by SASHA

Preceding the Canadian premiere of his latest film, The Raspberry Reich, one of the organizers of the Toronto Film Festival introduced Bruce LaBruce as "Toronto's bad boy of gay porn."

"You can't use that term anymore," LaBruce said in his phlegmatic, wry voice, a DRI T-shirt framing his slender physique. "A film critic in Variety said it was becoming increasingly age-inappropriate."

The night before, LaBruce had joined me for dinner at my apartment. I made him borscht, then cabbage and sausage stew. LaBruce is a charming dinner companion and a marvellous eater (ah, country boys), and neatly tucked into a generous helping. "I love German food," he told me. "When I was editing Raspberry Reich in Germany, I loved eating."

The Image + Nation gay and lesbian film festival will be screening, as part of a retrospective on LaBruce, The Raspberry Reich, along with Hustler White, Super 8 -1/2 and Sugar (based on his short stories). The films span over a decade of LaBruce's career, from the raw, personal early works to the more polished and politically adventurous films, and cover all of his preoccupations: exposing homosexuality and homoeroticism in fascist posturing, gender roles, terrorism and the rigidity of male sexual identity. As we ate, we talked.

The revenge motif

Mirror: As a young person you were involved in JDs, one of the most radical queer punk porn magazines of the early '80s. Why did you choose porn to convey your politics?

Bruce LaBruce: I got into making porn because my friends and I abandoned the gay scene - we found it, even in the mid-'80s, becoming so bourgeois. We turned to punk because we thought it was fresh and political and aesthetically more interesting. But we didn't realize in some ways how sexually conventional and homophobic it was. I would make gay fanzines and movies and show them in punk clubs and get beat up, even though the early roots of punk had been quite sexually experimental and open. So as a way of getting revenge on these people, who thought they were being so radical and political - but were actually very conventional when it came to sex - it was very important to me to make work that was very explicitly homosexual. We'd also get straight guys from bands staying at our house and when they'd get drunk, we'd make them take their clothes off and publish their pictures in the fanzine. It was a revenge motif, basically.

M: Your work also seems influenced by mid-century gay porn, from the '40s and '50s, where there were, along with the typical physique magazine fare, a lot of tattooed punk drifters.

BL: Yes, I own a lot of those chapbooks. Early gay culture was like a refuge for all sorts of misfits and nonconformists. There were people who just got out of jail, or the navy, who had ended up having sex there. And there were blacks who were discriminated against. The gay scene was sort of a safe haven for any sort of social misfit or renegade.

M: Are you a fan of [gay novelist] John Rechy's work?

BL: I was just on a panel with him in L.A. at the L.A. gay and lesbian film festival. He was amazing. He had his orange tan and his pompadour. He is such an elder statesman; he was talking about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and he referred to them as court eunuchs. The ironic thing about being gay these days is that the old school is so much more revolutionary and radical and challenging than the new school.

Le Birth of LaBruce

M: You had success very quickly with your work, right?

BL: I was already sort of a known entity underground during the punk scene with the fanzines. That's where Bruce LaBruce was born, I adopted that pseudonym during that period.

I made No Skin Off My Ass in 1992, which was about a hairdresser who falls in love with a neo-Nazi skinhead. I played the hairdresser and my boyfriend played the skinhead. We were so naïve and shy about it and just had a dyke friend of ours shoot us having sex. But we would say, "Close your eyes while you're shooting, because we don't want you to watch." [laughing] It was so pathetic. I started showing it on super 8 in punk bars and in art galleries. We blew it up to 16 mm and it got on the festival circuit.

After that I made Super 8-1/2, which took two years and was a nightmare. I hadn't really expected No Skin Off My Ass to be showing all over the world and I probably went on a bit of an ego trip, I suppose. Some of the collaborators were people that I'd been living with and working with, and they were feeling I was hogging the fame. I had a huge rift with these people. Super 8-1/2 was a fictionalized version of that whole experience, where I played a washed-up porn star that this dyke filmmaker was making a documentary about, which I thought was my big comeback, but she was just exploiting me. The girl who plays the lesbian filmmaker was based on my collaborator in JDs, G.B. Jones. I don't think it's a mean characterization, I think it's in some ways very flattering. It was more of a tribute in my mind, but I'm sure she didn't take it that way.

Also, the boyfriend in No Skin Off My Ass was in it, and we broke up during the making of the film. The DP ended up having a complete nervous breakdown and being institutionalized. So it was art imitating life, and life started imitating art, and I became an alcoholic, which lasted for years.

Multicultural sexuality

M: Most cultures have porn, but it's distinct everywhere. How have people in other countries reacted to your version, based on their own sexual identities?

BL: Part of the reason that I want to start making more mainstream movies as well is because I want to travel to Asian countries. They have an incredible sexual underground, but they don't want to acknowledge it, and they don't want to screen my films at their festivals. The only Asian country I've been to was Japan, when I was at the Tokyo International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with Hustler White. I have a following there that is mostly teenage girls, because they're the ones who really fetishize gay pornography and everything gay.

M: Do they just love Tony Ward [the star of Hustler White], who is so macho and model gorgeous?

BL: Not just him, homosexuality in general. Gay love stories. The girls love male homosexuality.

M: Why?

BL: Some people think it's because Japan is still somewhat like America in the '50s, in terms of the way women are treated. There's this image of women being above sex and maintaining more traditional roles. The gay male thing presents an ideal of an egalitarian relationship between two people. I'm not really sure where it comes from, but when I showed the movie there were 500 people, and over half of them were teenage girls.

M: You were in South Africa about four or five years ago with Skin Flick. How was that?

BL: It was so bizarre. In Cape Town, for example, one of our hosts was this guy Reverend Rowe. He was a black Anglican reverend who was gay, but not openly gay, but everyone knows he's gay. He did this public service announcement for the film festival, which was called Out in Africa. In it, he appeared on a pulpit, and said, in full Anglican drag, "Some people think that homosexuality is the devil's work, but I don't." Then he leaves the pulpit and there's a devil's tail coming out from under his vestment. It was hugely controversial, and he had to issue an apology. In a country like that, which is so volatile and unstable, there's just so much energy. A lot of it is negative, but some of it is really positive. There are so many contradictions and paradoxes that you're just embroiled in them all the time.

The opening ceremony of the film festival was in this very affluent white mall in Johannesburg. This famous gay South African performance artist got up in elaborate drag, verging on Leigh Bowery territory, with a big feather thing coming out of his ass attached to a dildo. He took that out of his ass, shat out this brown liquid into a pitcher and drank it. It was a messy performance piece, very shocking, but then they just cleaned up the stage and the next person was a guy from the military trying to get gays and lesbians to sign up. And here I was, showing Skin Flick, a porno about neo-Nazis. The funny part about the reaction there was that they thought it was a little tame. They were kind of like, "Is that all you got?" The joke I came up with was, "Everyone there has been raped, robbed or shot in the head - they deal with that on a daily basis."

Homesick homo

M: After Skin Flick, you didn't make a movie for four years. Why?

BL: Basically I'd made four feature films in the '90s, and when I came home after touring Skin Flick I realized I didn't have a life. I hadn't had a relationship in nine years, I hadn't cooked myself a meal in years. I was just totally rootless.

M: You then made Raspberry Reich. Why did you choose this particular group to tribute?

BL: The Baader-Meinhof Gang, or Red Army Faction, were the most glamorous terrorists going in the '70s. They wore leather jackets and sunglasses and berets and drove fast cars, and they were very aware of their glamour. Andreas Baader was a hustler in gay bars when he was young, and Ulrike Meinhof was a glamorous academic who put her ultra-leftist theory into practice. As a punk in the '80s, I and my friends all passed around a book called Hitler's Children, by Jillian Becker. Although it was from a rather conservative point of view, it was a detailed account of the RAF. Also, like the Weathermen and the SLA, they believed in sexual revolution. Anyway, the movie is also a critique of the left, particularly those leftists who don't practice what they preach, who theorize but don't act, or who act hypocritically.

M: Skinheads, neo-Nazis and hustlers appear consistently in your work. How did that all start?

B: It's partly because when I was in my 20s I had a boyfriend who was a hustler and peripherally involved in punk. We broke up, and he transformed into a neo-Nazi, spouting their racist rhetoric. He was in trouble and needed a place to stay so I allowed him to stay in my house. I started ridiculing him and trying to change his mind, and he beat the shit out of me. I guess it turned me on. I made No Skin Off My Ass about it in a whimsical, almost comedic way. When I had the opportunity to make my first legitimate porn for a porn company, Skin Flick, I revisited the theme, but treated it more seriously.

M: Any fond screening anecdotes, memories from the making of The Raspberry Reich?

BL: Getting kicked out of a location for having porn stars wearing ski masks and carrying guns running in and out of an apartment building, and for having two actors have sex in an elevator.

Bruce labruce will give a talk: "But is it pornography? Art and Porn in the New world order", Tuesday, Sept. 28, 5:30 p.m.–7 p.m., in Mcgill's Arts bldg, west wing, room w-125. For more information on screenings, visit www.image-nation.org.

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