American writer and artist William S. Burroughs was BOTD in 1914. Born in St Louis, Missouri to a wealthy industrialist family, he was educated in New Mexico, recording his sexual attraction to other boys in his journals. He attended Harvard University, exploring the underground gay scene of New York City. Living off his family’s money, he lived in Weimar-era Vienna while pretending to study medicine, and married Ilsa Klapper, a Jewish woman fleeing Nazi persecution. He returned to the United States where his mental health declined, resulting in his severing a finger to impress a male lover. He enlisted in the Army in 1942 but was discharged on mental health grounds. In the 1940s, he befriended Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and formed a relationship with Joan Vollmer with whom he had a son. Addicted to heroin and amphetamines, they moved to Mexico, where Burroughs drunkenly shot and killed Vollmer during a game of “William Tell”. Fleeing to the United States to avoid imprisonment, he worked on two novels: Queer (filmed in 2023 by Luca Guadagnino) and Junkie, drawing on his experience of drug addiction. He is best known for his 1959 “anti-novel” The Naked Lunch, an experimental, expletive-ridden collage of nightmarish scenarios exploring addiction, homosexuality and murder. Highly controversial, it was banned in several countries and was the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston. He became a hero of 1960s counterculture, hailed for his literary innovation and unflinching treatment of social and sexual taboos. He lived variously in Tangier, London, Paris and New York, partying with Andy Warhol and Patti Smith at Studio 54, before retiring to Kansas in the 1980s. David Cronenberg’s 1991 film of The Naked Lunch revived interest in his writing. He died in 1997, aged 83. His work has been highly influential on queer artists including Jean Genet, David Bowie, Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant and Kathy Acker.