SOURCE: Viegener, Matias. “Men Who Kill and the Boys Who Love Them.” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (spring 1994): 105-14.

In the following essay, Viegener examines the American fascination with psychosexual murderers and the portrayal of homosexuals as calculating, deviant criminals, drawing attention to Frisk and Jerk for examples of the pathological, anti-social gay killer. Viegener contends that Cooper's depictions of sexual violence are not a strategy for transgression, but suggest the extreme limits of experience, self-identity, and intersubjectivity.

The homosexual killer sits at the juncture of two great social obsessions, homosexuality and criminality. The homosexual criminal has a long history, epitomised in life in the case of Oscar Wilde and in representation in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Jean Genet made this perilous equation the centrepiece of his life's work, such that criminal desire (specifically the desire to steal, though also to kill) is not only the analogue...