Experience: Not that the Brad story needs another wrinkle, but here’s mine. I hired “Brad” about three weeks ago. I question how much of what the two previous reviewers wrote is true. I suspect the reviews were written by Brad/Steve himself. I was looking for Brad at Pumpers in Long Beach after reading the first review. It turns out that I’d seen him there a number of times drinking and sometimes playing pool or pinball. I had been told by the bartender that his name was Steve. He stood out because of how young he looks, but apart from being cuter than your usual street trade, I wouldn’t say there was anything supernatural about his appearance. He had a reputation among the regulars at the bar as an arrogant creep who charged a ridiculously large fee ($ 350) to sit on men’s faces and masturbate.

(The Sluts)
 

The Sluts är en senare roman av Cooper, som från början var tänkt att ingå i George Miles-cykeln. Den kretsar kring ett mytologiserande av en ung eskortkille, Brad. Romanen består till större delen av poster från ett webforum där torskar recenserar eskortkillar de betalat för sex. Berättelsen om Brad skenar iväg, omförhandlas och ifrågasätts då en rad torskar vill göra sin version av Brad gällande. Och då allt i boken berättas genom opålitliga berättare, dokument där vem som helst kan dölja sig bakom den utskrivna avsändaren (e-post, fax, poster på message boards) blir själva mytologiseringsprocessen romanens centrala tema.

DC: ”I got very interested in the language of the Internet. Chat rooms and message boards seemed to me like a really interesting form. I thought it would be interesting to work with that form, outside the Internet, like in a novel. There is no page turning on the Internet – anything is the first chapter and the last chapter – so I wanted to try to put that in a book where the time frame was more of a novel-time frame.

I came across this escort review site, which I used as a model. It was an escort-listing site and they had a message board. The johns would review the escorts, and then the other johns could decide to hire these boys. But there was so much fabrication and lying, people trying to make them selves like studs, or people attacking the prostitutes or other prostitutes were jealous and wrote fake-reviews, or escorts writing reviews of them selves that were fake… And then a new escort would come on, and everybody would go crazy for him, and chat about him all the time… So it seemed like a really interesting thing to make a kind of super escort.

I liked the power relations, how the power was mostly in the john’s hands but at the same time the escorts had this other kind of power. The johns really wanted to control the experience with the escorts, what it was like, and there was a lot of spin about that. The reviewing was set up to reinforce that kind of power structure, but because of the way it worked with obvious lying, with johns fighting each other, and the escorts sneaking in pretending to be a john, trying to defend them selves… It became a really interesting place.

Before the Internet, you couldn’t access prostitution in that kind of way. There was no common meeting ground. On this site it became a kind of community – a troubled and complex community – where the objects and the people who were objectifying, desiring them would meet. There was a kind of equalization going on and it was very, very interesting to me.”
 

Formens, berättandets genomskinlighet blottlägger romanens fiktion som konstruktion. En så intensiv objektifiering av någon (något) som så tydligt är en diktad konstruktion påvisar alla fantasier som förläggs på Brad som sprungna ur icke-essensiella fake-begär. ”Brad” utplånas av berättelserna om honom, av allt det som riktas mot ”honom”. Allt är ihåligt: sexuell attraktion, omsorg, våld.
 

En queer läsning: Begäret blottlagt som iscensättningar.

Eller en läsning utifrån George Miles-cykelns horisont: Ensamheten, tomheten bakom de fantiserade begären.
 

Eller: Vad är en sexuell fantasi?

Vad händer när olika personer fantiserar kring samma objekt tillsammans, på samma plats, samtidigt?

DC: ”What kind of ideal would be constructed with all those different voices, they were all concentrating on this one figure, some tried to build him up, others tried to tear him down. People were trying to give him attributes that were conformed to their specific fetishes or desires. What kind of figure would resolve from that? Out of this came Brad, an entirely impossible figure. Ultimately he became some kind of Frankenstein - a boy who wants to be killed, because people want to kill him. He becomes okay about that, but the only way he can be okay about being killed is if he’s got a brain tumor… Everybody’s feeding in to make this perfect boy that matches everybody’s desires. And then the ones who feel sorry for him, and think that it’s terrible that he’s got a brain tumor and that people are hurting him, can create this narrative about how he needs to be saved and how he’s secretly very sweet, and so on. It was interesting to see what kind of ideal figure would resolve out of all this input at once.”
 

*
 

Fyll pojken. Mata honom tills han spricker.

*

DC: ”People have often accused me for just trying to shock, but the whole goal is a severe shock, and trying to give the visceral its full power. It’s really difficult. I’m trying to allow it to be really erotic and really frightening at the same time – using language to make it possible to experience it without just throwing the book away. Ideally you would be able to hang in there, but at the same time it would be working on you, making you uncomfortable or confused, making you question your own reaction to it.”
 

*

Unga bögar som knarkar.

Unga bögar som tittar på snuff-filmer.

Unga bögar som inleder relationer med sina homosexuella adoptivfäder.

Unga bögar som stammar fram en kärleksförklaring till sin bästis (och säger “Sorry, I know I’m weird”).

Unga bögar som offrar katter, pojkar, smycken till satan.
 

*

KF: ”How has the language of pornography influenced your literature?”

DC: ”It isn’t just the language; it’s the energy. When I was trying to write novels, even when I was younger, I wasn’t really interested in conventional novels at all; it just kind of bores me. I didn’t want my novels to be like that, where you keep on reading to find out what will happen to the character or you want to know about the plot. So I was looking at other things, to figure out how to give the work all this energy that wouldn’t be the narrative, or where the narrative would be used as a kind of devise to keep people interested. Music was great for that, and it was very influential on me.

The kind of relation between someone looking at pornography and the pornography, it’s so private, it’s so psychotic in some way, so removed from reality and so forceful. There’s really an enormous power there and I wanted to see how I could use that, like the way you sit through a porn just to see the cum shot, or what ever. I was trying to do that in my fiction.

In The Sluts that is really paramount – not just the language, but the whole thing about pornography. Also because I’m interested in sexual fantasies, and the difference between sexual fantasy and sex and responsibilities – that you have to think about sex and the irresponsibility that’s available to you in a fantasy.”
 

*

Ett sätt att berätta som knäcker konventionella fiktiva kontrakt. Läsningen blir fysisk genom upphetsning och äckel. Samtidigt synliggör den hur fantasier/fiktion förflyttar sig mellan verklighet och dikt, medvetandegör läsaren om sin upplevelse.

Att läsa Dennis Cooper är att märka hur kön, kräkreflexer och nerven där paniken sitter, sväller och rycker synkront.