In a return to such uncompromising visions I see a chance for a true American voice. The same goes for gay writing. No sensitive coming-out story, no tragic tale of AIDS has yet equaled the power of the picaresque tales of John Rechy's hustlers and queens in the saga City of Night or his compulsive sex maniac's repetitive story in Numbers. No one has shown the relationships between chemical chains, sexual obsessions, and word associations as well as William Burroughs's Times Square junkies. I am suggesting almost a suicidal sacrifice of consciousness to these realities.
Street people speak of appetites and aggressions, rather than of identity.
In underclass life, sexual identity and ethnic identity cannot be conveniently sifted out and defined. Hunger, homelessness, or drug addiction always take precedence. There is a certain depth of need or disorganization at which a person will stick it in anybody or let anyone at all stick it in. Middle class Americans born after World War II will probably do a lot of it, for many are the Americans who had the comfort, security, and leisure to learn to write. They grew up in protected suburbs and were nurtured on fast food and television.