I have no fidelity to Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, but Edelman had one good idea: “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net.” That is to say: the phantasm of the white child in dire need of protection or rescue is the kernel of ideology that justifies imperial war and homophobic violence at one and the same time. In the work of Dennis Cooper, these phantasms assume a material form, waifish twinks with gruesome ends. Cooper’s poetry and fiction repeat the same event with garish dedication—a white boy dies, strangled by his so-called friends or butchered in a snuff video for online creeps. 

Formed in the crucible of the homophobic 80’s, Cooper’s body of writing canvasses a world in which (1) gay desire, the opposite of a social anomaly, is the casual default of all its denizens but (2) the worst disasters of a homophobic imagination come to fruition with a staggering persistence. This repetition pinches a cultural nerve, attested nowhere more forcefully than in the persistent and arch-homophobic attitude that Cooper is an advocate of violence rather than, on analogy with horror, its auteur. Remarking on the double nature of Cooper’s violently unphobic writing, Cam Scott observes in the Believer that “Cooper’s works are hopeless, but utopian. This relative autonomy is more likely to upset would-be censors than any explicit content per se.” 

Cooper himself asserts the analogy with horror. The Tenderness of the Wolves (1982), his second poetry collection, is titled after the 1973 Fassbinder horror film in which a killer murders, then devours, youthful masculine trophies. Cooper’s Tenderness thematizes the same content. Cooper doesn’t name his young wantons as white, he doesn’t have to. His villains dispatch not so much characters as a social type, the racial subject in whom a homophobic imagination discovers the ideal victim of gay brutality. In this visual economy not even God is exempt: “Stripping a boy, killing him would not give God much pleasure. Humans were small. God would have to look through a spyglass until His arm ached.” Then again, like Lukács says of Kant, what else is God but a metonym for totality? Everybody collaborates; welcome to a poetry of canny imperatives. “While raping a boy,” Cooper writes, 

slide your hands 
around his neck 
closing your grip 
until he is dead. ... 

Now let the news- 
papers take over 
and show you
his past and its 
promise, his power. 

He increases in 
value with death 
until all young 
girls clutch pens 
rhyming tributes, 

until women kneel 
folding up hands, 
until even the ones 
who despised him 
desire him, press 

palms into crotches, 
his damp open hands 
holding onto the girls, 
being held on the earth 
in a powerful grip. 

Cooper’s not averse to a virtuosic turn of phrase. Here he’s banal in the imperative mood: slide your hands, close your grip—in anticipation of the teen girls’ “powerful grip” at the poem’s landing. The aberrant privacy of taboo desire transforms into a public longing so forceful it turns disgust upside down. Actually desire’s the opposite of a secret aberration, and a newspaper translates the most intimate perversion into the unanimous libido of the public sphere. Contra Sade—and however much a writer of Sadean literature—Cooper doesn’t care to demonstrate an amoralism that instrumentalizes human flesh on the order of willful desire—so much as the visual medium that generalizes, and banalizes, the most anti-social perversions of a homophobic conscience. Everybody who fears for the white boys’ butchery lines up to peep with one eye punctiliously shut. 

God looks and you look too. It’s visual culture all the way down, isn’t it?—horror, porn, glossy magazine covers. Until it all of a sudden isn’t: Cooper’s 2004 novel The Sluts is told mainly in the form of message-board posts about an escort, Brad. Is it all the same Brad? Who cares? The men who want to snuff him and film it (some of the men just want to snuff Aaron Carter).

Brad’s the hole at the core of their obsession—“his smooth white body was dreamy,” one forum post reads. “I’ll never forget that sweet young ass smell or the sight of those soft, innocent white cheeks.” Says another: “This review is a bald-faced lie. The picture on the reviewer’s homepage is not a picture of Brad.” The novel’s horny gossip fixates on sight in its unqualified absence. One reviewer, either genuinely Brad’s pimp Brian or a cunning poseur to that effect, finally admits “Brad was just your idea, and I guess you think he’s a great idea. He may be a great idea, but Brad himself is just a kid who got drafted into the job of representing an idea.” The absence of the visual here frots desire into a frenzy—but (Cooper seems to say) that isn’t the pathology, it’s the norm. The Sluts echoes Lacan on the gaze: the fulfillment and deprivation of desire meet in the objectified realm of the visual. But that’s also where desire is articulated socially, not in private like meat shoved in a locker. It’s like The Sluts looks at Cooper’s villains, and back at you, and intones: reader, you fucking love it.