:
“Distance… may be thought as more of a crossroad than an
affective
impasse or an emotional dead-end or cul-de-sac in that it
suggests possibilities of movement or ‘moving’ . . . despite
appearing to be unmoved’.”
Suppose we conceptualise distance as the array of possible paths at a crossroads: The multiple paths present within this framework, some converging while others diverging, can evoke discomfort arising from conflicting emotions, particularly when one feels compelled to choose the “right” path. Considering Huang’s notion of distance when analysing the phrase in the introduction, reading it through the lens of distance invites varied interpretations. For those familiar with Burroughs’ life, it puts into context his quote:
“Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely
painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories? …I feel that I was
being written in Queer.”
However, for me, the term “disembodied” has also highlighted my feelings of dissonance with the dominant representations of gayness which fail to consider cultures and histories outside the West and assume gay experiences to be monolithic. In many parts of Asia, homosexuality is still frowned upon, much like Burroughs’ experience in his own time. Huang’s observation of distance lacking the trait of specific measurement, allowing it to serve as a non-specific index, suggests the possibility of multiple truths coexisting within Guadagnino’s Queer.
Whether compatible or contradictory, these truths can create tension precisely because none are dismissed as invalid. Rather than conforming to the instinct of picking a side, practising inscrutable looking allows one to engage with multiple pathways that open up diverse interpretive possibilities, enabling a nuanced exploration of the tensions at play without a definitive resolution. Building on Ahmed’s notion of “the gap” which highlights the distance between “feeling and desirable feeling,”
“We cannot always close the gap between how we feel and how we
think we should feel. To feel the gap might be to feel a sense of
disappointment…We become strangers, or affect aliens, in
such moments.”
Huang argues that recognising this “gap” allows one to actively engage with or “perform the distance of that gap.” Looking at Queer through the lens of distance, where different interpretations can be drawn, causes conflicting emotions to arise. However, Huang encourages us to embrace these feelings rather than withdraw upon sensing discomfort. By allowing ourselves to “feel that gap,” we can glimpse other intangible relationalities and lifeworlds that might otherwise remain obscured. Feeling the gap can allow us a peak into Burroughs’ gay experiences and what it means to “not be queer” but “disembodied”. Ahmed’s “gap” also helps articulate my experience of feeling dissonant from dominant gay narratives, where “desirable feeling” represents the emotions I think I should feel when engaging in experiences labelled “gay”. In those moments, influenced by my Singaporean Chinese identity, my real “feelings” diverge from these expected norms.
Another pressing question is raised: How can we acknowledge the realities beyond our perception to which looking inscrutably brings our attention? Or, to put it simply, how can we be assured that what we perceive through looking inscrutably is real? Huang notes that Muñoz’s theorisation of ephemera may help us answer this question. Described as “all of those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself” and a “modality of anti-rigor and anti-evidence” as central to the processes of “proving queerness and reading queerness”, Huang posits that ephemera is a “powerful response to critical insistence on evidencing experience” by offering a framework that resists the “historical strategy that depends on evidence as foundational,” echoing Édouard Glissant notion that people should have the “right to opacity”.
Ephemera in Queer manifests as the gaps in Burroughs’ manuscript. It’s unfinished state could be pointing to trauma he experienced living as a queer person in 1950s Mexico City that were too difficult to revisit. It could also signify the lack of exact words to express certain experiences
at the time.
It is its open-endedness, however, that has also allowed Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes space to fill the gaps in with their interpretation. Though it may not be faithful to what Burroughs’ personally went through, it is a possibility. Ephemera in Queer thus functions as a witness to or “proof” of the unseeable dimensions of gay existence, justifying and legitimising the multiple, sometimes contradictory, readings from looking inscrutably whilst supporting their coexistence. Doing so allows for a more nuanced and fluid engagement with gay experiences that resists rigid categorisation proliferated by dominant gay narratives. To use Huang’s words:
“To ask about the aboutness of something… is to miss out on
encountering that thing in other ways. Inscrutable subjectivity is
not about a coherent, self-knowing subject whose political and
psychic traction lies in studied and quantifiable articulation…
Withholding honors that some things cannot be captured”.
With the global political climate becoming increasingly polarised, the right to choice, expression, and identity being stripped away, looking inscrutably takes on renewed significance. As an act of quiet resistance, it resists the demand for legibility and acknowledges experiences existing beyond hegemonic knowledge structures.
In Queer, inscrutable looking reminds me that I do not need to fully comprehend the experiences of Lee, Allerton, and Burroughs to acknowledge their experience as real.
By embracing the quality of quiet present within looking inscrutably, the practice has the potential to bypass the boundaries of censorship, subvert control, and cement the presence of marginalised voices without exposing them to danger.
Works Cited: Glissant, Edouard. (1997). Poetics of Relation. Translated from the French by Wing, Betsy.
United States of America: The University of Michigan Press.
Huang, Vivian L. (2022). Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American inscrutability.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Maskell, Emily. (2024). The turbulent life of William S. Burroughs: groundbreaking author behind
Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. Available at: https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/10/11/who-was william-s-burroughs-luca-guadagnino-queer/#page/3 (Accessed: 23 Mar 2025).
Queer (2024). Directed by Luca Guadagnino [Feature Film]. New York City, NY, United
States: A24.