If Wakefield Poole is the spearhead of experimental gay cinema, Bruce LaBruce is its stabbing sword. Poole is recognized as a radical auteur who synthesized gay cinema, experimentation, and pornography, turning once-peephole movies into a new kaleidoscope of cerebralism. Since the mid-’80s, LaBruce has released 20 short and feature-length films that weave together satire, taboo subject matter like BDSM and extreme fetishism, gore, hardcore sex, and social commentary into a truly individual style that gleefully walks the tightrope between lowbrow and high art. Regardless of one’s predilection toward gender, orientation, or possible-prudent views, LaBruce is an acknowledged master at creating groundbreaking movie mayhem that has no equal.
A native of Canada, LaBruce was a firebrand of the ’80s underground cinema and helped kickstart the homocore movement of the ’80s and ’90s. And LaBruce’s dedication to his art has been as aggressive as his work. Writer, actor, filmmaker, photographer, agitator … LaBruce wears all these titles and he wears them well. If there is a punk rock descendant of the gnarly genetics of 20th-century subterranean filmmaking, LaBruce is the heir apparent.
In conjunction with Sun-Ray Cinema’s March 26 installment of its discussion-based series, “The Talkies,” which features Poole screening Bijou(1972) followed by LaBruce’s 1996 film, Hustler White,Folio Weekly Magazine sent LaBruce some questions, which he was kind enough to answer. Here’s a portion of that communiqué.
Folio Weekly Magazine: In your 1994 film Super 8 1/2, you reference Wakefield Poole. Is he an inspiration to your work?
Bruce LaBruce: I like to think that I’ve tried to make my films in the tradition of what I call “The Great Gay Avant-Garde,” which has a long and complex lineage. It extends back to Kenneth Anger, who started making films in the ’40s, to Jean Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour, made in 1950, up through the ’60s with Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and The Kuchar Brothers in the ’60s and beyond, and of course John Waters in the ’70s and beyond. But the “Great Gay Avant-Garde” also has a porn component, which includes directors like Fred Halsted, Peter Berlin, Curt McDowell, Jack Deveau, Peter de Rome, and, of course, Wakefield Poole. What distinguishes these pornographers from any others are their styles and aesthetics, which have always been of prime importance in the gay world, their visual inventiveness (on meager budgets!), and their political use of sex, particularly in terms of gay liberation. Many of these films, like those of Mr. Poole’s, helped introduce the kind of sexual freedom and militancy that characterized the gay liberation movement in the ’70s and ’80s. I probably saw Boys in the Sand for the first time in the early ’80s on VHS, and it was a revelation for me that a filmmaker could combine explicit gay pornography with a number of unexpected elements: strong narrative technique, mise-en-scene, montage, humor, an inventive, sometimes ironic use of music, a camp sensibility, etc. It also made explicit gay sex so lush and sensual and erotic, while still remaining unapologetically pornographic. I started making films using some of the same techniques in the mid-’80s, except with a punk aesthetic. I credited the filmmakers I’ve mentioned in my second feature film, Super 8 1/2, which was in some ways an homage to this style of amazing ’70s avant-garde pornography.
It seems like your films were initially made in the wake of filmmakers like David Wojnarowicz, Richard Kern, and Nick Zedd; who were then sometimes known as “transgressive” filmmakers. Do you feel that sensibility in cinema affected your approach to making films?
I think those three were absolutely transgressive filmmakers. I had my nipple pierced in an early film, and pierced my boyfriend’s in No Skin Off My Ass, as a tribute to Wojnarowicz’s Robert Gets His Nipple Pierced! Richard Kern’s work was a particularly hard lesson for me. In my early ’20s, I had been somewhat brainwashed by a certain strain of feminism that was very politically correct. (Full disclosure: I still, however, consider myself a feminist.) So I really struggled with Richard’s work initially, particularly his films with Lydia Lunch. Then I was kind of deprogrammed by a couple of enlightened friends, and I ultimately realized what incredibly strong statements that Richard and Lydia were making about female sexuality and power. It also served to free me from political correctness in my own work. I became friendly with Richard, and he even did a cameo in Super 8 1/2. So the Cinema of Transgressive was very influential on me as a political, underground filmmaker.
Hustler White seems like this weird amalgamation of film noir, a Grail Quest, and straight-up, crazy sex. Can you describe the movie for the uninitiated?
Hustler White is an amalgamation of many influences. It’s partly an homage to Kenneth Anger’s depiction in Hollywood Babylon of the seedy underbelly of Hollywood. It’s also a queered updating of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, as well as a re-imagining of Visconti’s Death in Venice. It’s also a document of the last gasp of the male prostitution scene on Santa Monica Boulevard, before the cops drove away all the hustlers, and before the Internet made street hustling almost defunct.
With your recent MoMa film retrospective last May, do you feel somewhat validated for spending 25-plus years creating on a kind of rogue wavelength?
Yes, it was a great experience, and an opportunity to look back at my work as a whole and see how it has evolved through the years. For example, I started out making films on Super 8 and 16mm film, and then made the switch to digital, which introduced a whole new aesthetic, which I sometimes fought and sometimes embraced. I also developed my work through the gay movement, the queer movement, and now the post-queer movement, so it’s interesting to look back and see how that played out historically. It was also cool to introduce my films to a whole new audience.
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