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Dennis CooperINTERVIEWS
3AM: Were Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period cathartic, or did they dig up more than they buried? DC: Both, really. I started the cycle wanting to get the horror out of my mind in a reasonable way. By that I mean I wanted to understand my torment, but I also wanted to see if my thinking would make sense to other people. Just as importantly, I wanted to write novels as great as the ones I loved. On a personal level, the novel cycle is a kind of ongoing argument with myself: why should or shouldn't I do the things I fantasized about doing? I wanted to figure that out for myself, and not rely on the standard moral, religious, and legal rights and wrongs, because I don't believe in the idea of a collective truth. I'm an anarchist, by philosophy. I believe everyone has everything they need within themselves to make the right decisions. Anyway, I'm less afraid now that I'll go insane and do something fucked up to myself or to someone else, but I'm hardly free. More recently, Dan Epstein talks to Cooper about the adolescent friendship that influenced the novels, comparisons to Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis, why he doesn't like being pigeonholed as a "gay novelist," and opinions on various other writers and filmmakers.
[Cooper] has been accused of threatening our ideas of what's acceptable in literature as he moves in and out of the literary fringes, exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, violence and ultimately death. Indeed to some members of the gay community, his work seems to threaten more than traditional definitions of literature as Cooper shows the monstrous capability of sexual obsession through the minds of his homosexual male protagonists. However, what these readers fail to see is that although his work is centered on homosexual men, it transcends the constraining definitions of "sexual orientation". Cooper takes us into the fragmented, obsessed and scattered minds of the truly sexually and psychologically alienated. His message seems to be that all people are sexually, emotionally and socially alienated at the core despite sexual orientation. Pure sexual/emotional connection between people is impossible since all a body can offer is fragmented information. Sexuality is individually and uniquely obsessive and dark, and it is only when we are free from the confines of collective identity that we can even begin to understand this. It is only when succumbing to the politicized community's definitions of sexuality, gay or otherwise, that we mask our natural "freakishness" and pretend to be "normal". Cooper picks up this theme in the interview. "Personally, I never even really felt, like even since I decided that I was gay when I was, whatever, thirteen or something, really comfortable in the gay community. Even before liberation made everybody 'out' and more able to have conventional lives and stuff, I never liked the rituals and the collective thing. I am not into collective identity at all." ARTICLES
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3 AM Magazine has published two recent interviews with writer Dennis Cooper, who's often compared to Burroughs in his exploration of sex, violence and obsession. Stephen Lucas