the gay man straight boys love

Considering Dennis Cooper

One of my most widely-read essays, from my okay-alright-pretty-fine-actually career as a book critic and cultural commentator, appeared in Electric Literature in 2015. It’s called “The Spatial Poetics of Nintendo,” and it looks at the different ways video games engage with what might be called high aesthetics. (Tl;dr: video games are as much a spatial medium as a narrative one, and perhaps even more so.) The literary angle arrives in the form of a novel by Dennis Cooper, titled God Jr., which finds a father playing a game favored by his dead teenage son, only to find himself sucked into the game itself, where he kinda-sorta encounters the soul of his son in the form of the game’s avatar. 

Teenage trauma, media trickery, casual drug use–this is par for the course for Cooper. If anything, the book is a relatively mild entry in his oeuvre, as there is significantly less violence and unwholesome sexual practices as found in his other work, especially the five novels that comprise the George Miles Cycle. There are so many teen boys getting mistreated and abused in his books. 

I’ve been thinking about Cooper recently, and the unusual place he occupies in the current literary landscape. Or doesn’t occupy, really. 

Cooper seems like the sort of author who would have a devoted cult of internet youths, an elder statesman of queer writing. A 90s icon. Dude wrote a novel in gif’s, for crying out loud. Born in 1953, in the socioeconomic underside of the Baby Boom, Cooper lived a marginal, sometimes violent life in Southern California as a gay punk teen. In the 1980s and 90s, he started writing stories and then full-length novels, about teenage boys similar to the ones he’d grown  up with, hustlers from broken homes, turning tricks in back alleys to make just enough money to score another hit. They are brutal, violent, and often quite beautiful. 

Just the sort of long career that would attract a cohort of Tumblr acolytes, no? 

Well, no, actually. 

In my admittedly amateurish overview of the current literary scene, there are few LGBTQ authors who seem to carry forward the torch of Cooper’s influence. Think of some of the most widely-renowned queer authors in the literary world now. Say, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, Ocean Vuong, off the top of my head. I don’t think one can find a trace of Cooper’s influence anywhere in their work. Greenwell combines a kind of Edmund White style with the furor of Thomas Bernhard; Taylor recalls Edith Wharton, Henry and contemporary heirs to that tradition like Alan Hollinghurst; and Vuong is the pure personification of the MFA program, all identity and lyricism. 

You know who loves Cooper, though? 

Straight white guys.

Straight white guys of a certain type, admittedly. The paradigmatic example of an author carrying Cooper’s influence forward may be Blake Butler. Butler came up as a small press author, writing dark, experimental novels for publishing concerns run out of basements by enthusiasts¹. Butler’s novel There Is No Year owes Cooper a major debt. It too looks at teenage life in the suburbs and nowheres of America with a moody, nightmare-ish feel, blobs of darkness in the streets, unspeakable acts in bedrooms. There is a whole cohort of indie horror authors who seem like the adopted children of Cooper, publishing with presses like Apocalypse Party and Clash. 

So why is this the case? The basic layout here—gay male author serving as a touchstone for straight, and often but not always white, male authors—seems a bit unusual for the transmission of literary influence as it’s often thought of nowadays. So much of the handwringing about the decline in (straight) men reading is that they struggle to see themselves in the work of the women, POC and queer authors who are said to reach the heights of publishing today. Where are the Ernest Hemingways, the Richard Yateses, the Tucker Maxes?

Yet for many white guys of an indie/punk/metal bent, those avatars of straight masculinity have little to offer. Cooper’s work, which sees men and boys as perpetually at the mercy of violence and degradation, strikes a chord in a way that the swaggering midcentury boys simply do not. If there is a crisis in masculinity, then perhaps a gay man who’s suffered through the worst bigotry that America has to offer can speak to those experiences better than C suite executives. 

Cooper is not alone, either. Another gay male author popular with straight male writers and readers, arguably to a greater extent than Cooper even, is Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis is far more famous and mainstream than Cooper, and it must be said that results in part from Ellis writing novels about straight characters, rather than gay ones. Patrick Bateman of American Psycho simply would not achieve the same reach if he were gay instead of straight. Indeed, Bateman can be read as a gay man’s diagnosis of the ills reflecting the straight men he sees around him. 

But perhaps that’s exactly the point. Perhaps it is gay men like Ellis, rather than hucksters of straightness like Jordan Peterson or JD Vance, who are best equipped to diagnose and possibly even treat the young men of today suffering from terminal heterosexuality. Perhaps the suffering of the gay man and the straight man is not a line in the sand, but a rung on a ladder. A lifeline the former can offer the latter. 

Or jeez, just think of Fight Club, written by another gay Gen X white dude, Chuck Palahniuk. Has any other artistic diagnosis of the travails of masculinity been more widely worried over and brooded upon than the work of a working class man from the Pacific Northwest who genuinely feared for his life were ever to come out, and mostly left his orientation go unacknowledged for decades? 

I realize these can be controversial figures. Ellis, in particular, can be counted on to post eyeroll-inducing thoughts on social media. But I simply point out this phenomenon because I think it often goes unnoticed, even by fans of Cooper and Ellis and so forth. These are gay men who lived less-free lives than so many gay men of today. That can result in generational skirmishes among the gay community, which flare up often, and aren’t really my business anyway. But those very struggles have something to teach straight men of today, whose struggles are arguably less severe, sure, but importantly aren’t diminished. Few people have taken the struggles of heterosexual males more seriously than Ellis. 

It is worth pointing out–perhaps it is even funny– that readers and writers who could easily be characterized as Annoying White Guys In Your MFA are devoted readers of a fearless, sometimes even transgressive author like Cooper. Perhaps they are learning something no one else knows they’re learning, something about suffering, and how to make meaning out of it. 

1. Over at his newsletter, Butler has been writing an illuminating series that details his experiences with publishing, at every level from indie to Big 5. Highly recommended!