Steal Hearts, Steel Bonds/ This is Pittsburgh

COOPER

I think pornography is a very rich medium, and I’ve studied it closely and learned quite a lot as a writer from it. 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. But I’m also always interested in subverting and counteracting porn’s effect, and the sex in my books is never merely hot. It challenges the objectification that is porn’s stock-in-trade by removing the central conceit that people having sex are in a state of supreme relaxation and self-confidence, wherein their worries and individuality are muted and beside the point. It uses hotness as a kind of decoy.
My novel The Sluts, for instance, which has a lot of sex in it, brought a mainstream gay audience back to my work that had largely abandoned it in the early nineties, but there was a lot of complaining that the boner the novel’s premise seemed to offer wasn’t delivered. I think when many gay guys seek out things that have sex in them, they want to get off, period. When they see an attractive guy, they want to fuck him. When they watch porn, they imagine teleporting themselves onto the set, into the action. To me, desire and sex are much more complex than that. I’m as interested by what sex can’t give you as by what it can. I don’t see lust as a dumbing-down process. Most people fear confusion, but I think confusion is the truth and I seek it out. Sex is such a confusing situation that your ability to communicate what you’re thinking and feeling in the moment is severely hampered. If you try to articulate your thoughts and feelings in words, you’re reduced to saying the quickest and easiest epithets you can come up with—porn language, ­essentially, or the same CliffsNotes expressions of affection that have rushed from a million other enraptured people’s mouths—because objectivity and rational thought are the enemies of lust. That’s why, when writers attempt to describe sex accurately, the scenes all tend to sound the same, no matter what the writers’ individual styles may be. I think most writers just want their sex scenes to be realistically sexy. 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.am