William S. Burroughs and Marcus Ewert - Dating, Gossip, News, Photos list. Help us build our profile of William S. Burroughs and Marcus Ewert!
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In 1988 17-year-old Ewert met and started an on-and-of relationship with 62-year-old Allen Ginsgerg that lasted for the next eight years.
The following year [1989], Ewert moved to New York to study at Columbia University. Whenever he wasn’t in class, he would travel from Morningside Heights down to Ginsberg’s apartment on the Lower East Side, where he also spent his weekends. Slowly ingratiating himself in the city’s art scene, it was there he met the second name on his two-man hit list: William Burroughs.
He had laid the groundwork the summer before at Naropa, asking Ginsberg to call his longtime friend and suggest a meeting. According to Ewert, Ginsberg was into the idea and said it would be good for his 74-year-old pal—who was by then living in Kansas—to get laid. After telling the Naked Lunch author that his new lover was “straight out of one of your books...pure, uncut boy stuff,” he put him on the phone and they agreed to try and hook something up.
One afternoon, Ginsberg called Ewert at his dorm and invited him to a party being thrown by the poet and Warhol Factory regular John Giorno. Burroughs was in town and Giorno and a few friends, including painter Francesco Clemente and Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, were having a dinner in his honor. It was being held at Giorno’s apartment at The Bunker—a semi-converted YMCA on Bowery, and Burroughs’ former digs.
Ewert turned up on time and, as promised, soon found himself alone with one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation. His earlier excitement gave way to anxiety as Burroughs took him to the bedroom and showed him one of his shotgun paintings and the various knickknacks he had on his dresser. But it in that moment, Ewert realized the king of postmodern literature was actually nervous of him.
“I couldn’t quite understand why he was so invested in telling me these little stories. And then I was like, Oh my god, he’s nervous. He’s nervous of me,” Ewert says. “That totally switched everything around in my head because it’d never occurred to me that anyone could be nervous of me—I was nervous of everyone and everything. So the idea that here this cultural icon wants to please me and is worried that I’m going to lose interest if he’s not showing me something interesting, it was such a heady rush...the idea that I had any sort of power.”
Suddenly having the upper hand turned Ewert on. When Burroughs ran out of things to show him, they sat down on the bed, side by side. The walls of The Bunker were made of thick concrete and Ewert remembers the deathly silence most of all; sitting a foot apart, Burroughs placed his hand in the space between them, eventually working up the courage to put his hand on Ewert’s knee. “It really felt like he was very much testing the waters, very much wanting to make sure that I wasn’t going to run screaming, or that I’m not going to laugh at him,” he says. “I really had the feeling that how I react here could really hurt somebody else.”
And Ewert didn’t flee, but rather returned the gesture, putting his hand on Burroughs’ knee and giving it a light squeeze. Even through the thick jeans, the poet’s leg felt bony and frail, which only turned Ewert on more. A skinny young thing himself, the idea that somebody found his frame attractive, even someone 57 years his senior, was an aphrodisiac. “It was like hugging my doppelganger, and that totally turned me on,” he says. They found themselves naked on the bed, engaged in what could be described as chaste, fumbling sex. No kissing, but a sweetness despite the absence of overt affection.
“I don’t think there was any oral at all, I think it was just hand jobs and humping. At one point I felt this little splash of fluid against my leg and, you know, he’d cum, and then I probably jerked myself off and came. And then we’re lying in bed in this post-orgasmic peace and after a while he goes, ‘Ah, that was great. That was the first time this has happened in years,’” Ewert recalls. “And I’m super happy because I had enjoyed it. Also, the little calculating, crusty 18-year-old part of me was excited by the fact that he hadn’t had sex in a long time. He’s already 70-whatever, and I’m guessing he’s not going to have a lot of sex besides me going forward—he’s not going to live that much longer. I was like, That’s awesome, I’ll go down in history as the last person to have had sex with William Burroughs. I don’t know if that’s totally true, but it gives you a sense of my mind-set at that time.”