Cooper Koch, star of ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’, says the Menendez brothers “deserve to come home”

Cooper Koch, who had the gays salivating with his portrayal of Erik Menendez in Netflix’s biographical crime drama Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, has said he thinks the Menendez brothers, who were jailed in 1996 for the murder of their parents in 1989, “deserve to come home”.

In an interview with VMan magazine, Koch expressed his support for the brothers and their pursuit of being released from prison.

“Erik teaches speech classes, yoga, and meditation, and they help people who have been through sexual abuse,” Koch said. “They’ve gotten college degrees. They’ve found a life in prison because they’ve accepted what happened to them, and they accepted what they did. That takes such courage and bravery and strength and time. I think for that reason they deserve to come home.”

In the interview, Koch went on to list three queer novels he’d love to be involved with, saying: “Giovanni’s Room, All Fours and A Little Life,” Koch said. “Those are the top three. I don’t want it to sound like I’m conceited, like I can do whatever I want. It’s more like… I just want to do things that I feel have meaning and purpose that I’m passionate about.”

All three of the novels he named have queer themes. All Fours is a 2024 novel by writer and filmmaker Miranda July about a middle-aged woman having a sexual awakening.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is considered a modern queer classic, which is about four college friends who move to New York City and must overcome several obstacles, including the sexual assault of one of them.

Giovanni’s Room, a 1956 novel by James Baldwin, concerns the events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings and frustrations with his relationships with other men in his life, particularly an Italian bartender named Giovanni whom he meets at a Parisian gay bar