Bruce LaBruce in conversation with Victor Fraga and Alex Babboni

Part Two //

[Alex Babboni] Some of the recurrent elements in your films [such as punk, poetry, politics and pornography] seem to share the same sensibility found in J.D.s zine [1985 to 1991] created by you and G.B. Jones. Do you think the fanzine set up the guidelines for you as a filmmaker?

[Bruce LaBruce] I have been “politicised” a number of times in my life, something that I used to refer to as “the painful process of politicisation.” I had two main mentors in my 20’s, and each one politicised me in a different way. One was the late, great film professor Robin Wood, one of the favourite film critics of the likes of Scorsese and Truffaut, whom I took a number of undergrad courses with at York University, including a genre studies and a Japanese cinema course. He was also my thesis supervisor when I got my Masters degree in Film and Social and Political Thought; my thesis was a shot-by-shot analysis of Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ [1958] focusing on the inscription of gender in the mise-en-scène. I also was his projectionist for his grad courses, which was really fun and educational, everything projected in class on 16mm. Robin had had a straight marriage with children before he came out as gay in the early years of the liberation movement, writing an influential article called ‘Responsibilities of the Gay Film Critic’ which combined an analysis of the gay subtext in mainstream cinema with personal anecdotes, putting him on his path as a Marxist feminist gay liberationist critic. My other major mentor was G.B. Jones, whom I met in the underground punk and alternative music and film scenes in downtown Toronto.

[Babboni] Very interesting to know that those two mentors, specially G.B. Jones, had a significant role in the creation of J.D.s zine.

[LaBruce] Together G.B. and I cooked up J.D.s, a queer punk fanzine that begat the queercore movement, which still exists internationally to this day. It was from the synthesis of the influences of these two mentors, one in a more conventional academic context, the other in an underground, avant-garde creative context, that I emerged. The fact that they were sometimes politically and aesthetically at odds with each other perhaps led to my predilection for contradiction, paradox, and dialectical thinking. [I also took a minor in Dance at university, just to introduce another paradox].

[Babboni] J.D.s was the junction of these two universes: academic and underground, but going further, I can say that it was a platform where you and G. B. Jones confronted intrinsic values of punk, as well as the dominant gay movement [at the time].

[LaBruce] J.D.s, which primarily stood for “juvenile delinquents”, was largely targeted at young queer punks who felt alienated from the macho, straight hardcore punk scene. We had become disenchanted with the mainstream gay world, which had emerged in the 80’s as a largely white, middle-class movement rife with racist, classist, sexist and misogynist tendencies. But when we turned to punk, which we thought was more politically charged, anti-bourgeois and aesthetically and stylistically adventurous, we discovered the same tendencies of racism and sexism, with the added bonus of homophobia! So J.D.s was a direct challenge to that problematic, which is why we made it very pornographic with lots of sexually explicit gay material, to make the point to the straight punks that if they were so radical they also needed to be sexually radical, and that all their macho antics  [which we fetishised a la Tom of Finland, G.B. enacting a bit of détournement with her ‘Tom-Girls’ drawings] were very homoerotic and gay! We were totally intersectional and diverse in terms of the representation of class, race, and gender, encouraging comradeship between fags, dykes, and trans people.

[Babboni] And the fanzine became important with repercussions beyond Canada.

[LaBruce] J.D.s was totally analogue – pre-digital, pre-internet, pre-social media – but we used many of the strategies that are common today. Although underground, we insisted on being international, mailing our fanzines around the world and corresponding with sympathetic comrades everywhere. We created fake names and personae, partly for fun, partly to distance ourselves from the constraints of our families, and partly to evade the law, as the film and photography labs would call the cops on me to police my pornographic work, and we were regularly receiving notifications from Customs threatening to charge us with “obscenity” and “sedition.” Influenced by The Situationists, we used détournement and slippages of the spectacle to express our revolutionary agenda. We were also influenced by Andy Warhol’s “Factory” and its superstars well before it became tiresomely trendy; ditto revolutionaries and terrorists like the RAF, the SLA, and the Weathermen. [There was only one book about Warhol and his film factory available at that time, Stephen Koch’s ‘Stargazer’ and only one book about the RAF, Jillian Becker’s ‘Hitler’s Children’, which we each had dog-eared copies of].

[Babboni] As a magazine editor, I am very interested in what your process of generating contents for the zine was like.

[LaBruce] We pretended to be a fully formed, radical queer punk youth army in Toronto when in fact it was basically just G.B. and I and a few friends sitting at our desks cutting and pasting fanzines or editing super 8 movies, integrating found pornography into our collages to make it also seem like a kind of sex cult, and eventually starting to make our own naive and personal pornography. It was DIY desktop publishing, so we became multi-disciplinarian — taking photographs, making collages, writing fiction, criticism, and manifestos, drawing cartoons, making super 8 movies, etc.

[Babboni] All these elements compiled in the fanzine made J.D.s an extremely authorial and sincere vehicle for the thought/voice of you and G.B. Jones…

[LaBruce] G.B. Jones was also in an all-female, feminist punk band, Fifth Column, with whom I lived in a crummy squat for two years, and for whom I danced as the sexually objectified go-go boy. Our friend and neighbour Candy, who had already done a great queer-adjacent punk fanzine called Dr. Smith, was also in the mix. With J.D.s, we were salacious, propagandistic, politically incorrect, sexually insurgent and pornographic, but also romantic and sincere. It was a unique formula, often copied but never duplicated. Rejecting the mainstream of two subcultures, gay and punk, we were outsiders amongst outsiders – fifth columnists, heretics, rebels and rabble-rousers.

[Babboni] Going back to my first observation, in J. D.s zine the dialogue between politics, punk, poetry and pornography happened organically.

[LaBruce] I had already been interested in radical politics at university, having taken a first-year undergrad course called ‘Protest Literature and Movements’ and a first-year grad course called ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism.’ I had also studied both still photography and super 8 filmmaking at film school, but it was only when I became radicalised in this queer punk environment that I started to make work that was political and pornographic. I had also taken poetry and fiction classes in university, but I only started to realise their creative potential with my fanzines and filmmaking.

[Babboni] In all of your work, we can see that there is a consistency, an authenticity that started with J.D.s zine and has branched out in a very genuine and personal way to countless projects that you carry out as a filmmaker and also as an artist, where your values are represented with great clarity and sincerity.

[LaBruce] The aesthetics of my early films are completely consistent with my fanzine aesthetics – collage, bricolage, détournement, punk and porn. The punk ethos and the spirit of queercore and its aesthetics still infuse my work to this day, even when I’m making more “mainstream” work.

[Babboni] J.D.s zine challenged the hypocrisy of the punks: they fought against the establishment but acted exactly as the establishment when it came to sex or gender. [quoting you] “that girls couldn’t be seen as butch, the same for boys, who couldn’t be seen as fags.” Can we say that the use of pornographic images in the fanzine was a direct attack against this homophobic aspect in the punk movement?

[LaBruce] As the character Big Mother says in my movie ‘The Misandrists’ [2017], “pornography is an act of insurrection against the dominant order. It expresses a principle inherently hostile to the regulations of society.” The engine of the gay liberation movement in the 70’s and 80’s was driven by radical and subversive sexual energy. After studying Wilhelm Reich at university and watching Dusan Makaveyev’s ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’ [1971], which influenced my movie ‘The Raspberry Reich’ [2004], I understood how dangerous sexual repression could be, and the importance of the orgasm and anal liberation! So, we were encouraging the punks to take it up the ass, which is the original meaning of the work “punk” — a prisoner [like Genet] who becomes a cum-dump in prison! But I also satirise these ideas [Reich could be pretty over the top with his orgone theories!] in ‘The Raspberry Reich’ [2004], as when the leader of the terrorist cell, Gudrun, says to her straight followers, whom she has encouraged to fuck each other for the revolution and who have now unfortunately turned gay, “How many times have I told you that homosexuality is only to be used for revolutionary purposes?!”

[Babboni] In our previous issue we featured an image from John Waters artwork called: ‘Gay is Not Enough’ [2006] and in the interview Waters said: “… I would say gay is not enough. It’s a good start but it’s not enough. There are bad gay movies: and that’s progress, to admit that. I do a whole thing in my spoken word show about this – that I think it’s time we should be dangerous again. I think gay men should start fucking lesbians and we should really freak out straight people, if we did that. And go to new limits …”. What are your feelings about transgression or being gay today when, thanks to social media, nothing is a taboo anymore?

[LaBruce] We now live in an era of maximalism and complete camp excess, except that camp is no longer the provenance of smart, sophisticated sissies, a secret, coded language of outsiders used for revolutionary political purposes. Instead, we have a world dominated by bad straight camp and conservative camp, artifice, theatrical exaggeration and aesthetic ugliness and grotesqueness practiced without a hint of irony or distance or subversive political underpinnings. It’s all just excess for its own sake, fame and narcissism for its own sake, rampant materialism and superficiality for its own sake, without any self-reflectivity, without conscience or consciousness. So, the idea that nothing is taboo anymore really doesn’t mean anything because there are no standards of taste or aesthetics or meaningfulness left. It is a clusterfuck. Transgression means nothing if there is nothing to transgress, or if everything has already been transgressed in a banal and uninspiring way. However, it’s still possible to stand out from the crowd, and that is by making perhaps more graceful or subtle gestures and provocations that challenge the hegemony of the contemporary wasteland of meaningless signs and signifiers. It can be as simple as going against the grain or being non-conformist in a thoroughly conformist world. Everyone wants to be an insider now – being an outsider is definitely out. But only by being an outsider can you see the big ugly picture and fight against the banality of it all, the central jejuneness of everything. I’ve always followed Genet’s dictum of supporting revolutionary moments whenever they crop up but abandoning and turning against revolutionary movements that have become assimilated, co-opted, diluted, institutionalised, and corrupt, and by that I don’t just mean the gays, but also art, cinema, style, and politics in general.

[Babboni] Was it an ethos for the fanzine?

[LaBruce] It started with J.D.s — we always tried to act punk in gay situations and act gay in punk situations. I would get thrown out of gay bars for having a Mohawk and wearing a swastika earring and acting aggro, and I would get beat up at hardcore punk shows for being femme-y and swishing and dressing like a sissy and being thoroughly old school gay. It was the revolution of ever day. The Socratic method! One of my favourite quotes from 70’s cinema is from Jane Wagner’s movie ‘Moment by Moment’ [1978] starring Lily Tomlin and John Travolta as narcissistic lovers, mirror images of one another that cancel each other out. It really is a dialectical masterpiece! Tomlin’s best friend in the movie, Naomi, says to her, while attending a bad art show called ‘Footography’: “We all have ideas. Sometimes the real talent is knowing when not to do anything with them.” I think people today should really think long and hard about that one!

[Babboni] Your first feature films are art films with sexually explicit content evolving into a notorious reputation for real/hardcore pornography first presented in: ‘Skin Flick’ [1999], ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010] and ‘The Raspberry Reich’ [2004], to name a few. Did you consciously plan this transformation, or did it happen organically? As you don’t seem too eager to draw a line between art and porn.

[LaBruce] Actually it had more to do with economics. After my first three films with Jürgen Brüning, we gained the reputation of pornographers, even though we thought we were just making sexually explicit art films. But when you have that reputation, you are regarded with a certain amount of moral judgment, skepticism, and even contempt. I tried to get larger-budgeted,  non-pornographic films financed, but my reputation followed me like a bad smell, and people assumed anything that I would make from that point on would be necessarily pornographic. It also didn’t help, especially back in the 90’s, that I was a flamboyant homosexual punk who himself had performed blowjobs and been anally penetrated on the big screen. But I had to continue making feature films [even though it was extremely painful for me and against my nature, it was now in my blood], so I segued into pornography. Brüning started the first ever porn company in Berlin, Cazzo Film, and my next four films were all at least partially financed by his and other porn companies. For ‘Skin Flick’ [1999], ‘The Raspberry Reich’ [2004] and ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010] we made softcore and hardcore versions, released under different titles and with different distributors. The softcore versions, which always maintained a few brief moments of hardcore sex, became sensations on the [non-gay] international film festival circuit, and even got some theatrical distribution. The hardcore versions had long, uninterrupted scenes of explicit sex and were consumed strictly as porn.

[Babboni] This format to present your films is thought-provoking and disruptive…

[LaBruce] I’ve been living a double life for quite some time now! [I just made a porn feature called ‘The Affairs of Lidia’ [2022] for the ethical feminist porn company ‘Erika Lust’ and they also insisted on a hardcore and softcore version for the purposes of marketing, so I guess we were kind of pioneers in that regard]. But yes, I am loathe to draw much of a distinction between art and porn. All I know is, I have always been considered too pornographic for the art world and too arty for the porn world. [Someone once told me I had a bad reputation in the porn world, which was quite a source of pride for me!] As with J.D.s, caught between the gay and punk scenes, reviled by both, I exist in a twilight world, like all old school homosexuals worth their salt.

[Babboni] Mainstream cinema is conservative in terms of how it supports and perpetuates the dominant ideology. Do you believe in the use of pornography as a kind of propaganda to break this paradigm?

[LaBruce] I’m all for propagandistic pornography! I’ve always been surprised that pornography hasn’t been used more purposefully for propagandistic purposes. And by that, I mean quo pornography – to insert subversive political messages, not only about sex, but about challenging the status quo and the dominant order in general, into porn films. The porn audience is put into a very receptive state, turned on and tuned in as it were, seduced and hypnotised by sexual pleasure and open to new ideas, new experiences. So, I love to infuse my porn with radical political notions, feminist and Marxist and quasi — and post-Freudian, and to question and undermine the conventions of porn while working within it. I often make people conscious of their spectatorship of porn and the mechanics of sexual representation, for example, which is something that a “real” pornographer should never do. Like Gudrun, I’ve always used porn for what I call political purposes. It started as a provocation against the straight punks, but then I extended it to include any audience that has been lulled into a state of complacency and the passive acceptance of the dominant ideology, particularly those people on the “radical left” whose politics have become doctrinaire, or who don’t practice what they preach. [I became disillusioned with academia when I recognised that there was a large disconnect between theory and praxis, and that there was a lot of radical posturing going in a hermetic environment that wasn’t necessarily connected to action in the material world. To me, filmmaking seemed more directly connected].

[Babboni] How do you envisage pornography into your work?

[LaBruce] I not only try to act politically within a porn context, but I also wield porn as a weapon against the sexually repressive dominant culture and cinema, which no matter how wild and crazy it appears to get, always remains, essentially, sexually conservative. Penetrative sex is still the line that is rarely crossed, and if you put it in a non-porn or art film, it is most often utilised not as something pleasurable and sexy, but as something grotesque and problematic. Explicit, penetrative sex is always consigned to the porn world where it can be viewed privately and with a certain amount of shame and swept under the carpet. It’s a disaster that people can no longer go to porn cinemas and watch sex communally. It really takes all the fun [and subversion] out of it.

[Babboni] Your work as a filmmaker and as a photographer is always imbued with fashion components/references. As an example, your latest film: ‘The Affairs of Lidia’ [2022] or even your latest exhibition at CASSTL Gallery [Antwerp/2022], where you joined forces with the artist/jeweller Jonathan Johnson. What is the importance of fashion to you and to your films?

[LaBruce] I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with fashion and the fashion world. As a dedicated fag, of course I’m drawn to it, but I’ve been disheartened by the direction it’s taken lately, with the imprimatur of the major designers becoming godhead, and the slavish capitulation to labels and luxury and materialistic consumerism in the ascendent. In the past it was considered crass and conformist to smother yourself in designer labels at the expense of your own sense of personal style. Now it’s de rigueur. I’ve always preferred vintage [or even better, second-hand] because it allows one to extract the designer garments from their capitalist modes of production and the signification of wealth and status and use the clothing as a personal statement that might be at odds with the intentions of the fashion industry or even the designers themselves, as opposed to becoming an advertisement for the corporate colonisation of style. Fashion is now dressed up in its woke Emperor’s New Clothes, but it’s really just putting lip gloss on a fashion pig. It hasn’t changed that much. Fashion is such a fun and easy target, but no one is even taking aim at it anymore. I miss Mr. Blackwell, or even Joan Rivers.

[Babboni] Your work reverberates in the fashion circuits and your films continue to feed the imagination of many creative people.

[LaBruce] As with porn, I’ve forged an uneasy and reluctant relationship with fashion, and try to take the piss out of it when I can. As with cinema people, fashion folk sometimes regard me with a certain skepticism, assuming that my work is too pornographic to be of use to them to promote their products, but I am asked every once and a while to do a fashion spread in a high profile magazine – I’ve done them for the likes of Purple and Numéro and others — which, as a fag, I find fun and even, at times, glamorous. I  recently shot the Spanish actor/star Manu Rios in Madrid for a fashion spread in Dust magazine. But I think there should be more porn in fashion, just as I think there should be more porn in mainstream cinema. I just saw scenes from a trendy new gore movie, and it’s the same old story: a woman’s body can be slashed, eviscerated, tortured, mutilated, dismembered, and cannibalised in a popular film, but you still can’t show it in the context of a sexually explicit scene of female pleasure. That would be too appalling.

[Babboni] Were you trying to make a dialogue between the two industries: cinema and fashion when you presented some players [from the fashion industry] to take part in your films, like Terry Richardson, Nikki Uberti, Santino Rice and Tony Ward?

[LaBruce] I think it was actually more about my work process, of asking people that I had become friends with or had met socially to participate in my movies. So, I became friends with Terry Richardson because I was hanging out a lot in New York in the 90’s and I knew a lot of people in the fashion world and we had mutual friends and we wanted to meet each other, and then I interviewed him, his first big interview, for the artist Peter Halley’s Index magazine, for which I wrote and did photography for and was a contributing editor. He and other artists I met, like Dash Snow, and Joaquin Phoenix, who I both met when they were 17, were really intrigued and inspired by the way I used porn in my work, and by the fact that I had done sexually explicit scenes myself in my early films. Nikki Uberti was a supermodel, muse of Richard Avedon, and married to Terry at the time, and she was trying to get into acting, so I gave her the part of Cameltoe in ‘Skin Flick’ [1999]. That whole scene at the beginning between her and Terry Richardson, where she rips the film from his camera and accuses him of exploiting her is very interesting to watch now, and somewhat prophetic, after everything that has happened since.

[Babboni] ‘Hustler White’ [1996] is very relevant for its aesthetics and reverberates in several moodboards as a reference in the fashion industry and Tony Ward helped to catapult its reputation…

[LaBruce] I collaborated on ‘Hustler White’ [1996] with Rick Castro, who was always working in the fashion industry, having had a design collaboration with Rick Owens and Michèle Lamy. We had actually cast a real street hustler named Monty as the lead in ‘Hustler White’ [1996], who was living with one of our friends who appears in the film, Glen Meadmore, but three weeks before shooting, Monty cleaned out Glen, stole all his belongings and his car, and fled Los Angeles. So, we had to go with our second choice, which was Tony Ward, who was already the muse of Rick and of Herb Ritts and Greg Gorman and all these fashion people and had just come out of a notorious relationship with Madonna. Of course Tony was perfect for the role and wonderful in it, but he also turned the movie into something less street-y and more fashion-forward, which was great for the profile of the film. And Rick of course styled the film, which was a mixture of street and fashion. Years later I asked Tony and his bestie at the time, Santino Rice, to do a cameo as two hapless, homeless men in my porn film ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010] and they made their own costumes, which was cute.

[Babboni] Can we say that the synergy between fashion and creativity has always been present in your work?

[LaBruce] I have had fashion people in my movies, but also musicians and artists and other filmmakers – Ben Weasel, Richard Kern, Kembra Pfhaler, Ron Athey, Glen Meadmore, Viva Ruiz, G.B. Jones, etc. Then, as I had always wanted to do a movie set in the fashion world [as a devotee of fashion films like William Klein’s ‘Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?’  [1966], Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’ [1966], Berry Gordy’s ‘Mahogany’ [1975], Irvin Kirschner’s ‘Eyes of Laura Mars’ [1978] etc], I finally managed to make one with my porn feature ‘The Affairs of Lidia’ [2022]. It’s a light-hearted pastiche of fashion, with gay porn stars having polyamorous sex with women as one of my added little provocations. I think a fashion/porn crossover will be the wave of the future.

[Babboni] I could imagine Dries Van Noten designing the costumes for ‘Saint-Narcisse’ [2020]or even Rick Owens designing for ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010]. Would you consider working with a fashion designer or a brand for the costumes of one of your movies? And if so, who would you pick?

[LaBruce] Actually, Rick Owens provided the main costumes for my movie ‘Otto; or, Up with Dead People’ [2008]! I also got Bernard Willhelm to provide some clothes for François Sagat for ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010]. Zaldy did the costumes for my stage production of ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ at the Hau Theatre in Berlin, which were also included in my film adaptation of it. Desi Santiago did the production design for my movie ‘The Misandrists’ [2017]. So, there already is a lot of fashion in there. I also worked with some up-and-coming designers for ‘The Affairs of Lidia’ [2022] like fRASER bRUCE mILLER. The Hamburg-based jeweller Jonathan Johnson has been a friend and collaborator of mine since 2010 when he came to my gallery presentation of ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010] at Peres Projects in Berlin and gave me a ring featuring the film’s title. I have a line of jewellery with him, and he’s made jewellery for my movies ‘Gerontophilia’ [2013] and ‘Saint-Narcisse’ [2020], pieces that figure specifically in the plotlines. He also appeared as an actor in my faux-exploitation film ‘Ulrike’s Brain’ [2017] opposite Susanne Sachsse, , star of ‘The Raspberry Reich’ [2004] and ‘The Misandrists’ [2017].

[Babboni] For this issue of ours, you directed and shot a fashion story based on ‘Theorem’ [1968] infusing it with the fashion elements derived from ‘American Psycho’ [2000], ‘Liquid Sky’ [1982] and ‘American Gigolo’ [1980]. Can you tell us how this idea came about?

[LaBruce] My method of writing a script for one of my movies usually entails remaking several movies that have certain themes or narratives in common, and stealing plotlines, characters, scenes, or even dialogue from those films. For example, ‘No Skin Off My Ass’ [1991] is a remake of Altman’s ‘That Cold Day in the Park’ [1969] and then adds Warhol’s ‘Flesh’ [1968] and bits of Polanski’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ [1968] and Alan J. Pakula’s ‘Klute’ [1971] into the mix. ‘Super 8 ½’ [1994] is a loose remake of Frank Perry’s ‘Play It as It Lays’ [1972] but it also references a number of Elizabeth Taylor movies and Warhol’s Factory movies, and the big interview scene at the end is cribbed from Fellini’s ‘Toby Dammit’ [1968]. ‘Hustler White’ [1996] is a mash-up of Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ [1950], Aldrich’s ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ [1962], and Warhol/Morrissey’s ‘Flesh’ [1968] and ‘Trash’ [1970]. ‘The Raspberry Reich’ [2004] steals from Makavejev’s ‘WR: Mysteries of the Organism’ [1971], Fassbinder’s ‘The Third Generation’ [1979] and Godard’s ‘Les Chinoises’ [1967]. ‘Gerontophilia’ [2013] could be viewed as a queer remake of Ashby’s ‘Harold and Maude’ [1971] or as a reverse ‘Lolita’ [1962]. ‘The Misandrists’ [2017] includes direct references to Aldrich’s ‘The Dirty Dozen’ [1967], Ida Lupino’s ‘The Trouble with Angels’ [1966] and the Ulrike Meinhof- scripted movie ‘Bambule’ [1970]. ‘Saint-Narcisse’ [2020] is a very loose remake of Mark Rydell’s ‘The Fox’ [1967], but also contains aspects of Paul Almond’s ‘Act of the Heart’ [1970] [as did my movie ‘Otto ; or, Up with Dead People’ [2008]], the Disney movie ‘The Parent Trap’ [1998], the Bette Davis movie ‘A Stolen Life’ [1946], directed by Curtis Bernhardt and Altman’s ‘Images’ [1972].

[Babboni] Fascinating to know more about the creative process behind your films and at the same time realise the importance of the history of cinema in your work and the homage you pay in a respectful way to everyone who came before you.

[LaBruce] I could go on and on, and in fact my movies are so hyper-referential that sometimes I forget myself where I’ve stolen particular scenes or lines of dialogue from. But the trick is to absorb all of these references and make something out of them that is uniquely yours, that is in your own style and voice, which for me often involves “queering” it, or making the homosexual subtext of the original more overt. So, for our imaginary movie [see fashion story on page… of this issue], I started with the idea of Pasolini’s ‘Theorem’ [1968] [which didn’t need any queering!] and then thought of other movies that reminded me of it. The main female character in ‘Liquid Sky’ [1982] also has sex with a number of her “friends” who then disappear or transcend earthly, existence, which brings to mind ‘American Psycho’ [2000]. And then all of the films are vaguely hustlerish, which leads to ‘American Gigolo’ [1980].

[Babboni] The images you created for our fashion story have similar emotions to some images created by Nan Goldin, Corinne Day, Davide Sorrenti and Larry Clark. Was it your intention to reference the 90’s? Also, if I am not mistaken, that was the era when you started your career as a photographer, correct?

[LaBruce] I actually took a photography course in film school in the 80’s and also did photography for my fanzine J.D.s, but I only started getting paid for my photography when I started shooting for gay jerk off mags like Honcho, Inches, and Playguy in around 1997, for about five years. I started doing fashion photography then, too, for a bunch of international magazines. I met Larry Clark and Harmony Korine at the world premiere of ‘Kids’ [1995] at Sundance in 1995 [I was there with my movie ‘Super 8 ½’ [1994]], and I was of course aware of the Boston School and had been photographed by Jack Pierson for Linda Simpson’s My Comrade magazine early on. I was also photographed in Berlin by Wolfgang Tillmans before he became a famous artist. My style and aesthetics have developed concurrently with all of those people. There was nothing like New York in the 90’s. It was still very kitchen sink and real, with a mixture of street culture and rich society side-by-side. All the little gay bars in the East Village had dark rooms for sex and I would be snorting coke and/or heroin with friends in the bathroom stall at Ellen von Unwerth’s birthday party. I was hanging out with Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen and Dash Snow and Earsnot of the IRAK graffiti crew, doing a lot of drugs but also working a lot and being very creative. Terry Richardson was blowing up in fashion and doing his pornographic shows, and everyone was carrying around a Yashica T4 and trying to copyhis work. I met my life-long friend Slava Mogutin then, who is now a successful artist and photographer and does a lot of fashion work. He also appears and reads his poetry in my movie ‘Skin Flick’ [1999].

[Babboni] Looking back to the 80’s, your work was as much about going against the gay orthodox and the gay mainstream as it was about challenging the status quo of the dominant straight culture. Concerning mainstream, what are your feelings as an artist?

[LaBruce] I’ve always been as much about challenging the conventions and orthodoxy of the gay mainstream as of the dominant culture. Gay assimilation actually started very early on, in the 80’s, when AIDS kind of wrecked the party and using sex as a radical political strategy started to be regarded as practically pathological. It was a slow, agonising death, but sexual conservativism finally won out, and homonormativity took over. In a way, porn stars became the last of the sexual radicals in the gay world. Before that, many gay men lived their lives as if they were porn stars, having very public sex any time and any place. Of course gay assimilation entailed buying into all of the most conservative institutions — marriage, monogamy, the military, the church, conventional politics, nationalism, patriotism, etc. The gay movement, which had always been largely controlled by affluent middle class white men, started to distance itself from most of its more radical elements, to the point where the oppressed started to become the oppressor, a theme that runs through all of my work. It was particularly disheartening because the early roots of the gay liberation movement in the 70’s were Marxist, as were the political origins of the black and feminist movements, and they were all aligned against the same capitalist enemy. I never considered myself part of the gay mainstream. I came from a working-class background, and I had a distaste for the racist, sexist, and classist attitudes I encountered when I first started hanging out in the gay scene. I preferred dodgy hustler bars to bougie gay sweater bars. My first boyfriend ever was a straight hustler, whom I broke up with, and when I met him two years later, he had turned into a neo-Nazi skinhead, but that’s another story! Short version: he needed a place to sleep, I invited him back into my bed, I tried to goad and humiliate him out of being a neo-Nazi, he beat the crap out of me, I kicked him out, and my skinhead fetish was born!

[Babboni] Are there any artists that you consider influential to you as a person, as well as an artist yourself?

[LaBruce] Artists who have influenced me who are also friends include John Waters, Kembra Pfhaler, Ron Athey, Slava Mogutin, Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noé. Artists whose work has influenced me would include Warhol, The Viennese Actionists, Niki de Saint Phalle, Pee-wee Herman, Wilhelm von Gloeden, and Marcel Duchamp. I’m partial to the Absurdists, the Surrealists, and Art Brut. I try to continue on in the footsteps of the great gay cinema avant-garde, including Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Wakefield Poole, Peter de Rome, Fred Halsted, the Kuchar brothers, Curt McDowell, Drella, Paul Morrissey, Peter Berlin, etc. Filmmakers too numerous to mention, but primarily Altman, Cassavetes, Frank Perry, Agnes Varda, Godard, Fassbinder, Antonioni, Buñuel, Jerry Lewis, and on and on. Oh, and Don Knotts, who didn’t direct but was kind of an auteur. And I guess I shouldn’t neglect to mention all my old school gay attachments to classical Hollywood cinema, particularly the films of Josef Von Sternberg, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Preminger, Minnelli, Cukor, McCarey, Sirk, Wilder, Wyler, Ophuls, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Robert Aldrich, Richard Fleischer, and on and on. Oh, I was also influenced by gay or gay-adjacent Asian directors like Yasujiro Ozu, Tsai Ming-Liang and Nagisa Ōshima.

[Babboni] When we were in Antwerp, we saw you DJing. How important is music to you and to your films? Tell us about that.

[LaBruce] Music has always been essential to my films, particularly in shaping the narrative, or using it in ironic counterpoint to the image [long before it became super-trendy on Netflix, etc, to do so]. In my early movies, I used punk music mixed in with found soundtrack music from 60’s and 70’s Hollywood movies or exploitation movies [when it was all still only available on vinyl]. For ‘No Skin Off My Ass’ [1991] and ‘Super 8 ½’ [1994] the music is all stolen, without buying the rights, which wasn’t such a big deal back then, especially for no budget and underground filmmakers. With ‘Hustler White’ [1996], I started getting music rights. For ‘Otto; or, Up with Dead People’ [2008], I put out a call on the internet for experimental or avant-garde music that would be suitable for a movie about a sensitive zombie boy having an existential crisis, and I got dozens and dozens of submissions, most of which I tried to use in the movie as an almost continuous musical soundtrack. Starting with ‘L.A. Zombie’ [2010], I’ve worked with a number of film composers who wrote music specifically for my movies. My latest indie feature film, ‘Saint-Narcisse’ [2020], was completely scored by the wonderful composer Christophe LaMarche-Leduc, but I also obtained the rights to the pop songs ‘Where Evil Grows’ by the Poppy Family and ‘Family Affair’ by Sly and the Family Stone, both which came out in 1972, the year the film is set in. From the beginning, I used music to fill in the narrative gaps that I had for lack of film footage.

[Babboni] Can you share your favourite playlist? What have you been listening to and/or playing as a DJ? Or [if you prefer] what would be part of your personal/favourite set list?

[LaBruce] I never thought I could be a DJ, but I started doing it anyway in the oughties at the occasional club, and then at film festival parties. The miracle of technically simple mixing software available for free on the internet allowed me to become a relatively decent DJ, and I even began to make part of my income that way. I can’t name all the tracks, but I’m very eclectic, playing soul, funk, disco, pop, R&B, etc.

[Babboni] On Instagram, you pay tribute to several film directors and their films, which I assume were essential for your practice as a filmmaker…

[LaBruce] I was mostly influenced as a kid by USA and Québécois movies of the late 60’s and the 70’s that I would see on late night TV. I could single out Bob Rafelson’s ‘Five Easy Pieces’ [1970] and ‘The King of Marvin Gardens’ [1972], Robert Altman’s ‘That Cold Day in the Park’ [1969], ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ [1971], ‘Images’ [1972] and ‘3 Women’ [1977]. Paul Almond’s ‘Isabel’ [1968] and ‘Act of the Heart’ [1970], Frank Perry’s ‘The Swimmer [1968], ‘Last Summer’ [1969], ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’ [1970] and ‘Play It as It Lays’ [1972], and on and on. Jerry Lewis’ movies as a director, particularly ‘The Ladies Man’ [1961]. ‘The Nutty Professor’ [1963], ‘The Patsy’ [1964] and ‘The Big Mouth’ [1967] were also a big influence on me.

[Babboni] And as far as your own filmography, can I ask you if there is a movie that you consider to be your favourite?

[LaBruce] I don’t know if it’s my favourite, but ‘Super 8 ½’ [1994] is like my redheaded stepchild movie. It was my sophomore feature and a complete nightmare to make. I had to work as a dishwasher, waiter, and bartender to make money to complete it, my DOP had a nervous breakdown, my boyfriend who was acting in it broke up with me, the lab called the cops, the negative fell apart in post because the negative cutter did a lousy job, etc, etc. It took me two years, but I finally completed it, which is my second rule of filmmaking: finish your film! [My first rule is make films]. The movie is a shambles, but it got around on the festival circuit, culminating with a screening at Sundance. The New York Post gave it below zero stars with the headline “Super 8 ½ in Negative Numbers.”

[Babboni] In 2010 you interviewed Karl Lagerfeld for Vice magazine and he said: “I admire porn… and I personally only like high-class escorts. I don’t like sleeping with people I really love. I don’t want to sleep with them because sex cannot last, but affection can last forever. I think this is healthy. And for the way the rich live, this is possible. But the other world, I think they need porn.” Do you agree with him?

[LaBruce] No, I prefer low-class escorts.

[Babboni] Our previous issue was an homage to John Waters and I know you are quite close; how is your relationship with him?

[LaBruce] John Waters and I have been friends for quite a long time now. I first met him at a book signing for ‘Crackpot’ he did in Toronto in 1987 at a great, now defunct bookstore ‘This Ain’t The Rosedale Library’. It was really just at the time I was starting to make short, experimental super 8 queer movies, and obviously he was a huge inspiration. He has always been supportive of my work, attending a number of my movie premiers, including one for ‘Skin Flick’ [1999] at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC in 1999. In 2000 I visited the set of his movie ‘Cecil B. Demented’ [2000] for a piece for index magazine and got yelled at by Melanie Griffith, but that’s another story. In 2007 I interviewed him for the Gay Times of London, and he invited me to visit him in Baltimore and stay over night at his house. He casually suggested I bring a suit as “we might attend the inaugural ball of the new Governor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley.” I thought he was kidding, but he did in fact take me as his date. It was like something out of “The Manchurian Candidate,” a huge rally/celebration at a cavernous convention centre. He had backstage passes, of course, so after being patted down by the FBI we went to the private reception and he introduced me to everyone, including the governor, as “a wonderful filmmaker from Canada.” He is so generous and has such largesse, it really floored me. Later a took a photograph of my poop in one of his toilets and published it along with the interview. He thought it was pretty funny!

[Babboni] In the film ‘No Skin Off My Ass’ [1991] there are very exquisite/ethereal aquatic scenes, Can you tell us where the pool scenes/locations were and also a little more about the location of your character’s house [The Hairdresser]?

[LaBruce] I shot many of the interiors of ‘No Skin Off My Ass’ [1991] at my own apartment, but the brilliant location of the hairdresser’s home happened to be the basement of the house of an elderly rich couple for whom a friend of mine was working as a chauffeur and gardener. I’m not even sure he ever told them we were shooting there. It was formerly the 60’s swinging bachelor pad of their son, complete with underground swimming pool! The design is kind of 60’s futurism meets the Flintstones. It really added so much value to the film. Incidentally, the young daughter of my friend the chauffeur and his wife, also a friend and fellow filmmaker, plays the little girl I am babysitting in the movie!

[Babboni] Before starting the photo shoot [that you did for Doesn’t Exist] in Antwerp last year/2022], you turned on the sound and an extremely cinematic soundtrack dominated the studio. Can you tell us what was played during that day?

[LaBruce] I used to collect soundtracks on vinyl, and I still have the collection of over 200 records, some quite rare, mostly from the 60’s and 70’s. I used to poach music from them for my early movies before I or anyone else was so goddamn concerned with copyright. So I now have a playlist with a lot of that music that I often play for pleasure and relaxation, and I often use it when I’m doing photo shoots to create a cinematic mood. I was probably playing soundtracks like Robert Altman’s ‘Images’ [1972] by John Williams, Losey’s ‘Boom!’ [1968] by John Barry, Richard Quine’s ‘Bell, Book and Candle’ [1958] by George Duning, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ [1958] by Bernard Herrmann, Jack Haley Jr.’s ‘The Love Machine’ [1971] by Joe Ng and Ting Si Hao, Elito Petri’s ‘The Tenth Victim’ [1965] by Piero Piccioni, and for sure I was playing the soundtrack for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Theorem’  [1968] by Ennio Morricone, as well as his soundtrack for Elio Petri’s ‘Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion’ [1970]! The soundtrack for Peter Ustinov’s ‘Hammersmith is Out’ [1972] by Dominic Frontiere. Oh and the soundtrack for Vincente Minnelli’s ‘Goodbye Charlie’ [1964] by André and Dory Previn!

[Babboni] In your work, you contextualise explicit sex [which in turn has its own specific narrative], elevating it beyond pornography. Can we say that this contextualization would be a way of rethinking the cinema practices?

[LaBruce] I hate the word “elevated” — especially when it’s applied to horror or porn films. It has a snobbish connotation. I wouldn’t call John Waters’ masterpieces ‘Mondo Trasho’ [1969] and ‘Multiple Maniacs’ [1970] “elevated”! More like the opposite of elevated. Sometimes very “low class”, down-and-dirty porn, or low-budget exploitation horror films, are just as interesting, maybe even more so because they are channelling the zeitgeist without intellectual or artistic pretensions. Like my character in ‘Super 8 ½’ [1994], my signature use of porn in the beginning was self-conscious and somewhat embarrassed by itself. It drew attention to and undercut the artificial and constructed representation of sex, and its formal and thematic conventions. I used a variety of distanciation techniques to make the audience aware of its viewership and its collusion in the act of sexual objectification or exploitation [using films-within-the-film, having characters who are filmmakers, using music ironically, being hyper-referential, making fun of sex and porn], but this approach also somehow made the porn seem more personal and poignant. My political use of porn in a queer context added another layer of distance but made it again more personal and “authentic”.

[Babboni] Since you started, cinema has evolved substantially. When we interviewed Peter Greenaway [for our second issue], he said that “cinema is dead.” Do you agree with Peter Greenaway?

[LaBruce] Godard proclaimed that cinema is dead at the end of ‘Weekend’ in 1968! [“Fin du Cinema”]. In Marxist terms, Guy Debord declared cinema almost dead in his article ‘Contre le cinéma’, which attempted to wrestle it from its capitalist modes of production. I would say that cinema could be now described as being in its death throes. The same could be said of poetry, or the novel. It may continue to exist in some slightly mutated form, but its heyday is definitely over!

[wrap]

Original published in issue #5 / A tribute to Bruce LaBruce