“A year later, he moved to Amsterdam, mainly in pursuit of a boyfriend. He lived there for nearly three years before returning to New York.”

One of the most controversial writers working today, Dennis Cooper is best known for his series of strikingly original, critically acclaimed, albeit transgressive and contentious, novels exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, brutality, and death. His works obsessively feature callow but beautiful adolescent boys, predatory older gay men, punk rock music, drug abuse, explicit sex, and graphic violence.

  
This is the fifty-seventh post in a series highlighting the best gay and lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that period)who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of history.


Cooper, Dennis (b. 1953)




Cooper has been praised for his polished, lapidary style, and for fearlessly pushing past the thematic boundaries of contemporary art. His unique narrative voice has been particularly acknowledged by critics for capturing the inarticulate, blunt, yet loosely poetic, language of laconic, drugged-out teenagers.

   
Biography and Early Career

Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953 in Pasadena, California, the son of a wealthy businessman. His parents divorced when he was young.
Cooper has described his family life as a deeply alienating experience: "I had severe problems with my parents. . . . the divorce proceedings took forever, and my parents did not behave well during that period. The fact that parents barely exist in [my] books is probably because I escaped mine as completely as I could beginning in my teenaged years. I crashed at friends' houses a lot, and tried to distance myself from the hell going on in my family home, and, ever since, I've had a very distanced relationship to my family."

   


Before he achieved success as a novelist, Cooper was best known as a poet, and his works were celebrated by such writers as Edmund White and Felice Picano. Cooper's first poetry collection, Terror of Earrings, was published in 1973, when he was twenty years old.
In 1976, Cooper founded Little Caesar Magazine and two years later established Little Caesar Press, which he ran until 1982. It was through the Press that Cooper published his second collection of poetry, Tiger Beat (1978), as well as twenty-four other poetry chapbooks, featuring such writers as Gerard Malanga, Tim Dlugos, Joe Brainard, and Eileen Myles


In 1984, Cooper moved to New York City and later that year published his second work of fiction, the novella Safe.

The George Miles Cycle
While in Amsterdam, Cooper matured as a poet and prose stylist and began work on the novel Closer, which was published in 1989, the first in a sequence of five interconnected books that has become known as the George Miles Cycle. The other novels in the series include Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), and Period (2000).
George Miles, a recurring character in two of the series' five novels, as well as the model for most of the other major young male characters in the cycle, is also the name of an actual person in Cooper's life: his most important and influential friend from high school onwards.
The two remained extremely close friends, and years later, when Cooper was 30, he and Miles had a brief sexual relationship. Cooper lost contact with Miles, however, after he moved to Amsterdam, and tried tracking him down, but without luck. "In a way," Cooper noted, "I wrote the novels for him, and assumed that somehow, somewhere he was reading them, and knew how important he was to me."
In 1997, Cooper finally learned that Miles had killed himself ten years earlier while Cooper was still living in Europe.

When the novel was published in 1991, members of the gay activist group Queer Nation denounced Cooper and his works for their glorification of pedophilic sex crimes. In San Francisco a leaflet was distributed, proclaiming that "Dennis Cooper Must Die! Must Die! Must Die!" and suggesting that Cooper himself was guilty of murdering young boys.
Cooper later defended his intentions, saying, "I present the actual act of evil so it's visible and give it a bunch of facets so that you can actually look at it and experience it. You're seduced into dealing with it . . . . So with Frisk, whatever pleasure you got out of making a picture in your mind based on . . . those people being murdered, you take responsibility for it."
A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1995, directed by Todd Verow, with a script by Jim Dwyer, and featuring Craig Chester and Parker Posey. Cooper himself makes a cameo appearance in the film.

The series' fourth installment, Guide, has come to be considered by many critics Cooper's masterpiece. Cooper places himself as a participant squarely in the center of the story and employs a single, first-person voice, constituting a break from the detached, impassive third-person of his previous narratives. He also adopts, to startling effect, the stylistics of various non-literary genres, such as self-help manuals and substance-abuse rehabilitation pamphlets.

Cooper concluded his quintet of novels in 2000 with Period, a splintered tale of satanic sacrifice, gang rape, and nonchalant mutilation, which Publishers Weekly nonetheless called a "darkly comic ride through the looking glass of marginal youth culture." The novel also celebrates the return of the George Miles character.



As Cooper has explained, "The cycle doesn't so much end as collapse in on itself, and all that's left is a writer, his memories of a dead boy he loved, and the books that tried and failed to understand and express that love."
Other Works by Dennis Cooper
Cooper's post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread (2002), a spare, dialogue-driven tale about a teenage boy struggling to understand his physical attraction to his younger brother. The Sluts (2004), concerning an online community that comments on a website dedicated to gay male escorts, was the recipient of the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Fiction. His most recent novel, God Jr. (2005), tells the story of the disintegration of a marriage in the wake of an adolescent boy's death.

In 2003, he founded the Little House on the Bowery imprint, which focuses on the works of young North American writers, for the independent publisher Akashic Books, and has since published works by Travis Jeppesen, Matthew Stokoe, and Derek McCormack, among others.
Since 2005, Cooper has been dividing his time between Los Angeles and Paris. While in Paris he has collaborated with the French theater director Gisèle Vienne and the composer Peter Rehberg on four theatrical works: I Apologize (2004), Une Belle Enfant Blonde (2005), Kindertotenlieder (2007), and a stage adaptation of his graphic novel, Jerk (2008).
Craig Kaczorowski
George Miles cycle
In the spring of 2000 Cooper published Period, the last of a series of five novels known as the George Miles cycle (ISBNs refer to the Grove Press paperback editions):
Closer (1989), ISBN 0-8021-3212-X
Frisk (1991), ISBN 0-8021-3289-8
Try (1994), ISBN 0-8021-3338-X
Guide (1997), ISBN 0-8021-3580-3
Period (2000), ISBN 0-8021-3783-0
Other books
Fiction
Antoine Monnier (fiction, Anon Press, 1978)
My Mark (fiction, Sherwood Press, 1982)
Safe (novella, SeaHorse Press, 1985)
Wrong (short fiction, Grove Press, 1992)
My Loose Thread (novel, Canongate, 2002)
The Sluts (novel, Void Books, 2004; Carroll & Graf, 2005)
God Jr. (novel, Grove Press, 2005)
Ugly Man (short fiction, Harper Perennial, 2009)
Poetry
The Terror of Earrings (Kinks Press, 1973)
Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978)
Idols (SeaHorse Press, 1979; Amethyst Press, 1989)
Tenderness of the Wolves (The Crossing Press, 1981)
The Missing Men (Am Here Books/Immediate Editions, 1981)
He Cried (Black Star Series, 1985)
The Dream Police: Selected Poems '69-93 (Grove Press, 1994)
Thee Tight Lung Split Roar Hums (with Thurston Moore, Byron Coley; Slow Toe Press, 2004)
The Weaklings (with illustrations by Jarrod Anderson, Fanzine Press, limited edition, 2008)
The Weaklings, expanded paperback edition (Alyson Books, 2010)
Collaborations & Nonfiction
Jerk (collaboration with artist Nayland Blake, Artspace Books, 1994)
Horror Hospital Unplugged (graphic novel with illustrations by artist Keith Mayerson, Juno Books, 1997)
All Ears (criticism and journalism, Soft Skull Press, 1997)
Weird Little Boy' (provided texts for CD collaboration by John Zorn, Mike Patton, Trey Spruance, Chris Cochrane, William Winant, Avant, 1998)
Violence, faits divers, littérature (non-fiction, POL, France, 2004)
Dennis (CD/book, Don Waters Editions/AK Press, 2006)
Two Texts for a Puppet Play by David Brooks (with Stephen O'Malley, Jean-Luc Verna; DACM, limited edition, 2008)
SAFE with Dennis Cooper Ugly Man CD (Dot Dot Music, 2008)
Peter Rehberg/Dennis Cooper Music for GV (Mego Records, 2008)
Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, Obituaries (Harper Perennial, 2010)
Jerk / Through Their Tears CD/book (w/ Gisele Vienne, Peter Rehberg, DisVoir, March 2011)
[edit] Works written for the theater
This Is How You Will Disappear (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Stephen O'Malley, Visual Effects: Fujiko Nakaya & Shiro Takatani; 2010)
Dedans/Dehors/David (Writer/Director: David Bobee, based on Cooper's novel "Closer", 2008)
Jerk (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2008)
Jerk, radio play (France Culture/Radio France, 2007)
Kindertotenlieder (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2007)
Une Belle Enfant Blonde (Co-written with Catherine Robbe Grillet, Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2005)
I Apologize (Director: Gisele Vienne, Score: Peter Rehberg/Pita; 2004)
The Undead (Director: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Score: Tom Recchion; Visual Design: Robert Flynt; 1990)
Knife/Tape/Rope (Director: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sets: John De Fazio; 1985)
Them (Director: Ishmael Houston-Jones, Score: Chris Cochrane; 1984)
[edit] Visual Art
Curator:
Against Nature: A Group Show of Homosexual Men (w/ Richard Hawkins; LACE, Los Angeles, 1989)
They See God (w/ Tim Guest; Pat Hearn Gallery, NYC, 1990)
The Freed Weed (Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, 1992)
The Temptations (Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, 1998)
Brighten the Corners (Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC, 1998)
Smallish (greengrassi, London, 2001)
The Funeral Home (Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, 2002)
Writer/Books:
Tom Friedman (Phaidon), Raymond Pettibon (Phaidon), Mike Kelley: Catholic Discipline (Whitney Museum of American Art), Bill Henson (Scalo), Mise En Scene (Santa Monica Museum of Art), Helter Skelter (MoCA/LA), Gothic (MIT Press), John Miller: Disko Sucks Rock Sucks (daadgalerie, Berlin), Scott Treleaven: Some Boys Wander By Mistake (Kavi Gupta/John Connelly/Marc Selwyn), Sue De Beer: Emerge (DAP), Sue De Beer: Hans und Grete (Philip Morris GmbH), Charles Ray (Newport Harbor Art Museum), David Salle (Bruno Bischofberger), Jack Shear: Twelve Marines (Twelve Trees), a.o.
Miscellaneous:
Contributing Editor, Artforum International Magazine (2002 - )
Contributor/Critic: Frieze, Parkett, Art in America, Modern Painters, Art Issues, Beaux Arts, a.o.
[edit] Editor
Little Caesar Magazine #s 1 - 12 (1976–1982)
Little Caesar Press (1978–1982)
Dennis Cooper Tiger Beat
Gerard Malanga 100 Years Have Passed
Arthur Rimbaud Travels in Abyssinia and the Harar
Tom Clark The End of the Line
Tim Dlugos Je Suis Ein Americano
Tim Dlugos Entre Nous
Joe Brainard Nothing to Write Home About
Elaine Equi Shrewcrazy
Amy Gerstler Yonder
Elieen Myles Sappho's Boat
Oswell Blakeston Journeys End in Young Man's Meeting
Coming Attractions: American Poets in their Twenties
Ron Koertge Diary Cows
Peter Schjeldahl The Brute
Donald Britton Italy
Jack Skelley Monsters
James Krusoe Jungle Girl
Discontents: New Queer Writers (Amethyst Press, 1994)
The Kathy Acker Reader (with Amy Scholder, Grove Press, 2004)
Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Press
Travis Jeppesen Victims (2003)
Benjamin Weissman Headless (2004)
Derek McCormack Grab Bag (2004)
Martha Kinney The Fall of Heartless Horse (2004)
Richard Hell Godlike (2005)
Trinie Dalton Wide Eyed (2005)
James Greer Artificial Light (2006)
Userlands: New Fiction from the Blogging Underground (2007)
Matthew Stokoe High Life (2008)
Derek McCormack The Show That Smells (2009)
Mark Gluth The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (2010)
Matthew Stokoe Cows (February, 2011)
Lonely Christopher The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (February, 2011)