BRUCE LABRUCE: Challenger of Normative Standards Within Gay & Queer Culture

“Every sexual fetish involves a certain worship of the love object, even a strong religious devotion. Sex is religious, religion is sexual. End of story.”

TRQ: Bruce LaBruce Born January 3, 1964

Writer, actor, director, and photographer Bruce LaBruce explores transgressive themes that challenge normative standards within gay and queer culture. He is closely associated with queercore, a guerrilla-like approach to making art expressing homosexual discontent with society.

Telling stories of hustlers, drag queens, porn actors, and zombies, his work blurs the boundaries between pornography, social commentary, sex, and horror. He regularly writes and shoots for Vice, Man About Town, Purple Fashion, The Guardian UK, Index Magazine, and Eye Weekly. 

LaBruce is a Canadian born in Southampton, Ontario. His childhood was a happy one, and he attended York University to study film.

In 1985, he was editor and producer of J.D.s, alongside filmmaker G. B. Jones. The zine sparked the provocative queercore scene that joined the punk movement in taking aim at oppressive norms within the mainstream.

In 1990 and 1991, J.D.s hosted movie nights. Alongside Jones’ work, LaBruce presented his super eight films Boy, Girl (1987), I Know What It’s Like to Be Dead (1987) and Bruce and Pepper Wayne Gacy’s Home Movies (1988). Jones also presented.

In 1991, LaBruce released his debut film, No Skin Off My Ass. LaBruce offers a queer response to Robert Altman’s de-queered 1969 film adaptation of That Cold Day in the Parkby Peter Miles. The film tells the story of the relationship between a hairdresser and a mute skinhead. Originally intended for Toronto’s underground scene, the cult hit features explicit sex scenes between LaBruce and actor Klaus von Brucker.

After seeing the film, the novelist gave LaBruce an autographed copy of the book with the note, “You got it right.” Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain named it his favourite film. The Museum of Modern Art has screened the film twice, and it was recently presented at Visionär Film Fest.

LaBruce released Super 81/2 in 1994, a satirical look at the relationship between a porn director and a lesbian filmmaker. The film played at festivals around the world.

In 1996, LaBruce co-directed Hustler White with Rick Castro. Tony Ward plays a street hustler on Santa Monica Boulevard in a film that combines hardcore sex scenes with moments of Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).

In 1997, LaBruce published The Reluctant Pornographer, a memoir. Explaining the title, he said, “I think you’d be crazy not to be reluctant with regard to working in pornography. It is a very strange and harsh world which attracts a lot of interesting but sometimes insane and freaked out people. I choose to work in pornography because it is one of the few remaining places where homosexuals can express themselves freely and radically without fear of censure.”

Skin Flick followed in 1999 and was more pornographic than his earlier films. The Raspberry Reich (2004) continued his use of pornography in his films and was released in two different versions. The uncut version of the film included gay sex scenes not included in the original.

“I think gay culture is more bourgeois than ever because now that it has been identified as a demographic which can be economically exploited by corporations, it is to the advantage of those who can capitalize on its commodification to make it as innocuous and non-threatening as possible in order to market it. Queercore was and probably remains a form of rebellion against this process.” — Bruce LaBruce

L.A. Zombie starring François Sagat premiered in 2010, as two versions. The 103-minute DVD version features hardcore gay porn not included in the 63-minute festival and theatre version. A sneak peek of the film included an exhibit of LaBruce’s silkscreened portraits of Sagat as the Zombie at the Peres Project Exhibit in Berlin.

In 2011, LaBruce directed a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin at the Ufer Theatre. With Pierrot as a transgender man, the performance included castration, sex toys, and gender diversity. LaBruce released the adaptation as Pierrot Lunaire (2014).

With Gerontophilia (2013), LaBruce explores sexual taboos in a less sexually explicit style. The film tells of a romantic relationship between a young male healthcare worker and an elderly assisted living resident.

In 2014, TIFF/Bell Lightbox honoured LaBruce with a film retrospective. MoMA in New York followed with their own retrospective in 2015, presenting all his feature films and a selection of shorts. They are now part of MoMA’s permanent film collection. 

For CockyBoys studio, LaBruce produced the pornographic short film collection, It is Not the Pornographer That is Perverse in 2018. The four films star François Sagat alongside other gay porn actors in a series inspired by It is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971) by Rosa von Praunheim. The collection premiered at porn festivals in Toronto, Guadalajara, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, the UK, and Israel.

In 2020, LaBruce premiered Saint-Narcisse at the 77^th Venice International Film Festival in the Venice Days stream. The film explores the blurring of religious and sexual ecstasy, twincest, and the central character’s fetish for himself. 

“The idea of trying to humanize taboo sexuality and fetishes runs through all my work. You’re not sick or morally corrupt because you have a fetish, you’re just a living, breathing human that happens to have this extreme impulse. It’s actually quite often a real worship, a devout kind of respect and appreciation, even a spiritual appreciation of the object of desire.” — Bruce LaBruce

LaBruce’s work has been included in the Death Book series, along with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alicia Gibson, PZtoday and other notable artists. LaBruce’s contribution focuses on the representation of death in Western culture and includes his photography and images of his performances and film productions. 

About the Authors

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore. 

Sources:

Bruce LaBruce

GLBTQ Archive

OUT

Los Angeles Blade