Making zines gave me the confidence to develop and publish my writing elsewhere. In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was an infrastructure of queer publishers, bookshops and media. The internet was beginning.
I published a novel, Cherry, and made my living as a journalist. I also wrote memoir, short fiction and experimented with online writing.
Journalism
For 20 years I worked in print, new media and radio as a columnist, staff writer, content producer and guest presenter. I produced news stories, shorts and features about LGBT+ culture and community.
My clients included: BBC, British Film Institute, Cheap Date, DIVA, Europride, Exeunt, The Food Commission, g3, Gaydar, The Guardian, Liverpool Biennial International Festival of Contemporary Art, On Our Backs, Open Democracy, RainbowNetwork, The Scavenger, The Skinny, The Wellcome Institute, The Women’s Library, Time Out, and plenty of others.
Memoir
Cooper, C. (2017) ‘A moment that changed me: finding out at 15 that Dad was a spy’, The Guardian. [online] London. Available: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/moment-that-changed-me-finding-out-dad-was-spy
Cooper, C. (2007) ‘Remembering,’ The Skinny. [online] Edinburgh. Available: https://www.theskinny.co.uk/sexuality/deviance/remembering
Cooper, C. (2006) ‘I was a teenaged go-go girl’, in Stevens, A. (ed.), The Edgier Waters: new writing from literary upstarts. London: Snow Books.
Cooper, C (1998) ‘Charlotte Cooper, aged 18’, in Cole, C. (ed.), Between You and Me: Real-Life Diaries and Letters by Women Writers. London: the Women’s Press.
Short fiction
Cooper, C. (2004) ‘This Is Lesbian Luv’, in Kramer Bussel, R. and Bias, S. (eds.), Up All Night: Adventures in Lesbian Sex. Los Angeles: Alyson Books.
Cooper, C. (2004) ‘Jerk’, in Fox, A. (ed.), Va-Va-Voom: Red Hot Lesbian Erotica. London: Millivres-Prowler Group Ltd.
Cooper, C. (2003) ‘When the car slammed into me’, in Sanders, H. (ed.), Necrologue: The Diva Book of the Dead and the Undead. London: Millivres Prowler.
Cooper, C. (1998) ‘My Dream Date’, in Smith, E. (ed.), The GirlFrenzy Millennial. Brighton: Slab-o-Concrete Publications.
Digital
I’ve been been involved with digital media since 1988. I learned to code in 1999 and worked in tech for about ten years. CharlotteCooper.net started in 2002 as an online zine. I had a LiveJournal from 2003–2013 and various blogs.
Other early online projects include Women Against Violent Language, a prank from 1999 supporting Stewart Home’s novel, Cunt, and Bad Toon Rising (2003), which encouraged people to draw well-known cartoon characters from memory.
A couple of contemporary conversations:
Kramer Bussel, R. (2001) ‘Cherry: An Interview with Charlotte Cooper by Rachel Kramer Bussel’, Technodyke.com [online], available: https://web.archive.org/web/20021122114543/http://www.technodyke.com/features/102202_cooper.asp?page=1
Godfrey, O. (2003) ‘Any Queries? Charlotte Cooper’, Time Out, London, 12-19 March, read the article (.pdf, 66kb)