Burroughs may have been an outlaw, but in truth he may have had it easier than Cooper, who has not blinked through this most nauseating era of political correctness and radical gay self-righteousness. And Big Bad Bill never had a death threat made against him. Dennis Cooper has. The death threat isn't that surprising. Cooper is a dangerous writer, both for the pedestrian reader unable to get beyond surface, and for those who like their homosexual literary aesthetics cozily free of anything resembling depth or complexity.
Cooper is anything but cozy.
Prolific but terse, simultaneously poetic and laconic, he is a profoundly original American visionary, the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs. America being America, transgressive literary artists are not a highly appreciated commodity. In England, his books are bestsellers. The truth is that Dennis Cooper is an American master, and his great subject is American youth culture. George Bataille has certainly had his influence, and Cooper also summons to mind Genet, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but he is, in the end, himself.