Dennis Cooper Interview
__________________
The Paris Review Interview
The Art of Fiction
“…pasty white straight boys
and the hot women who love
them. That’s publishing.”
—Ira Silverberg, Lambda Literary
INTERVIEWER
You called your first novella “pornographic.” Is porn something that influenced you artistically?
COOPER
What’s the matter with you? I think most writers just want their sex scenes to be realistically sexy. My goal is to try to articulate what my characters wish to express during sex but can’t and to depict the way language is compromised by sex, as realistically as I can.
INTERVIEWER
But if your characters are bound & gagged, spread-eagled and handcuffed in bed or hanging from the ceiling in chains—no wonder they’re inarticulate. Is that what turns you on? The young characters, the inarticulate male flesh in your s/m novels struggling to articulate their pain?
COOPER
Well, it does reduce the plot to the quickest and easiest epithets you can come up with—porn language, essentially, is quickie CliffsNotes. It tries to shorthand succinctly the action, the expressions of pain, the bondage & deliverance that are rushing in from a million enraptured tortured sensations. Objectivity and rational thought are the enemies of lust.
INTERVIEWER
But with all your attempts to describe sex accurately, don’t the scenes all tend to end up sounding the same? There’s no give and take—just more & more of the same boring thing?
COOPER
You can say what you want, I don’t care. I don't see lust as a dumbing-down process. Most people fear confusion, but I think confusion is what they need. Too much S/M can be severely cerebral and hampering. If you try to articulate all your thoughts and feelings too much, then you end up thinking like many gay guys seeking out things that have sex in them, wanting to get off, period. When they see an attractive guy, they want to fuck him. And when they watch porn, they teleport themselves into the action. To me, desire and sex are much more complex than that. I’m just as interested by what used to be called foreplay.
INTERVIEWER
You mean using hotness as a kind of decoy? Isn’t that kind of slutty—like a sleazy cabaret act or some overly-suggestive burlesque show?
COOPER
Overly suggestive? Just turn on the TV and watch FOX-News. Talk about porno and violence. Everybody's a slut for it, crime shows and war news all the fuckin time. I used to be less slutty back in the early 90's, but after my gay audience abandoned me I wrote my novel, The Sluts. I was tres rather coy and coquettish, though, playing mind-fuck games with the readers. Getting complaints like “Where’s the Boner?” Lots of bitching and kvetching about that. Fuck the feelings, they said. Fuck the deep psychological novel. The gay readers wanted more hardcore S/M porno that's all. Now everybody's an internet porno slut with YouTube and Netflix. Who needs fiction, who needs novels, who needs books? Things change fast...
__________________
The Paris Review Interview
The Art of Fiction
“…pasty white straight boys
and the hot women who love
them. That’s publishing.”
—Ira Silverberg, Lambda Literary
INTERVIEWER
You called your first novella “pornographic.” Is porn something that influenced you artistically?
COOPER
What’s the matter with you? I think most writers just want their sex scenes to be realistically sexy. My goal is to try to articulate what my characters wish to express during sex but can’t and to depict the way language is compromised by sex, as realistically as I can.
INTERVIEWER
But if your characters are bound & gagged, spread-eagled and handcuffed in bed or hanging from the ceiling in chains—no wonder they’re inarticulate. Is that what turns you on? The young characters, the inarticulate male flesh in your s/m novels struggling to articulate their pain?
COOPER
Well, it does reduce the plot to the quickest and easiest epithets you can come up with—porn language, essentially, is quickie CliffsNotes. It tries to shorthand succinctly the action, the expressions of pain, the bondage & deliverance that are rushing in from a million enraptured tortured sensations. Objectivity and rational thought are the enemies of lust.
INTERVIEWER
But with all your attempts to describe sex accurately, don’t the scenes all tend to end up sounding the same? There’s no give and take—just more & more of the same boring thing?
COOPER
You can say what you want, I don’t care. I don't see lust as a dumbing-down process. Most people fear confusion, but I think confusion is what they need. Too much S/M can be severely cerebral and hampering. If you try to articulate all your thoughts and feelings too much, then you end up thinking like many gay guys seeking out things that have sex in them, wanting to get off, period. When they see an attractive guy, they want to fuck him. And when they watch porn, they teleport themselves into the action. To me, desire and sex are much more complex than that. I’m just as interested by what used to be called foreplay.
INTERVIEWER
You mean using hotness as a kind of decoy? Isn’t that kind of slutty—like a sleazy cabaret act or some overly-suggestive burlesque show?
COOPER
Overly suggestive? Just turn on the TV and watch FOX-News. Talk about porno and violence. Everybody's a slut for it, crime shows and war news all the fuckin time. I used to be less slutty back in the early 90's, but after my gay audience abandoned me I wrote my novel, The Sluts. I was tres rather coy and coquettish, though, playing mind-fuck games with the readers. Getting complaints like “Where’s the Boner?” Lots of bitching and kvetching about that. Fuck the feelings, they said. Fuck the deep psychological novel. The gay readers wanted more hardcore S/M porno that's all. Now everybody's an internet porno slut with YouTube and Netflix. Who needs fiction, who needs novels, who needs books? Things change fast...
INTERVIEWER
What kind of writing are you into now?
COOPER
I used to be interested in subverting porn and counteracting the Slut Effect. That’s the central conceit to gay porn pulp fiction—that sex is enough if it’s always there & hot. Porn pulp fiction now for me is just stock-in-trade showbiz for cute pasty-white boys and the women that love them.
INTERVIEWER
A swift, no-nonsense sluttish art of fiction?
COOPER
Yes, quick like manga yakuza roughtrade action. Japanese S/M creates an anxious, intimate, and secretive atmosphere that I find very seductive now that I have the time, money and deluxe chateau to erase context around my characters and see what happens.
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