Book Club

Mexico City, early Fifties. William Lee has to leave America because of his heroin addiction. In his hopeless pursuit of love, desire and sex, he wanders around from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. There he meets the enigmatic and aloof Allerton, a young student who seems to be detached from his feelings and his sexuality. Lee and Allerton end up going down to the rain forests, in Ecuador, to experience the yage, a plant believed to possess telepathy-inducing properties. Lee wants to use it to connect with Allerton without the fear of rejection. He wants “to enter his body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals”. Burroughs’ second novel, originally written in 1952, was only published in 1985, due to its outspoken depiction of homosexuality.

Marco Astolfi is a literary translator, writer and fairy from Italy. He lives in Berlin, is a co-organizer of the Village Heart Circle for GBTQ men and runs the Book Club evening every two months. He is a regular at Creative Writing and can occasionally be found modeling for Life Drawing classes. He attended the One Year Training in 2018 and led the Cock O’Clock workshops at Easter Stretch Festival 2019 and Private Talk at Stretch Imagina 2020.

About the Village Book Club
Book lovers and bookworms have been meeting on a bimonthly basis to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction (novels, biographies, and essays) focused on or related to GBTQ themes and personalities.
Anticipating insightful discussions, we choose the next book two months in advance.
While the evening discussions are conducted in English, participants are welcome to read the selected books in their preferred language.