Bruce LaBruce is not interested in comfort zones. Since the 1980s, the Canadian filmmaker and pioneer of the queercore movement has been intersecting punk, queerness, pornography, and politics in work that pushes boundaries and rejects categorization. In an age of politically charged fear and turmoil, LaBruce makes revolution sexy. From Oct. 9 to 11, FACETS will present “The Revolution is My Boyfriend,” a retrospective of ten of his most unique and uncompromising films. LaBruce will also make university appearances across Chicago, including at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
My first question is how you want to introduce yourself and what you focus on, because I feel like a really integral part of the retrospective, and kind of the theme of the showings as a whole, is how – still as a filmmaker – you do live between labels and identities in your work. Because you have a past of the zine as a writer, a photographer, and of course a main father of the queercore movement.
Bruce LaBruce: It’s because of my background in the zine world and the queercore that I became really multi-hyphenate, like interdisciplinary, because when we did the fanzines we did everything. It was like a do-it-yourself publication. It was desktop publishing.
It was collage and we all took photographs. I wrote fiction for it. We wrote manifestos.
We were making super experimental films concurrently with that, and interviews, so there was a journalistic aspect to it. And so it instilled in us this idea of being multi-disciplined.
In fact, I was also in university at the same time, and I was one of the co-founders of a magazine that we did there at York University, under the tutelage of the famous gay film critic Robin Wood. We made a magazine called Zine Action. And I actually did the desktop with another person. We did the layout and everything at the magazine. It was also very do-it-yourself, and I wrote criticism for that.
I actually got my master’s degree at York in interdisciplinary studies. My undergraduate, I had a major in film and a minor in dance. Which is crazy, but I have ended up using that in some of my theater work. So I’ve done theater as well in Berlin. Then my master’s was in interdisciplinary studies, film and social and political thought. It all came from that, basically. I do primarily identify as a filmmaker, but the rest are important.
All of it will inform your work.
BL: And they all overlap. When I make movies, I’ve generally taken photographs on all the sets of my movies. I have quite often taken the photographs for the DVDs or the promotion of the films and everything. And also I write about issues surrounding my films.
You mentioned the history of the zine – J.D.s, “Juvenile Delinquents,” correct? I know a lot are interested in physical media and zines as a form of community and conversation, really focusing on the physical distribution aspect and connecting to people through that. That’s also really important to the historical conversation and intersection between queer and punk, especially outside America, because I feel like a lot of people aren’t really aware of that.
BL: It really was a precursor to a lot of stuff that’s going on now in terms of the queer movement. We had an ethos that was already about inclusivity, forming alliances between gays, lesbians, trans, and also class consciousness. We were influenced by a lot of disparate movements or phenomena, like anything from Warhol’s factory, the factory from the 60s, to especially his filmmaking. And certain terrorist insurrectionary groups from the 70s, like the Baader-Meinhof from Germany and the Weathermen and the SLA, the Symbionese Liberation. We read incessantly about all those extreme left wing groups.
We were also influenced by the situationists, who talked about the revolution of everyday, and the strategies of intervention, like Détournement and Spectacle. So we had all these different influences.
It was also pre-digital, pre-internet, and pre-social media, so we kind of didn’t have a choice. We had to do physical media. It does make a big difference. It’s very tactile. It’s literally using your hands. And it’s very anti-corporate. We were not using any kind of corporate distribution or we didn’t have social media censoring what we were doing. It was also just in terms of the patience that you have to have to communicate in that way, because it was very slow through the mail, and you’d have to wait for weeks to get it or to get a reply to something. So we would also correspond with zine editors all over the world and a lot in the States. It was a very personal, direct communication with people, writing long form, handwritten letters, which was a very solid, bonding, solidarity type of exercise.
So I understand that desire to go back to some of those kinds of methods, because it’s outside of corporate control. It’s somewhat underground. It’s physical, it’s tactile, it’s direct communication, unfiltered. There was no prior censorship or self-censorship, it was before political correctness in a way. So there wasn’t that self-censorship and it was very direct and directly political.
It’s easier than ever to communicate, technically, but there is also the sense of distance, and it’s easy for things to be watered down or disconnected. There is still that urge to make art physically in general, but also to have that ongoing conversation through tactile objects.
BL: And also just as a defense against AI. I mean, we all use AI, or at least I do, and I have an AI assistant, but I am very conscious of maintaining a kind of human identity as well.
Did you find it difficult to bring these groups or themes together as well as get that message across? Or did you find that it was already so naturally incorporated — like if we take queer and punk in general, a big theme of it is that queer is punk and punk is queer. Was that difficult to bring that together, or was it already there and just something to find?
BL: We were within the punk movement, which was a very oppositional anti-authoritarian, anarchist-leaning movement. There were a lot of problems. In the eighties, in the hardcore movement, there was sexism, there was racism, there was a kind of machismo, misogyny, and homophobia. There was a lot wrong with it, even though we were attracted to its aggressive kind of political outsiderism and its aggro kind of anti-capitalism.
It was a static movement too. It was all about expressing politics through style without having to articulate or define a specific political stance or ideology. It was much more elusive and less co-optable, or understandable, than something that’s more straightforward. We were attracted to all that stuff, and it was a youth movement and had a lot of energy.
But I came more from the gay movement, and we were totally disillusioned with the gay subculture as well, which was also sexist and could be racist and classist. Both were subcultures, and in some ways oppositional to the dominant ideology, but we were also marginalized by the marginal groups. The reason we made J.D.s was to reach out to all the people who we thought were probably like-minded and like us, who were all over, especially in smaller cities or towns. They had no community, or no way to express themselves, because even if they went to the hardcore show, they would feel marginalized.
But as it turns out, in bigger city centers like New York or L.A., or even Chicago, there are people that were like-minded who are making fanzines and acting out against the problematics of the punk movement and the mainstream gay movement, which is, at that point, a bourgeois white gay male movement. So we did have solidarity, and those are the people that we kind of hooked up with. In New York, Linda Simpson had “My Comrade,” and Glenn Belverio had “Pussy Grazer Fanzine,” and there was Vaginal Davis in L.A., and that’s what really kickstarted the queercore movement.
This retrospective is special because it is harder to digitally access and view your work in an age of streaming, which then demands ephemeral events like this. Is that an important part of your practice?
BL: I’ve always remained somewhat underground, even though it’s difficult to even understand that there could still be an underground because everyone’s on social media. Everyone has developed a consciousness where they have to be visible all the time. If you’re not constantly getting hits or being noticed, then you feel like you’re invisible. But it’s the nature of my work.
From the very beginning, I was using pornography partly as a political strategy — it started out with the punk movement where we ran into all the homophobia in the hardcore scene, and so we said, “well, I’m going to start splicing in pornographic images, homosexual and lesbian images, into our fanzines and films.” And if you’re so radical and politically radical, you should be able to take these kinds of hardcore gay images.
Because we were always really against this notion of liberal tolerance, we wanted it to be completely frank and unapologetic about the queer experience, including sexual representation. The roots of the gay movement were sexual, it was a sexual revolution. Very open sexualities, fucking everywhere. The engine of the gay movement was based on a kind of sexual radicalism. So we were in that vein. Because of that, I’ve worked very much within the porn idiom, and I’ve made movies under the auspices of porn companies, and my work has generally been very sexually explicit.
I’ve always been a bit excluded from that mainstream distribution system. Also in the beginning, I wasn’t getting a lot of rights for stuff; I was stealing music and clips from movies and everything, very much a collage aesthetic in early movies. So even today, that contributes to the unavailability of some of my early work, because I didn’t have the rights for a lot of stuff. It’s a double-edged sword. In some ways, it makes my work more elusive, but it’s also more specialized. It’s hard to find, and it gives it a little mystery.
I think a lot of people are much too accessible these days, or you might make a movie and it just ends up in a bargain bin somewhere, or disposable in a hyper-capitalist market, as opposed to something that’s rare and unique. So that’s why Raphael Martinez, who’s organizing the retrospective, and I are putting out some bootleg stuff, like on VHS, as a kind of limited edition, in the spirit of that rare, underground quality of my work.
A bit more, if you know, you know, kind of.
BL: Yeah, but I don’t think in the sense like, exclusive, it’s more the nature of the work is uncooperative. I did it partly because it’s so easy to be co-opted by the mainstream and by the entertainment industry. And so I’ve always been somewhat of an outsider.
Especially for newer and upcoming artists, there’s a challenge of keeping a balancing act between wanting your art to be supported, but then also wanting it to be truthful. How have you mediated between what others will want to do with your work versus what you want to do with it, and how to stay truthful to you?
BL: It’s difficult with film, because film is cinema. It’s a very collaborative medium.
So it’s not just your work. You’re working with musicians, you’re working with cinematographers and editors and everything. So people want their work to be recognized and seen. But in terms of the audience, you don’t want to be preaching to the converted all the time, just only have it be seen by a limited, set audience. And I do both; I’ve worked more in a mainstream mode sometimes. “Gerontophilia” and “Saint-Narcisse” were financed by the Canadian government.
When I’m working with bigger budgets, for me, they’re still low-budget independent films, but it’s instead of the usual no budget guerrilla films that I sometimes make as well, especially in the beginning. I do work within that industry model. You have to start out with the realization that you’re making a different kind of product. For example, sexual explicitness is one thing that is generally not accepted. Even when you have stuff like “Euphoria,” things on TV that are pushing that envelope, it’s still prosthetic, playing within the strictures of the broadcast medium. So that’s why I try to go back and forth between both.
And when I’m making a more mainstream film, I still try to push it as far as I can within that context. “Gerontophilia” is about an 18-year-old boy who has a sexual fixation on the elderly, which is already something that a lot of people find unacceptable, or they think it’s extreme or strange. And twincest in “Saint-Narcisse.” Thematically, I try to push it as far as I can.
When I’m working in the mainstream porn industry, I try to push it as far as I can towards the sexual representation that you don’t usually see in porn, which is in gay terms. I always have very strong female characters, and I have very strong narrative, and referencing 70s avant-garde porn where it’s more aesthetic and political as well. So all those things that you’re not supposed to do in the mainstream porn world. That’s my punk training as well, is always being oppositional and trying to push whatever limitations you find yourself working within. You try to break the rules, push the margins, or be sneaky, try to slip it in somehow.
Keeping that central theme and desire to push those boundaries, and also the taboos of society, while still working with what others expect and limit from you.
BL: Yeah, so it’s still a strategy. And arguably, you’re reaching a different audience, a wider audience. If you’re working within those more mainstream, whether it be mainstream porn or mainstream indie film, you’re still doing your thing, but you’re reaching a completely different audience. Which is also why I made a couple of genre films, like horror zombie films, because I knew that those would reach a different audience. I’d be reaching those horror nerds and making really gay zombie movies that were very sexual, which is probably shocking to certain people who are usually used to seeing a certain type of zombie film.
As playing with the kind of social and political expectations is important to the work, how have you approached the way that that’s fluctuated? Like from the 90s to now, how has that changed others’ and your views of the older and the newer work, seeing the political state of things and trying to push against and challenge that?
BL: Well, just in terms of what we were talking about, I still try to go back and forth, I still try to make porn as well as mainstream films, and I’m kind of relatively mainstream. I think I’ve carved a bit of a niche for myself, where filmmakers aren’t allowed to do that, you’re supposed to make your porn films when you’re young, and then —
And then “evolve.”
BL: And then evolve, right, or grow up. Which I’ve never done. So my recent feature, “The Visitor,” I just happened to very serendipitously find this arts organization, A/POLITICAL, that gave me a very decent budget and encouraged me to make a film in the genre I feel like I’ve invented, which is agit-porn, so it’s a very political porn genre. It was a reimagining of Pasolini’s “Teorema,” so it was taking that political model of his from the late 60s, which was very anti-capitalist. It was about the alienation of industrialized society, it was about how the bourgeoisie had become very alienated, both sexually and existentially.
He made a film that was about liberating this conventional, conservative, bourgeois culture. And so in my updating of it, I decided to do a very queer version of it. Pasolini was moving more and more towards pornographic representation anyway when he was murdered. And in fact, the works that he was working on when he was murdered were very pornographic. So I just pushed it really hard in that direction. But I changed it to the idea of a black refugee coming to London and infiltrating a bourgeois family. And he fucks them all, and enacts a radical transformation on each one of them. But it’s very much addressing queer political identity as well. The daughter in my version is transmasculine, and the maid is a male in drag and female-identified. It changes the whole dynamic, and it’s about how even queer identity can become conventional and stuck in reified structures of society, the institutions.
I’m very conscious about the assimilation movement and how gays have embraced institutions that always were their enemy, like monogamy and the church and the military and marriage and all those things. I’ve always fought back against that idea. And so, I’m allowed to make those kinds of political statements — “allowed,” always that word — when I find someone who recognizes that that’s the essence of my work, and they give me the freedom to do that.
It’s mentioned in the retrospective bio that queer media is arguably at its most mainstream right now, but at the same time, it’s very difficult and very scary to be in a queer body right now, especially in the American government. There is an aspect of queerness when it’s allowed, profited off, washed down, palatable, but then there’s this pushback against queerness when it’s raw, vulnerable, messy, uncompromising.
BL: That’s the thing out in the U.S., with the Democratic Party, right? Like woke 2.0, it’s already, with the more radical aspects of the left, trying to tone it down in order to be viable in the upcoming elections.
There’s a sense of queer society feeling, out of fear, the need to compromise and to assimilate into what society wants from them for safety.
BL: But then some people have to stick to their guns. And that traditionally has been the underground or the avant-garde. There needs to be some kind of subversive element. That’s the whole cycle of revolution, which a lot of my films have been about. Revolution starts out with people who have these revolutionary ideals that are very outside of the mainstream, and they try to enact them. The revolution somehow starts to get co-opted. What Genet talked about was that the most important thing is the actual revolutionary moment itself. And so Genet always tried to live by his dictum. He would go to any revolutionary movement in the world, whether it be the Palestinians or the Black Panthers, and he would throw his full support behind them. But the moment he would find that revolutionary movement started to become co-opted, he would not only abandon it, but turn against it, and then go on to the next revolutionary moment. And the process would go over and continue. So the main theme in a lot of my movies has been the oppressed becoming the oppressor, and I think you see that happening a lot these days.
The importance of displaying queerness as something that is multi-layered and complex, and as a radical act. That is a difficult thing to do, to hold all these aspects of queer existence at once.
BL: I dig into it a bit in “The Misandrists,” where you have this group of lesbian separatists who are making porn, which already is contentious, because there’s a lot of anti-porn feminists, but then they’re infiltrated by a trans girl who they don’t realize is trans, and the leader is TERF. And so it causes this whole schism. Meanwhile, there’s a female cop who’s infiltrated the terrorist cell. It’s complicated, and it is very factionalized now. So you have to figure out how, as we did in the past, it was about solidarity between lesbians and gays, and trans is much more powerful than being factionalized. And at the time in the seventies, when you had the black movement and the feminist movement and the gay movement. The Black Panthers, for example, reached out and recognized the class-based exploitation that kept them oppressed, that all those movements shared the same kind of oppression, and had a common enemy. In a way, it’s not that hard to figure out who the common enemy is these days.
How we survive, I feel, is to challenge these separations within marginalized groups and infighting and keep making art and keep talking. Because otherwise we fall apart to the common enemy.
BL: Art and cinema have always been great ways of bridging those gaps for sure.
For the retrospective, for those who’ll be reading this article, if they can only make it to one or two films, what would be something that you would encourage people to come see? And what you find reflects who you are as an artist, and what you want people to talk about right now?
BL: You’re making me do Sophie’s choice.
I know, it’s a really difficult question.
BL: If you want to get a sense of my early films compared to my middle films and my late films — my first film, “No Skin Off My Ass,” is everything that, when I see that film now, I’ve just been remaking that over and over again, my whole filmmaking life. It has all the elements. It has the queer punk, it has the skinhead, it has the anti-fascist element that’s done in a very tongue-in-cheek and politically incorrect way. It has the very strong female feminist filmmaker lesbian character. It’s more experimental in form. It’s a remake; a lot of my movies are remakes. So it has all those elements – the politicization of porn.
And you star in that film as well, correct?
BL: And I’m in it as well. So that’s an example of me, I starred in my first three films. Then, if you want to go more middle, one film that hasn’t been seen a lot, that I’m really happy that’s playing is “Pierrot Lunaire.” In 2014, I think, I did this play in Berlin. It’s based on Schoenberg’s opera, “Pierrot Lunaire.” I transplanted it onto this kind of real-life story about a trans man, which is very different. I was doing a lot of theater in Berlin at the time, and it’s more connected to avant-garde cinema. It’s kind of a musical, so it’s quite different. Then “The Misandrists,” as well, makes a good companion piece to that. “Raspberry Reich” and “The Misandrists” are the ones that carry on that thread of the female lesbian terrorist feminists from “No Skin Off My Ass.” And then you can go to — some people might’ve seen it already, it played in Chicago, I think — my latest, “The Visitor,” which is a very agit-porn kind of film. So that’s beginning, middle, end.
I know it’s a really difficult question, because it is all a conversation between not only your own work, but your influences. One work can’t exist alone without all the other ones in terms of what informs you.
BL: In “The Visitor,” there’s certain images, tropes, that I didn’t even realize that are already there in my early work. If you’re someone like me, who mostly writes your own work and your own films and everything, you are constantly in a dialogue with yourself, and you’re constantly going back to the same well of images and visual metaphors.
It’s also important for viewers who aren’t as familiar with your work, or aren’t already fans of your work, to maybe not settle for what is already in their genre and their theme. Your work does challenge the viewers to see something that is with the taboos and with pushing the boundaries, in general, the importance of making yourself a little uncomfortable.
BL: That can extend to, if you’re just used to my very pornographic kind of work — or underground, or guerrilla — if that’s all you know, then you might want to check out “Geronophilia” and “Saint-Narcisse,” which are the more indie film ones that have higher production values and are more like a mainstream viewing experience. Or vice versa. If you only know those films, you might want to check out the crazier ones, like “L.A. Zombie” or “Pierrot Lunaire.”
There’s a lot of fear and hesitation about art-making. But, as we know, art is revolutionary and is very important to express yourself, as well as to have a conversation with each other, support one another, challenge each other. What would you say to those who are not only students at SAIC, but general art students, who are unsure about what they want to say with their art right now or who don’t really know how to be involved in that revolution?
BL: Art can be revolutionary, and it can be very strong politically or aesthetically, but there’s a lot of reactionary art out there, too. There’s a lot of very hyper-capitalist and depoliticized work. As a filmmaker, I started out making very personal work. I started out just documenting my life and my friends, treating it as a very direct, personal expression of what you believe or what you’re thinking, as opposed to just making some kind of genre film that you’re trying to tap into the next big thing. If you don’t have that foundation of making personal work, then where do you go? You get lost in this huge machinery of the industry.
And then I went through a process of politicization. When I was making films and working in university as an undergraduate, I had no idea. I was clueless; I didn’t know what to make films about. It was only through the whole process of going to university and having a very broad liberal arts education, and then through my peers or people, fellow students and professors. I was politicized by Robin Wood, my film professor, who is a Marxist feminist, Frankfurt School kind of guy. And then I had my partner in J.D.’s, off campus, G.B. Jones, a very hardcore, feminist punk filmmaker, who is also very intellectual.
It’s all about allowing yourself to become politicized and figuring it out as you go along. I would beware of being sucked into all the traps of social media. Self-censorship is now the worst kind of censorship because you’re trying to get a lot of followers on social media, and because they have these limitations of what you can represent both politically and sexually, then you’re automatically already internalizing that censorship, so you don’t even know how to be unfiltered.
To some extent, you have to trust your gut. And make your own work to block out all the noise. In a way, to be an artist is mapping your internal struggles into the world. And that is the most truthful way to say something, to figure yourself out.
BL: You can’t be too risk-averse. When I was starting out, I was getting censored by customs, the police would try to confiscate my films at the film labs and in the photo labs when I would be making these films guerrilla style without permits. It was always one step ahead of the police, doing illegal things. I didn’t even really have the constitution for it, in a way. I’m kind of a nervous guy, and I really had to push myself outside of my comfort zone so often, but you can’t be too safe. You have to be willing to take some risks as well.
