About the Editor: Bruce LaBruce
In the wrong hands, cinematic transgression is easy… too easy: wrap a few strategically shocking images around a thematically blunt object, pound your audience senseless with it, and call it a day. But for someone fluent in all of film's multifaceted languages, who knows when to wield a visual scalpel or a clap of sexually graphic thunder, transgression can do what nothing else ever could.
Cut to our guest editor, the queercore icon, Bruce LaBruce.
A resident of Toronto, LaBruce's work as a filmmaker, writer, artist, and photographer knows no borders — or bounds.
"When Queer Majority approached me about the possibility of doing this,” he said speaking about this Cinema issue, “I thought, you know, I'm a queer filmmaker, so a queer cinema issue would be on point. Like the fanzine I did way back in the 90s, called J.D.'s, one issue of which was dedicated to underground cinema, which was a lot of fun.”
"I also used to write for a cinema magazine that I started with a bunch of grad students and professors at York University in the 90s called Cine-Action! It was founded by my mentor, Robin Wood, who was a very well-known film critic and a favorite of Scorsese and Truffaut. He wrote a very seminal article called The Responsibilities of the Gay Film Critic. Robin was a big influence on me.
"So I thought about all those things, wanting to give a platform to my favorite people; friends or colleagues I've known for a while and some I’ve met recently that are doing interesting things in queer cinema — for example, one writer is from Taiwan, writing about queer cinema in that country. I wanted to give QM’s readers an idea of what's going on internationally."
It is a testament to LaBruce's impressive artistic abilities and wide-ranging accomplishments that it'd be easier to say what LaBruce hasn't done than try to list everything he has. He’s the director of countless shorts and 15 feature-length films such as Montreal's Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Grand Prix-winning Gerontophilia (2013), and the 2014 Teddy Award Special Jury Prize-winning Pierrot Lunaire (2014) — as well as others such as No Skin Off My Ass (1991), Hustler White (1996), Saint-Narcisse (2020), and The Visitor (2024) which debuted at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.
After LaBruce's L.A. Zombie (2010) was scheduled but then banned from the Melbourne International Film Festival, it got the showing and award consideration it deserved that same year at Switzerland's Locarno Film Festival. LaBruce's visual arts have also been displayed internationally, most notably his more than somewhat infamous Obscenity photography exhibition at Spain's La Fresh Gallery in 2011.
From screen to stage — LaBruce directed and wrote a trio of plays for the Hau Theater in Berlin, two of which subsequently evolved into avant-garde films, and he created works for Zurich's Theater Neumarkt and Hau Theater's X-Homes project based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
LaBruce has also brought his queer erotic sensibilities to music videos, two of which garnered him MuchMusic Video Awards, while the XBIZ porn awards gave his movie Fleapit not only Best Gay Director but Best Gay Film in 2018.
His cinematic work was honored with full retrospectives first by TIFF/Bell Lightbox in Toronto in 2014, and then a year later by New York's Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) highlighted many of LaBruce's feature films and a host of his shorts, all of which will soon be in the MoMA film collection. He was similarly honored with a full retrospective at La Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal in 2022.
Exposing his life and creative processes in The Reluctant Pornographer (1997) and his other autobiography, Porn Diaries: How To Succeed in Hardcore Without Really Trying (2020), LaBruce's newest book The Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2024), is described as an "unapologetic visual anthology of homoeroticism and non-conformist counterculture."
Discussing the origins of queercore cinema, LaBruce said, "I was really heavily influenced by all the great gay avant-garde filmmakers like Warhol and Paul Morrissey, Kenneth Anger, Curt McDowell, and Jack Smith. Then, there were also the avant-garde gay porn filmmakers like Peter de Rome and Wakefield Poole. That's where I was coming from cinematically, and if you merge that with the punk zine scene I was into, you arrive at my idea of queer porn.
"Zines have always been very multimedia; learning to write manifestos or fiction, to be a photographer, to do collage, desktop publishing, make music, and we made movies — my whole filmmaking ethos came out of that sort of queercore experience.
"There was also a lot of gay separatism at that time, not a lot of crossovers between communities, but we believed in inclusivity and always sought to find solidarity between us, so that's one of the things I kept in mind when editing this issue."
Whether with a photographer’s loupe, a movie camera, a writer's pen, or treading the stage, Bruce LaBruce's unapologetically vibrant life, is filled as much with brilliant creativity as it is with occasionally frighteningly poignant insights on life, sex, and queerness, proves that transgression — in the right hands — is not just important but essential.
Published Jul 1, 2024
Published in Issue XII: Cinema