From the Archives 2

Dennis Cooper, NLOGs, & Richard Howard's cock

Several weeks ago I looked through Dennis Cooper’s archive at NYU. I am not a fan of Cooper at all, but he is connected, in both friendship and enmity to a number of important people in contemporary gay history, and there’s some cool stuff among his papers. Like these postcards from Wojnarowicz!

Now the second one is getting already at what, no offense to Daniel Cult, I can’t stand about Voyno’s writing (how did no helpful clerk at Ellis Island straighten out that family’s name? I hate that famous artists with finicky names become shibboleths dividing the real knowers from the phonies. Of course I would say this as a Smith…)—like yes dear you went to the Grand Canyon and had a very dark time. You’re so spooky. Go back to Party City where you belong!

W’s first letter to Cooper, however, is more sweet and sophomoric—although girls do not read Benjamin! Every other humanities grad student at UChicago seemed to always be in a state of readiness awaiting the chance to reference him or Adorno. Gross.

After’s W’s death, Cooper ‘praised’ him in a 1999 essay for Artforum thus:

It’s generally thought that his post-East Village shows… were the best of his career. That improvement has been fatuously attributed to his lucid response to testing positive for HIV in the mid-80s: he could express his horror unreservedly knowing that the politics swirling around his illness would do the job (ham-fisted or otherwise) of ascribing social meaning to his personal battle… [but] Whereas Wojnarowicz’s art is probably doomed to an eternity spent in gay- and/or AIDS-themed group shows, his writing [Cooper named Close to the Knives specifically] is far more likely to be remembered. Falling into loose association with similarly self-taught, self-absorbed geniuses like Jean Genet, Celine, and his beloved Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz’s poetic, ranting prose translates his life story, fantasies, and outrage at society’s imbalance into something that bears little stylistic resemblance to other writing, but rings natural as any diaristic jotting.

Somehow it’s ok, in a “diaristic jotting” to rage against society’s “imbalance” (an imbalance of what, exactly?), but “ascribing social meaning” to disease is likely to be “ham-fisted” and forgettable. Well, it’s true a lot of political art is bad, and a lot of AIDS art perhaps especially—but so are people’s diaries (I do not need Sheila Heti’s alphabetized nonsense. It was cute when Roland Barthes did a fragmentized self-archive in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, but honey you’re not Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes!)

And the comparisons to Genet (who spent the first half of his life robbing gays in cruising stops, and the second half championing Palestinian terrorism) and Celine (a raving advocate of genocide) are hardly apt—since neither of them, unfortunately, were “self-absorbed,” but had definitely political and by their own understanding unselfish designs on the world (Rimbaud himself turned from vatic-shlocky poetry to running guns and maybe slaves in colonial Africa).

Cooper seems moreover to think that it would be self-evidently terrible to be a ‘gay artist/writer’ much less an ‘AIDS artist/writer’—one should be rather part of the loose constellation of roguer, queerer men who aren’t exclusively homosexual (Celine was straight, just a fascist weirdo and thus I guess ‘queer’ politically in the sense of being anti-normative and laden with the death-drive) and definitely aren’t participating in either a political project of gay activism or the everyday pleasure of a gay cultural world. Ew, it’s so confining and lame to be part of a real group—one should be a thief, an outlaw, a cowboy, part of an imaginary set of anti-heroes. Frankly this sort of thing is embarrassing enough when straight men in middle age buy a motorcycle to feel like a rebel again, or form a country supergroup and sing:

I fly a starship across the universe divide

Gay men could save themselves from a lot of cringe by better seeing their parallels with straight men, who are subject to all the dumb temptations we are, except for the sexual ones. Cooper with his murder novels is about as edgy as a softball dad in a Punisher tshirt.

So, ok, I find Cooper fairly boring and very pathetic—one of the most eminent practitioners of ‘not like other gays’-ism, in which an obviously culturally gay guy, even as he’s immersed in gay networks and forms of life, constantly shits on some stereotype of a stultifying and supposedly hegemonic gay culture. Here’s him and his characters being ‘not gay’ in an early 2010s issue of OUT (which, like, girl if your books aren’t gay what are you doing being interviewed here? I don’t appear in Cat Fancy magazine to announce I don’t really think of myself as a cat guy—although catch me next month in Zoomer Cock Enjoyer trying to beat the allegations!):

This might seem inoffensive or even legitimate if Cooper hadn’t said earlier in the interview, in a similar vein, that he has the same ‘not me doing the thing I’m doing’ attitude towards paying for sex:

When you pay hustlers, basic bitch that you are, you’re paying for sex. When I do it, because I’m so smart, I’m playing a fantasy character who pays for sex. Master Thespian!

Cooper has been doing this forever—here he is in a very early letter (1984) to the gay paper New York Native which was asking writers where they were going on summer vacation:

Going to Fire Island (totally normal!) has to be prefaced with a ‘well obviously I’m very cool and degenerate and am usually between the Pyramid Club and Berlin but I guess I should go to the Pines if you insist…’

Here at least the move is somewhat innocuous and familiar from the defensive reflexes of Gay Twitter, where people express their actually basic and conventional opinions (which are fine to have! Most opinions are like this!) hedged with enough irony to make remind us that they come from a scintillating personality. It’s how straight people when they’re not telling us about their polycules are going full circle back to “conscious monogamy.”

(The queen of this whole genre of what 30 Rock identified as normalling—deluding yourself into thinking that you’re not like the basic bitches—is A View from the Bottom, whose author works chapter by chapter to convince us/himself that he’s thought through all the problematic racial power structures at play when he as an Asian gets fucked by white guys. His desperate fear seems not so much that he’d be dommed by white cock in a political bad way [indeed if it weren’t problematic it probably wouldn’t be fun for him—he needs whatever sad rice queen has accepted his hole for the night to radiate with dangerous racist energies] but that he’d be like other Asian bottoms—not smarter or more complicated than everyone else in his category.)

Oddly, in a 1984 review of The Smiths’ first album, Cooper attacks Boy George as a proto-Sam Smith (as Azalea Banks says, Ham Smith) who is hiding his gayness in queer fat, and praising Morrissey for being so much more direct (huh?):

Those were wild and confusing years, since Morrissey and Boy George were both doing complicated forms of being flamboyantly not quite gay. The infinite mirrors of self-denial.

Besides expressing itself in melancholic or fabulous English eccentricity, ‘Not like Other Gays-ism’ can take an ostensibly left-political form of identifying with ‘queer’ scenes. Cooper was involved, for example, in 80s queercore shit, which stridently positioned itself as a radical gender-diverse assemblage of angry non-conformist punks, and out of which such came such dubiously entertaining gems as Bruce LaBruce’s No Skin off My Ass (which is like, if John Waters were into skinhead hustlers). LaBruce, for the record, is exactly as annoying as Cooper—if you watch the documentary Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution, you find him at one point complaining about the macho narrowness of the pre-AIDS ‘clone’ bars, where sissies like him weren’t welcome. I’m not sure if he’s whining or bragging, actually, when he says: “I was thrown out for wearing my Swastika earrings!”

The tenderqueer gender inclusivity charge against gay male spaces (they’re full of men! ungendered uglies aren’t being celebrated!) is tangled up with the queer complainer’s desire to be edgy, dangerous, and antinomian—swastika earrings. Regular gays, the ones grossed out by such accessories, are both exclusionary crypto-fascists invested in a problematic masculinity and also boring Buttigieg voters who need to be blasted out of their conformism with bracingly nihilistic gestures. It’s all a very teenage way to position oneself to gay culture, or the straight society beyond it—I want you to include me, listen to me, accommodate me, and also to be appropriately shocked by my naughtiness (which you shouldn’t take too literally either).

NLOG-ging can also be right-wing. Witness Jack Donovan and other gays who are just too masc and based for the ‘scene’—or Steven Audabato, who is both incredibly clockily faggily writing about how Bad Bunny and Lana saved his life or whatever, but also a tradcath (or, an author Audabato’s a big fan of, tragic monastic fag Michael Hannon, who insists when he blew that childhood friend he was just after the Form of the Good!). Right or left, it’s always annoying pick-me-ism—the meta-political wish to be ‘more’ and ‘other’ than a mere category, to transcend the limitations of facticity or at least put a bunch of complicated qualifiers on one’s actual, obvious condition. Rather than saying, well, I’m a bottom, I’m basic, I’ll show the world what a basic bottom can do!

Cooper is a pick-me—and he is getting picked! In his early career, before he turned against the category of gay literature (writing a particularly nasty attack in 1994 on David Bergman’s book on the Violet Quill, in which Cooper dismissed Holleran as a “far better essayist and social critic than he is a novelist… his fiction has a tendency to read like cheap aftershave lotion smells”) he was heavily supported by more established gay writers Ed White and Felice Picano. The latter published him on his little gay press, while White ran a review essay on Cooper by him for approval:

The essay manages to make Cooper look retarded and boring while praising him—the voice of the “blank generation” between Bill and Ted and mumblecore:

I’ll spare you further but, ew—and in passing, any adult who’s work is all about edgy teens in peril (Larry Clark) should be locked up immediately for pedo vibes.

And Cooper gave as good as he got, reviewing forgotten gay poet Rudy Kikel, whose book Picano also published, and which Ed White also blurbed (we’re still in 1984 here). Here’s the first page:

Neo-casual and uniquely rigorous! Well, I’ll round out the post with one of the poems, dedicated to Richard Howard, about, uh, the erotics of male literary collaboration, as Koestenbaum once put it, or the self-shattering ecstasies of getting edited. You can see for yourself if it’s got “peripheral vision,” whatever that means :

It was fifteen years ago

I was present at dinner

party you regaled, who have

no children else, with the pleasure

of your progeny, poems

which belonged already to all

the world. Next morning you gave

instructions in how better to

groom my own offspring. Visits

to New York City, thereafter,

would seem incomplete without

my having delivered over

to you my “little terrors”—

as you called two of them once you

saw in Mouth of the Dragon—

begging to have you pass judgment

on them—which often gave you pain.

Finally, following my hard

coaxing, you put to me your

little terror. Not so little

a terror it did not hurt!

I don’t know why I was amazed:

did you not push back the walls

of any room I met you in?

so it seemed to me—merely

by speaking your mind? And always

what has been on your mind is

that there is no growing pleasure,

only growing pain one must

take as it comes—in the hope of

making something out of it

and oneself that can give pleasure.

Pleasure in your company

it goes without saying I have

taken. But the pains, Richard,

I appreciate too the pains.

***

So now I—and you—know Richard Howard had a big cock! Allegedly.