Hello and welcome back to another special episode of Bad Gaze, a podcast about evil and

complicated queers in history. I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, a member of the board of

Berlin's Schulles Museum. There's often something particular that happens when any minority group is welcomed into a particular

artistic or literary canon, and that is that the people who first make it into that canon, and in the case of gay literature,

I'm talking about gay male writers, fantastic gay male writers like Andrew Haller and Edmund White,

take on a lot of the traditions of that canon and try to include in some way the position that they're writing from inside that way of writing.

You have, you know, the sort of formally exquisite novels of Edmund White or Halloran or Alan Hollinghurst for that

matter. The subject of today's episode is a very different kind of writer, not someone who was

determined to take gay men and put them into the formal traditions of bourgeois literature,

not content to have the coming out, and as we'll joke about later, the sort of swimming, beautiful boy

in late afternoon,

replace the marriage plot of the standard English novel,

but instead somebody who wanted to explode literature entirely,

to achieve some kind of anarchist writing in which

extremely disturbing and transgressive ideas and ways of thinking

end up helping us as readers to explore ways of being and ways of thinking that might make us enormously uncomfortable or challenge how we

think and what we think. Dennis Cooper, the subject of today's episode, once wrote,

when I started writing, I was a sick, teenaged fuck inside who partly thought I was the new

Marquis de Sade,

a body doomed to communicate with Satan, who was using my sickness as his home away from home,

and there's your proof. Dennis Cooper is someone that we've admired on the show for a long time,

and have wanted to talk about on the show for a while, and to do so, we're really excited to bring on a fantastic special guest.

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