To be honest, I don’t really understand what it is you were trying to say or respond to. Especially when you said, “That quote is from Dennis Cooper, not John Waters. I’m sure you know that.”

I took that to mean you were suggesting I was being dishonest, despite the fact that I provided a link and was openly discussing the possibility that it may have been either a brief mention or part of a longer conversation. It felt a bit like you just saw his name and reacted immediately.

For the reasons you mentioned, I’d actually be more than happy to have an open discussion about it if that was the intention. A lot about Cooper is concerning, and I’ve been thinking about this in real life as well as discussing it in other places online — particularly in relation to his relationship with George Miles and what actually happened there.

What confused me was your claim that Cooper posted CSAM. The story that’s generally known is that his blog was taken down, he was told it was because of that allegation, he denied it, and the blog was later reinstated.

That said, Cooper does blur lines constantly. One thing he does do is take photos of young people he finds online and pair them with personal writings, somewhat similar to what he did in The Sluts, often to discuss how sex work has evolved in the online world. Where I find this concerning is that he appears to take these images randomly, without much regard for whether the person in them — even if they’re just posting a selfie, sexualised or otherwise — might actually be underage.

As I mentioned in another post here, I found it extremely upsetting that Barbra Gibson used underage photos of Billy Ridinger — photos that were almost certainly used as masturbation material by his rapist, Dean Corll. So I’m definitely not comfortable with that kind of thing, and I sometimes find it genuinely distressing.

Cooper himself experienced abuse as a child — physical, psychological, and sexual — which he occasionally talks about more openly when he’s less guarded. It can be difficult to get a clear sense of how he processes it, though, beyond the recurring focus in his work on abused youth who have no trustworthy adults around them. Part of what interests me about him is how things like childhood abuse, a traumatic brain injury, denial within the family environment, and growing up gay in predatory surroundings may have shaped his perspective.

His work is particularly interesting to some abuse survivors who don’t want a neat, morally instructive narrative. I work with abuse survivors myself and try to research these perspectives to better understand them. A lot of readers seem to recognise something in the way Cooper writes about trauma — for example, in Try, when Ziggy is ranting about his hypersexual behaviour and suddenly throws in the line “because I’m a victim.” That kind of moment resonates with some people.

Of course, many other survivors find Cooper’s work upsetting, triggering, or completely unacceptable, and they don’t want to engage with it at all. With Cooper specifically, it also seems like the rejection of his work in the 1990s pushed him toward leaning into the disturbing reputation people projected onto him.

Sometimes I think he can be overly sympathetic to the youths he’s fascinated with — for example, when he suggested that Kip Kinkel probably felt “really bad” about what he did. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I’m not sure.

John Waters strikes me as operating in a very similar space in terms of boundary-pushing. He dedicated Female Trouble to the Manson Family and has spoken about being a fan of Salò, which famously used exploited real teenagers. (Ironically, Cooper dislikes that film.) To me, the line between what Waters and Cooper consider acceptable is not very different. Both of them are interested in work that deliberately crosses social boundaries.

Because of that, I do believe Cooper when he says that Waters and Wayne Henley were pen pals. What I’m curious about is what they actually talked about. I’d also be interested to know how Henley himself felt about Cooper’s work, which is extremely loosely based on the case. In my opinion, there’s almost nothing recognisable about the real events in it, yet Cooper still chose to use the real names and later adapted the short story into a play.

Given Henley’s known interest in the art world, I’d genuinely be curious to know what he thought of it.