Little Caesar: Dennis Cooper & Friends

"I should mention that my penis envies the Universe"

In the late 70s and early 80s Dennis Cooper had a small press and journal both called Little Caesar which was already also a pizza chain so, idk, maybe not the best name? I don’t know if the latter had yet developed their distinctively sad and affordable ‘hot and ready’ line of pizzas that sat around in cardboard boxes waiting to be picked up by anyone with a few dollars and no time to wait. They got me through college.

This kind of free-associative structureless nostalgic ‘I remember…’ stuff was a staple of Cooper and company’s aesthetic c.1980—he published, as we’ll see, a booklet by Joe Brainard. But while there’s a proto-tenderqueer, post-O’Hara, origins-of-bad-autofiction core to Cooper-ism (in those years before he turned to novels about killing boys; the schlocky gestures of Bataille-but-make-it-gay transgression are only the other side of an uwu smolbean ‘I’m just a little boy’ shitck), Little Caesar had, in fact, a pretty diverse output, and some of it is even good!

Cooper himself was in those years a promising poet, with a lot of his work turning on themes (mostly clearly addressed in the 1978 book Idols) of yearning, both sexual and aspirational, omni-directed at friends, celebrities, passing boys. Many of the poems are touching, when they don’t shade off into ‘I’m so cool and jaded’ posturing or (increasingly, as the 80s kick off) pseudo-transgressive scenes of drugs and violence, which become the mainline of his prose (I’ve written about what I like and don’t like about Cooper elsewhere on Substack):

Doing the horny fun off the cuff ‘just letting it all fag out’ thing must be a lot harder than it looks, because often the poets in Little Caesar made embarrassing messes. For instance, Rene Ricard, who went on to make a name in the 80s as an art critic associated with Schnabel and Basquiat:

You get real, girl!

Speaking of art critics who were also bad poets, I only knew Peter Schjeldahl as a boring guy at The New Yorker who wouldn’t shut up about dying. But he also, in this 1981 book Cooper put out and Susan Rothenberg illustrated, had some thoughts about being a little bit gay:

But wait, he has more thoughts about cock!

Personally, I could do without more-or-less straight guy opinions on cocks and cocksucking—what I want to know is, what do gays say about gays? And here Little Caesar had a lot to offer, giving gays many chances to interview, review and address poems to each other, sometimes within and sometimes across the boundaries of eras, vibes, scenes, aesthetics etc. For instance, here’s Brainard being interviewed by Tim Dlugos, a Cooper protege who also wrote for Christopher Street, became a pretty good poet in the 80s (when he wasn’t overwhelmed by alcoholism and horror over AIDS) and was in seminary to become an episcopal priest when he died of AIDS.

It’s a long interview but a choice excerpt here:

It’s very annoying to me that gays ever had to waste—and maybe still waste—so much time wondering whether it’s ok to be labelled a ‘gay artist’ and whether there’s such a thing as a ‘gay sensibility.’ It’s like, you’re in a journal put out by Dennis Cooper, being interviewed by Tim Dlugos, accompanied by a photo taken by Peter Hujar, getting asked about a project you did with Jonathan Williams (who appeared in an earlier post)—you’re already in a gay world, Planet Fag, dithering morbidly about being perceived as something ‘less’ than the bearer of Universal Reason!

Of course it doesn’t make any sense to try and find an essence or principle to gay literature/art/culture, any more than it does to imagine black, jewish, sumerian etc art in terms of an irreducible core of articulable qualities related to each other in some systematic and enduring way. But that’s not how even individual identities/personalities work, let alone groups. We’re held together by ongoing conversations, shifting conventions, the surprising turns of taste. There are noticeable albeit uneven and changing patterns—which often appear most clearly in the course of in-group debates!

Having to get onto the ground of epistemological and ontological questions about how identity is even possible makes me want to throw up. When you’re explaining you’re losing; when you’re philosophizing you’ve lost.

It’s as bad as having to say what homosexuality is for or what its cause might be. Free people do not respond to questions about cause, purpose, and essence—these are for Aristotelians, Catholics, Kantians, Marxists and other losers enslaved by mindghosts.

Once you accept that you are have a peculiar, non-universalizable taste (that you’re not just a minority who might one day be in the majority, or an individual who might so legislate himself as to give a rule to the world) these concerns disappear and you can ask instead, given my-our sensibility, what more can I-we do with it, where can we take it, how can we reform, purify, expand, enliven it? Don’t ask whether the gay sensibility—or for that matter, anything—exists. Ask if it’s giving.

That said RIP Joe Brainard you would have loved Bluesky:

His interviewer Dlugos deserves a whole post—and I mean to write one, once I can get a look at his archive next time I’m in New York (btw if you love the ‘content’ I provide in this now several-dozen-long series of posts of gay literary material from archives across the country and don’t want to depend for its continuance on the vagaries of the funding bodies to which I make my really quite pathetically small grant requests you are welcome reader, especially welcome you rich reader, to fund them yourself!). But he’s one of Cooper’s ‘discoveries’—like Donald Britton, David Trinidad, and to a lesser extent Brad Gooch—who was really going somewhere, writing-wise.

Here’s his 1981 book Cooper published, and just look at the blurbs. For once, Ed White was not lying:

Britton is right to name O’Hara (and maybe no coincidence Dlugos was also a drunk):

But not everyone, especially starting out, needs an original style—and indeed there’s something I think lovely gentle and kind about the way this poem and many of his others from this period reaches out to a ‘you’ who is a lover/friend/reader and also a by now two-three-decade-old tradition of gay male poetry. Frank O’Hara we love you get up

Do Zoomers still know the way to San Jose?

Dlugos can also be more Richard Brautigan than O’Hara (I loved Brautigan as a teenager discovering poetry, especially these two love poems, and I still love him, although I was very unhappy to learn what his life and loves had been—straight men amirite?):

And he can be Whitman-being-everybody, too!

Ok the title of this post isn’t ‘Love Dlugos or Leave!’ but just one more before moving on:

Kudos to Cooper for this one!

One of Cooper’s projects I’m less excited about was to hail the new punk scene as implicitly queer, and Dlugos, I think, or someone similar, had an essay in Christopher Street that made the same argument: ‘punk is actually kind of gay and not as masculinist-aggressive-homophobic-fascist as it might seem; the gay sensibility in music can include this new genre besides disco, musical theater, cabaret, and varieties of orchestral music from the baroque to Wagner,’ an argument that I don’t think ever really took off with gay audiences beyond Cooper’s circles. Gay punk rock includes the charmingly bad Buzzcocks, Pansy Division, and the work of Seth Bogart, but none of it is anything I’d save in the Gay Time Capsule.

Queer Beat elders welcomed the implicitly queer punk scene with some awful poetry:

Other Beat elders appear non-textually, as in this pic of Burroughs by Gerard Malanga, the one-time Warhol protege who supplied many other photos (and some awful poems) to Little Caesar:

Speaking of Warhol—here he is uh embracing Parker Tyler:

I don’t know that Cooper and his friends got much of anything from the interwar modernist scene that Tyler constituted, or that Warhol did either (although it’s easier to think about how Cooper and friends, with their interest in celebrity culture and, for Cooper, sometimes cultivating a creepy flat affect, would be interested in Warhol), but it’s stimulating to see Little Caesar bringing three generations or scenes of gay literary culture together—Tyler’s transatlantic one affiliated with the modernism of jazz, Pound, WC Williams, etc; Warhol’s with New York painters and poets plus a certain pose of camped-up and not entirely uncontemptuous affection for mass culture; Cooper’s set of West Coast post-Beat tenderpunks.

The poetry Cooper published wasn’t all direct, personal stuff in post-Beat, post-New-York-School registers. If you could learn how to be simple, straightforward, sexual, silly, etc. from Ginsberg and O’Hara, you could also learn from ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ or the Odes how to be vatic, enormous and difficult—in a rival gay tradition running back to Whitman (who of course is also a source of the spontaneous, loose, free, personal style) and through Robert Duncan.

For example, here’s Leland Hickman (1934-1991), who I’d never read before and who here makes SM sound like an, as it were, Blakean experience. There’s lots of lines in this I don’t like, but I think it does build excitingly and I like the addresses to “poem.” Nightboat republished the long poem this is from in 2009, and I have just ordered it!

There’s prose, too—like this appreciation of gay porn by Cooper that wouldn’t be out of place in a smarter version of Gayletter today:

And there are essays that anticipate the late 80s European Gay Review where gay writers write about gay writers (mostly boringly but sometimes wonderfully—Thom Gunn’s essay in the EGR on Ginsberg made me finally appreciate him beyond the obvious classics):

And girls—appearing in such a context—ask if there’s a gay sensibility…

Finally, some of the poems of Donald Britton (who has also been put back in print by Nightboat—they’re doing God’s work!) that Cooper published; Britton was to Ashbery what Dlugos was to O’Hara and it’s very sad to think that both of them died, along with so many peers and readers, in early middle age from AIDS. We’ll never know what we lost.