Dennis Cooper
Bio
The L.A.-born, Paris-based writer Dennis Cooper is an iconic voice in gay and experimental literature. For 14 years, he ran the popular blog, The Weaklings. In recent years, it was hosted by Google’s Blogger Platform. When Cooper tried to access his Gmail account on June 27, 2016, it had been disabled. When he checked the blog, he was met with this message: “Sorry, the blog at denniscooper-theweakling.sblogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.” Cooper reached out to Google to see why, and didn’t get a response. It didn’t seem like he’d get a response, or the defunct blog’s data, until a few publications like Artforum, the Guardian, the NY Times and the New Yorker, picked up the story, brought up issues of censorship, and Cooper hired a lawyer. Almost two months later, on August 19, Cooper got his data and email archives back from Google, including a just-finished animated GIF novel (his most recent form of writing).
Now, his blog has a and he has a different, non-Google email address. On August 26, Cooper posted a message to his Facebook page explaining Google’s reasoning behind the takedown: “Google says some unknown person’s flagging of one image on a ten year-old group-curated page that wasn’t even technically on my blog is the reason they disabled my blog and email account.” You can read it all here.