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Dennis Cooper had a reputation in the 1980s and early 1990s of being an edgy, existentialist, controversial writer who shined a bright unflinching light on gay subculture issues. His books were passed around between my friends like an illicit drug. I remember reading Frisk, which is the second book in the quintet of novels based around George Miles. I'd always intended to read the Miles series, but somehow the years passed by, and Cooper didn't come up on my radar as often.
His style reminds me of William S. Burroughs, but also given the lack of engagement of the characters, the boredom, and the reckless behavior they embrace to try and feel...something, I am also reminded of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero.
The quote I begin this review was said by a character named David, but he was almost a twin to the equally gorgeous George Miles. There is a passivity tinged with melancholy that defines all of these characters, but George is the most compliant of them all. His friends use him for whatever they want and when they tire of him they toss him aside like a used kleenex. He doesn't seem to care.
Even when his mother dies he struggles to define his lack of emotion.
"It's strange I'm not sad about Mom. I guess it took such a long time I felt everything I could feel already. I wish I hadn't been there, but I'm glad the last person she looked at was me. She really loved me once. Likewise, I guess."
I had a young man working for me in the bookstore in San Francisco who was exotic and Arabic and very popular with his group of gay friends. We were working the late shift one night. We could hear the Chinese Karaoke across the street every time someone opened the door to enter the bookstore. He talked to me about the fact that he was expected to have sex with any of his friends who wanted him. He was tired of feeling so used, but at the same time he didn't want to be excommunicated from the group for refusing to provide intimacy. I was taken aback, but realized he was talking to me about a situation I had no basis to judge it by. For me it was easy to say you need to find new friends, but at the same time I knew it was far from being that simple.
Situations that came up in this book reminded me of that conversation that night. It made me wonder if the young man did find a way to break free from what really was a bondage of friendship. I certainly hoped he never reached the level of complacency that the young men in this book reached. Where sex was just something to do to kill an hour. Most of the time they are actually thinking about screwing someone else while they are screwing George. One boy admits to George: "I hope you understand that I'm a much better artist than I am a person."
Things really start to spiral out of control when George meets up with some 40 something men who prey on High School age males and have unnatural dangerous appetites to achieve their pleasure. George remains compliant no matter how painful or how weird their requests became. He wanted to feel more alive and his visits to see them were the only thing in this life that he looked forward to.
This story is told from the standpoint of several different young men and also from the perspective of the older males as well. Too much money, too much time, and most alarming a growing despondency that their lives will ever really mean anything definitely left me feeling uneasy. I grew up in the 1980s and the high consumption of money, drugs, and sex was truly a hedonistic time in our history. There was a decided shift in values and an over emphasis in fashion, style, attractiveness, expensive cars, credit cards, and pleasure. The work hard and play hard concept that you see portrayed on the show Mad Man was put on steroids.
Having what we want doesn't seem to make us better human beings.
Dennis Cooper is unflinching in his expose of the lifestyles being led by this privileged group of young gay males. They don't know what they are looking for or even what they should be looking for. Their parents are busy and barely pay any attention to them. They are rudderless in a sea of dangerous creatures. Cooper doesn't discuss AIDS in this book. I will be curious to see if the disease casts a long shadow over other books in the George Miles series. Cooper tells a story that needs to be told and though his books never hit the bestseller list the stark compelling writing gained him a following that went well beyond just the gay community.
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Passive, acid-addicted George Miles might as well be dead. He spends his time with others playing that exact role. What he needs is someone who cares.
Closer explores the minds and motives of several men that come in contact with George Miles and his beauty.
Typical postmodern D
I'm going to use this to make myself change, like a starting point. I think that's the best thing to do. I won't buy any more drugs. I'll try not to do what I always do. I never do anything other than school and Philippe.Passive, acid-addicted George Miles might as well be dead. He spends his time with others playing that exact role. What he needs is someone who cares.
Closer explores the minds and motives of several men that come in contact with George Miles and his beauty.
Typical postmodern Dennis Cooper: sex, drugs, and violence. Someone always gets hurt.
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1. eddie watkins nails what's best about these books. y'see, i'd be content with some obvious booshit like calling out cooper as a postmodern genet but watkins writes this:
"The particular obsession in Frisk does originate in a mere image (a
i burned through 5 dennis coopers in as many days and i'm in no proper state to comment. so, lemme bring to your attention two exemplary goodreaders i came across as i checked out how y'all responded to cooper's extreme punchfucking asseating & ballsniffing.1. eddie watkins nails what's best about these books. y'see, i'd be content with some obvious booshit like calling out cooper as a postmodern genet but watkins writes this:
"The particular obsession in Frisk does originate in a mere image (a snuff still), but Cooper does a fantastic job of portraying how deeply an image seen in one's youth can so deeply inhabit one's psyche that for decades to come one's larger actions are determined by it. But for Cooper it doesn't end here, because the obsesser finds out years later that the haunting image was actually a fake, which sets up some interesting metafictional pyrotechnics and much narrative ambiguity."
it kinda irks me that he used 'deeply' twice in one sentence, but this is disposable internet bookreport bullshit so fuck it. here's some more:
"Gay Fetish Lit. Did I ever think I would read such a thing? Never. Did I even know it existed? Sure, but only vaguely. Did I enjoy it? Definitely. Does this mean that my straight married life is going crooked? Only in the imagination (a far more capacious world than we are generally allowed in workaday life), and as a straight man (with an inner asexual gay man) I'm probably more interested in reading about gay sex anyway."
2. imogen binnie. ok, this girl is not on my friends list and i'm not gonna friend request her because i hope that one day she's skimming cooper reviews and comes across this and it totally freaks her out. after reading some of her reviews (cooper and non-cooper) and seeing her picture she seems the type that i would've met in a too-crowded & low-ceilinged nyc dance cavern and feeling all sad and wonderful during a new order or morrissey song i would've acted inappropriately and she would've punched me in the face and then i would've cried to her for a while and drunkenly pathetically repeated "i'm sorry, i'm so sorry" and she would've had to tell me "it's ok. forget it." over and over and then i would've walked home alone and felt all depressed and gropey but also kind've enjoyed the general chaos of the night. but yes. she's a really good reviewer and her cooper stuff goes something like this:
"Dennis Cooper is my boyfriend so bad. It's hard to describe why teen angst, gay u/dystopias, and shit obsession are SO APPEALING when he writes about 'em. But they are."
the first sentence makes absolutely no sense.
awesome.
"I can never remember any of the specifics of his books a week after finishing them. I love him."
and
"Pssh, like I was not gonna give this five stars: my life is basically an attempt to answer the question, "What if I had been the gay boy I should have been in 1995, and also what if 1995 had never ended?" This book is full of: Dennis Cooper being a homo interviewing Keanu Reeves, Dennis Cooper being a homo interviewing Leonardo DiCaprio just before Titanic came out, Dennis Cooper writing a 20-page biography of Nan Goldin (I got so sucked into this that I missed my bus stop), Dennis Cooper writing about heroin and Kurt Cobain and raves and, y'know, it's basically him taking all the things I like (including jaded old punk bullshit, self-conscious self-obsession, and pretending not to smirk) that i've mixed up and made my blood out of, and de-alchemizing them into their individual ingredients. Pretentious! All I'm saying is, I wish that Dennis Cooper was my dad... Man, I don't even care that it gets more and more lazily copyedited toward the end, dropping punctuation and even letters. Who cares! It is punk rock apathy, which was HOT in 1995."
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What is happening to me in my early middle-age? Due to no crisis that I kn
Gay Fetish Lit. Did I ever think I would read such a thing? Never. Did I even know it existed? Sure, but only vaguely. Did I enjoy it? Definitely. Does this mean that my straight married life is going crooked? Only in the imagination (a far more capacious world than we are generally allowed in workaday life), and as a straight man (with an inner asexual gay man) I'm probably more interested in reading about gay sex anyway.What is happening to me in my early middle-age? Due to no crisis that I know of I am now listening to Punk Rock, devouring crime novels, and reading about the pretty ass of a stoned-out pretty boy squeezing out turds on command for the delectation of an older Frenchmen.
Closer is an interrelated series of portraits of gay high-schoolers in (I think) early 70's Southern California. They are all for the most part spaced-out partiers with death wishes, and with all their focus on dicks and asses they're all fairly disgusted by the body and its workings. They're mostly obsessed/tormented by what to do with the pretty images they're so attracted to. To fuck them is the most obvious solution, but as they get closer to the body of their beloved the more disgusted they get. What does one do with a lovely image? Adore it from a distance. But what to do with this tangle of primal urges compelling one to move closer, to penetrate and devour?
It's a dirty world we live in. With loads of loveliness too.
The Frenchman got it as right as can be - to find shit lovely and delicious.
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I said he doesn't like explaining, but in an interview for The Paris Review (one of the best I've read) he does just that.
On realism:
I think it's important to reiterate that my novels aren't realist. They're not selective transcriptions of the real world... When there's a real-world resemblance, it's there to create an atmosphere of familiarity that's helpful as a comfort zone in which I can introduce things that are difficult and unsuspected. The characters are the main entrance into the work because they're shaped like humans and they're lit more brightly than their surroundings. But they're not real – they don't feel or think or want anything.
On finding the "final ingredient" for his fiction in the films of Robert Bresson:
[I recognised] that the films were entirely about emotion and, to me, profoundly moving while, at the same time, stylistically inexpressive and monotonic. On the surface, they were nothing but style, and the style was extremely rigorous to boot, but they seemed almost transparent and purely content driven. Bresson's use of untrained nonactors influenced my concentration on characters who are amateurs or noncharacters or characters who are ill equipped to handle the job of manning a storyline or holding the reader's attention in a conventional way.
On porn:
Porn charges and narrows the reader's attention in a swift, no-nonsense way, and it creates an anxious, intimate, and secretive atmosphere that I find very helpful as a way to erase the context around my characters and foreground their feelings, their psychological depths, their tastes... My goal is to try to articulate what my characters wish to express during sex but can't and to depict the way language is compromised by sex, as realistically as I can.
If I were Dennis Cooper, I'd find it hard to say what Closer is about, but in a haunting scene in its penultimate chapter I think he comes close. A drunk sadist and would-be killer lies in the dark, talking inwardly with an unidentified voice:
"How would you kill Georges?" Very slowly, so I could see everything in him and know what he has meant to me. "Would you expect to see yourself in him?" I would expect to see someone who could answer my questions looking at me through him. He would resemble me.... I am beginning to feel there is no answer for me. I am too interested in what is beautiful, and when beauty is not somewhere, I create it. But when something is beautiful it is impossible for me to understand. "How do you mean this?" I mean beauty is powerful. I feel very weak when I see it, or when I create it. No, I cannot explain.
"Death is beautiful?" It is too beautiful to explain. "But you try?" I must. "Why?" Because I must know what I love, because it is me. "I do not understand." I do not either. "You wish to die?" No, I wish never to die, but to see myself in death. To know what I am in the answer of death.
Though I've picked up and flipped through Dennis Cooper's novels at random for the past twenty years, this is the first time I've committed to reading one of them. That flipping-through worked against me, because in isolation his scenes don't quite come alive. He's not (judging by Closer, and what I've read of Frisk) an author whose work is "complete on every page". The use of language is functional, convincing, but will not "wow" you. As he says himself, "for better or worse" his range is limited. But there's a cumulative effect to his conjurings, and it's powerful. He takes you somewhere. And though, so far, I trust him, he's just hands-off enough in his guiding that it's a scary place to go.
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And who among us can get past the idea that butts are funny?
(2007 review:) Dennis Cooper is my boyfriend so bad. It's hard to describe why teen angst, gay u/dystopias, and shit obsession are SO APPEALING when he writes about 'em. But they are.
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I read Dennis Cooper's Closer years ago after finding it in the library, I honestly don't remember what had happened in the story but I do remember myself thinking it's a damn great queer novel---one of the best I've read ever. The story has a lot of things to do with sexual desire, guy pinning after another guy but can't (or unwilling to) act upon it, unhealthy dreams, unhealthy way of thinking, etc. I seriously need to re-read it
I need to re-read it. I need to re-read it. I need to re-read it.I read Dennis Cooper's Closer years ago after finding it in the library, I honestly don't remember what had happened in the story but I do remember myself thinking it's a damn great queer novel---one of the best I've read ever. The story has a lot of things to do with sexual desire, guy pinning after another guy but can't (or unwilling to) act upon it, unhealthy dreams, unhealthy way of thinking, etc. I seriously need to re-read it.
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I wrote all that partway through the book. At that point, it struck me mostly as better shock material -- sort of "these are things that happen and no one wants to talk about them" which is not without value, though also not the most compelling. But then the story turned far more brutal than I was expecting (and simultaneously sort of nervously hilarious, but still awful). And finally shifted into unexpected eloquence and pathos, and an even more unexpected thematic cohesion, that was really there all along, and I was too stuck on the individual incidents to notice right away. And I find myself totally impressed, and very likely going to continue with these. Yes, it's just the start of a five-part cycle. Yikes.
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Nails the nihilism and bleakness of adolescence. The agony of inertia, of not knowing what you're supposed to do. If anything means anything or if it's all a projection. If it's a projection then the bleakness must be your fault, your faulty projection, which leads to shame. A shame from which numbness or death—whichever—seem like nice respites. Drugs and fucking feel good for a while. And if you hate yourself, and feel powerless, it's nice to be desire
Such an original, assured and poetic voice.Nails the nihilism and bleakness of adolescence. The agony of inertia, of not knowing what you're supposed to do. If anything means anything or if it's all a projection. If it's a projection then the bleakness must be your fault, your faulty projection, which leads to shame. A shame from which numbness or death—whichever—seem like nice respites. Drugs and fucking feel good for a while. And if you hate yourself, and feel powerless, it's nice to be desired for at least one's beauty. Especially if one is not clear that there is anything within one's pretty shell but ugly guts. And thus hooking up with older men can be kind of amusing, to see the power youth gives you. Even if it is easily disposed of, at least it first got used. That's better than nothing, right?
The above describes not me but countless others. There must then be something like a hideous timelessness to these emotions. But it is cathartic to see them documented. That's usually the best-case scenario when it comes to horrible moods.
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When I finished the book I was really impressed with the very open and inconclusive ending which still somehow made me feel as if I'd arrived the
at first I'll admit that I didn't quite know what to do with this book. There are approximately 2 sentences before the first characters introduced begin having sex rather unceremoniously and it often talks about pulling the flesh away from the faces and bodies of young men. And other things it's not polite to just jump in and talk about without warning.When I finished the book I was really impressed with the very open and inconclusive ending which still somehow made me feel as if I'd arrived there at the end of a worthwhile journey. And I very much liked the structure of the book, divided into segments named after and about a small cast of boys.
The book has grown in my mind since I have finished it and had time to think about it.
It's very short, so I recommend trying it out one way or the other and, in the midst of long streams of graphic violence and brutality, there are moments of sublime observation.
joshua
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The author uses different types of narration styles to recount the tales of different lost souls with no center plot but George's presence and no definitive ending. The prose is very good but without continuing the series I don't think I'll be able to know where the author is heading so I might need to investigate more.
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2021 reads, #39. I had occasion recently to be reminded of the work of Dennis Cooper, one of the authors along with Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others who were talked about in hushed, awed tones by me and my fellow edgy Generation X artists back in the 1990s, supposedly heralding a "New Transgressive" age that was to be a shining apex of all e
[UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!]2021 reads, #39. I had occasion recently to be reminded of the work of Dennis Cooper, one of the authors along with Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others who were talked about in hushed, awed tones by me and my fellow edgy Generation X artists back in the 1990s, supposedly heralding a "New Transgressive" age that was to be a shining apex of all edgy art in history that had led up to that moment. Only one problem, I was reminded of when I was recently thinking about this, which is that I had never gotten around to actually reading any of Cooper's books back when we were all talking about him in hushed, awed tones; so after hopping online that day and discovering that all of them were available at the Chicago Public Library, on a whim I checked out all five volumes of his autobiographical "George Miles" novel series, the ones that made him famous (or, you know, as "famous" as you want to claim that Dennis Cooper is), and am currently in the process of burning through all of them right in a row, pretty easy to do since each of them are less than 200 pages apiece.
The one to kick them off, 1989's Closer, was not the one to make him an indie household name (that would be 1994's Try, coming a little later in this review series), but was certainly the first of his then four books of prose to get him a lot of attention, mostly because of the scandalous nature of the storyline itself. And indeed, the lasting legacy of the openly gay Cooper is that he wrote about LGBTQ issues in a way that literally no one had before; supposedly based on his real life, it's an ensemble piece about a group of disaffected gay teenage punk-rock boys all attending the same high school, and is one of the most disturbing and nihilistic portraits of a gay community that you will ever read in your life, even to this day. The young men of Closer are no shiny, happy, TikTokking, special-pronoun, rainbow-flag-waving queers, but rather the exact kind of emotionally vacant, spiritually empty shells that eventually came to define Generation X in general; numbed on a diet of junk food, pop-culture and systemic divorce, all of them display a complete and total inability to connect with each other in any way possible, using drugs and risky sex in a futile and failed attempt to at least feel something in their lives, then basically surrendering to the void when they realize that not even this will get through their thick hides and inpenetrable walls of emotional armor.
That said, one of the biggest things that strikes me by reading this for the first time a full 32 years after it was first published is just what an enormous amount this book owes to the early novels of Bret Easton Ellis, so much so that you could fairly call this novel not Closer at all but something like Less Than Closer or The Rules of Closer Attraction or what have you. This is a fact that's only become clearer with time, that pretty much all the indie literature of the entire decade between the mid-'80s to mid-'90s was unduly influenced by those first several novels of Ellis's, much like how the indie film world of the mid-'90s to mid-'00s was dominated by the looming, oversized shadow of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In Closer, there is no bottom to how low these characters will sink, no redemptive "point of no return" that in more traditional stories marks the third-act eucatastrophe into sobriety and the glimpse of a future happy life. Scat and blood play are the least of our characters' problems here; the real problem is that they react to these degrading, often physically repulsive acts with barely a stoned shrug, endless scenes of zonked-out twinks laying down on their stomachs with their bare asses in the air, resigning themselves silently to their fates.
In this, then, that's another warning to give any modern queer Wokes who might be thinking about picking this up to understand more about the history of LGBTQ literature; that despite virtually every character in this book being gay, there isn't a single positive depiction of gayness in the entire thing, with the adults in particular being an endless series of closeted sexual predators and sometimes out-and-out serial killers, choosing careers like high-school teachers specifically so they can cruise underage flesh from the comfort of their 9-to-5 jobs, and relating endless anecdotes about the alluring disgust they feel for the human body, whether that's the repulsion they feel about human skin being warm instead of room temperature, the desire to "open those bodies up" and see what's inside, and yet more very, very, very queasy details. And this also relates to pretty much the only legitimate criticism I have of this as a piece of literary art, which is that here in this early novel Cooper's writing quality is just all over the place, with it patently easy to tell which sections are based on his real journal entries of the time (namely, the sections that actually sound real), and which are the barely plausible filler that he inserted in order to make this tiny manuscript just long enough to publish as a full-length book (namely, the sections that make you frown and squint and say, "What the fuck, Cooper?").
Of course, with hindsight we now know what happened to so many of these Generation X edgy writers, which was the same fate that so many Generation X people in general suffered: as the '80s became the '90s, the need to always be transgressing even more eventually turned these people's books into cartoonish, over-the-top horror stories, snakes eating their own tails that were no longer edgy or interesting at all but now just silly and head-scratching; then in the 2000s, all of them found Jesus (or, you know, Buddha or Allah or Oprah, take your pick), and started writing books about happy little chefs in New Orleans and other unreadably sentimental pablum; then in the 2010s, when they discovered that neither Jesus nor Oprah was going to cure their ills, their nihilism came roaring back into a much more insidious form, manifesting as anti-vax screeds and QAnon essays and eventually becoming the first generation in human history to elect a fascist into the White House. That's a legitimate tragedy, the way that Generation X was never able to resolve their empty disaffection and unchecked nihilism even as they reached late middle-age, and so chose to just burn down the world and make everyone as miserable as them; but until the Christian Taliban finally take over the US government in 2024, seemingly the final end-game of Generation X still to come before their eventual bitter, miserable deaths, caused from a half-century of McDonald's, chain-smoking and serial tattoos, we have cultural artifacts like Closer, reminding of us a day when this unchecked nihilism seemed destined to be more of a creative force than a destructive one. As always, check back here soon for my look at part 2 of the George Miles cycle, 1991's Frisk, to see whether our characters finally grow up or just get worse and worse (spoiler alert: they just get worse and worse).
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Now don't get me wrong. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to write the same book (or at least the remarkably similar book) over and over again -- especially since so much of the power and wonder of Cooper's vision lies in the bleak relentlessness of it. But the crudeness in Closer seems unformed, undeveloped, even amateurish. This is not quite gross-out snuff just for the sake of gross-out snuff, per se, but there is a sort of surface treatment to the disgustingness that at this stage has clearly not quite been honed from flat, emotionless depictions of violence into the deliberately cold-hearted, stony calculations of violence that make his later works -- like The Sluts, say -- so horrifying and captivating.
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Much like the fantasy Disneyland rides with which the main character is obsessed, the book has an internal environment and fun-house mirror symbol repertoire all its own (ex. endlessly recurr In Closer, fetishes are contagious, and escalate quickly into life-or-death situations. It felt both sex-negative (by which I don't mean anti-sex, but rather divested from the idea that sex is essentially good) and deeply freaky. This book scared me and at the same time made me feel less alone in the world.
Much like the fantasy Disneyland rides with which the main character is obsessed, the book has an internal environment and fun-house mirror symbol repertoire all its own (ex. endlessly recurring drool dribbling). It completely pulled me in. In closer, looking into someone's asshole can cause hypnosis and amnesia. The book moves at a breakneak speed between dreams, hallucinations, delusions, and reality. The book is also extremely cinematic and is similar in tone and subject to a Gregg Araki film.
The characters use each other like mirrors, to find out more about themselves. Everyone is fucked up, and has a hard time looking directly at themselves. Gayness isn't something the characters agonize over, most of their internal struggles are more related to trauma and existential dread.
Also, there is a meta exploration of the role of written erotica and porn mags in the sex of the characters within the book. ...more
This was definitely a departure from my typical reading fare, but I am surprised to say that I enjoyed it. The writing is compelling and makes the point-of-view chapters work when they could otherwise seem quite cliched. I don't tend to like themes of sexual violence, and a number of scenes were definitely intended to make the reader uncomfortable, but the sexual content seemed to clearly be in service to the purposes of the larger novel.
George is an interesting character in his vacancy and extreme passivity. He is definitely somewhat of an empty vessel. Interestingly, even for the reader, he seems more compelling when viewed through the eyes of others; when we get his own point of view, we realize that he's just a messed up, dumb kid who is doing stuff that will likely get him hurt or even killed. But through the eyes of others, he is an enigmatic sexual object with the potential to be all things to all people. I thought it was interesting how several chapters began to build on the idea of death fetishes, likening George's passivity to that of a corpse until the point where he has to seriously confront whether he wants to die or not.
I appreciated the way that the various chapters were woven together, allowing us to see different people through different lens and weaving the vignettes into a fairly coherent whole. The vignettes definitely have an overarching narrative.
I would recommend this book to people who 1) don't mind a lot of homosexual sex, 2) aren't freaked out by sexual violence, 3) don't find angsty teenagers totally boring, and 4) want a quick, provocative read.
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The alienated eroticism is perva
As I read these interlocking narratives of young men - boys - negotiating desire, desperation, drugs and a kind of all pervading existential dissociation - one thing kept striking me. The oblivious, bourgie stolidness of their parents, able to supply enough cash to underwrite cocaine and LSD habits, and turn a blind eye to everything. I know this isn't the usual takeaway for readers of this book, but I was just struck by it. The 1980s really were a different time.The alienated eroticism is pervasive. Poignant among the young - so broken, so soon - pathological in the older men, the hip, trawling teacher, and even more so, the 40-something sexual predators. Thanatos cruising. It's frightening, it's sad. Beauty is a wound, a scab everyone picks at. Sensation is the closest they get to feeling. Everyone is a substitute for someone else. It's claustrophobic after sometime, everyone getting in everyone else's sex, life, mind.
Great writing. The Jesus And Mary Chain is described as 'a covert pop band'. Yes!
...moreHe wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, Califo
Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
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