| How do you feel about your notoriety? Has it helped in getting people like Scott Thompson, Tony Ward, and Nikki Uberti in your films?
I think my notoriety is unique in some ways because it is unusual for someone whose work is so extreme to actually cultivate people, both socially and professionally, who are more known in the mainstream. But then again, I meet the people that I work and become friends with very organically. Scott and I were acquaintances at University in Toronto, and later met again socially and became friends. I met Nikki Uberti through her husband Terry Richardson, the fashion photographer, who I had become friends with through Harmony Korine, who I had met through Gus Van Sant when I was at Sundance with Super 8 and a Half and Gus and Harmony were there with Kids. So in some ways it all just happens for me on a social level, and I tend to use my friends in my movies. So when did you get interested in making movies? I guess I got the bug as an isolated farm kid who used to watch 6 to 8 hours of television a day because he was so cut off from civilization. I grew up on Hollywood movies and ended up valuing movies over real life, like most filmmakers. What motivates you besides the obvious need to eat and spend money on things you want? My motivations as an artiste have always been pretty political, and even more specifically politics regarding homosexuality. Trying to make sense of my position in the world as a homosexual motivates my work very directly. I am also trying to continue a tradition of gay avant-garde cinema which has been almost lost -- the tradition of the Kenneth Angers and the Andy Warhols and the Jack Smiths -- which is extremely in-your-face and radical and stylistically innovative. Homosexuals should always be in the avant-garde and not capitulating to the mainstream. What's the biggest form of flattery an audience can give to your films, negative reviews or gleaming? I ask this because I've visited your website and you publish all of your reviews and comments people send whether they are favorable or mean-spirited. Considering the nature of my work, there's nothing like a good old "Zero Stars," or below, as I have garnered in the past. It shows that people really do care. When I watched Hustler White in Kansas City, several very uptight fags walked out of the theatre after the stumping scene. What are some of the most hilarious reactions to your films? Kevin Costner walked out of Hustler White in a huff when he went to see it after discovering Bound was sold out at the Sunset Five in L.A. (The incident was somehow reported in the New York Post.) Boy George did the same at a screening at the ICA in London, declaring it a "corn-hole movie." Even with No Skin Off My Ass I witnessed whole rows of fags leaving the theatre en masse. At a film festival in Amsterdam, some homosexuals left noisily, yelling "Nazi Schwule" (Nazi fag). It's all good. Toronto has a definitely strong punk and skinhead scene. What is your role in it? The Toronto punk scene is still pretty cool, although it used to be much stronger and more visible in the eighties and early nineties. In those days there were at least five or six venues where punk bands from all over the world played regularly, and I would go to at least one or two punk shows a week. I lived with fellow punks, and we always had bands and visiting dignitaries crashing at our squat-like house. With my friends I produced queer punk fanzines which challenged both the complacency and banality of gay culture and the emerging sexually conservative values of punk culture. With J.D.s we pretended that there was a large, very vocal queer punk scene in Toronto, even though there wasn't, but everyone everywhere else in the world believed us and it spawned a whole international underground movement with hundreds of fanzines and bands and such. So I guess I was one of the agent provocatuers. What are your thoughts or views on gay mainstream media? I find the new direction of the gay movement toward assimilation and the tendency to try to prop up a more palatable, inoffensive and non-threatening gay image in the mainstream media a total sellout of the whole impetus of the early radical roots of the gay experience. It's an attempt to dumb down the complexity of gay consciousness in order to be able to market it on a mainstream level. I choose to work in pornography because in some ways it's the last refuge of the unmediated, undiluted gay identity, the last bastion of radicalism and dissent. It seems that you are telling me that you see mainstream gays and fascists as dogs of the same kennel. Is this true? Kind of, in a hyperbolic kind of way. I have been quoted as saying that all gay porn is implicitly fascist, which I stand by more or less, at least modern gay porn since the advent of video. When porn was being made on film, mostly 16mm, in the sixties and seventies, the makers were skilled in the art of cinema, and knew how to craft interesting or entertaining or even complex products. They used narrative devices, humor, characterization, metaphor, and concentrated on style and aesthetics to mediate content. Today all that has become vestigial, and everything, all the meaning and intention, has been flattened out and streamlined to concentrate strictly on the sexual act. It's fascist in its single-minded agenda. In terms of mainstream gays in general, while I don't think they're literally or intentionally fascistic, the intolerance towards difference they display, toward the unsavory underbelly of gay culture (like me), is pretty narrow-minded and anti-intellectual. So I like to call them fascists, just as Camille Paglia and Rush Limbaugh called orthodox feminists "Femi-Nazis" at the height of feminism's anti-porn, pro-censorship madness. Living in Missouri, I see lots of segregation among the "gay community." Friends of mine who are punks and skinheads in Toronto have told me that your atmosphere is less racially divided than here in the States. I know there are factions of Anti-Racist Action Skinheads and White Power skinheads in Canada. What's your take on racism there as opposed to here in general and in the gay community? Toronto is a more racially integrated society in some respects, although one has to be careful that one's difference doesn't get erased by the great white northern dullness that Canada can be. Skinheads were basically run out of the punk scene like everywhere else years ago, sometimes even run right out of the city. I don't even see many anti-racist skinheads around anymore. It takes all the fun out of it. One of the great things about punk was that all points of view could be expressed, and sometimes even extreme political difference was bracketed, and an unity based more on style and musical and aesthetic choice prevailed. I find liberal attitudes toward racial difference often as dangerous as overt racism. At least an overt racist acknowledges his position and isn't being hypocritical about it. I think that everyone, no matter what color, unavoidably has some racist attitudes, and I think that each race should preserve its cultural heritage and not let it all get watered down into some vague, wishy-washy, utopic liberalism. Racism is still implicit in gay culture, for example. Gay people accept blacks or Asians if they conform to the bourgeois standards of that culture, otherwise they are snubbed. It's very patronizing. What did you get out of doing queer flavored zines like J.D. and Monstar? I remember seeing these in my late teens and getting really excited because I felt like I could finally relate to somebody who sucked dick! Hah! The fanzines were an expression of severe frustration. We found that the gay movement had become stagnant, uninteresting both politically and aesthetically, so we got involved in the punk movement, which seemed radical and more stylistically appealing. In fact, style and politics were inextricably linked. We did, however, discover that attitudes towards sexual difference by the mid-eighties in the punk scene in America had become somewhat conservative and judgmental. Straight edge and hardcore had ushered in a certain machismo which was mistrustful of male effeminacy or female butchness or whatever. It was getting a little to close to the frat party mentality. So with our little queer super 8 movies and xeroxed fanzines, we decided to shake that up a little. We'd make straight boys take their clothes off and suck dick and depict girls like man-hating lesbian extremists. It was fun. You mention that your films tend to have a political bent. Did you ever consider making Skin Gang about skinheads who were maybe of a different strain than White Supremacist skinheads who always seem to get the press? I was seriously considering putting a disclaimer at the beginning of Skin Flick/Gang saying that the skinheads depicted are not intended to represent all skinheads, just like William Friedkin put that disclaimer at the beginning of Cruising stating that he was only depicting a small minority of the gay community in that amazing film. I'm well aware of the history of 2 Tone and the influence of black style and music on skinhead culture, and the history of anti-racist behavior. However, I decided ultimately that the movie as it stands plays with the identity of skinheads and perceptions about them to the point where I think it's obvious the film isn't really any kind of straightforward condemnation of any single subculture. The film plays with notions of identity, whether sexual or national or racial, and the intersection of race, class, and sexual identification becomes extremely complex. The skinheads, which I insisted on styling authentically and shooting in black and white super 8 to give them a historical look, almost as if in old newsreel footage, become a kind of cliche of fascism. And of course, as Cameltoe so astutely points out, they're all just a bunch of faggots anyway. Looking back now, do you think you'll do a porn film again? At first I didn't think so, but now something has come up that I want to do. It's a story about cops versus gangbangers in L.A. that I've come up with, a kind of Romeo and Juliet story. What's next on the agenda for you? Any films with Cameltoe (aka Nikki Uberti) as a lead role? I would be glad to work with Nikki again, and in fact have a very low budget, almost home movie project in mind for her called Son of Cameltoe which would be centered on her character from Skin Flick. I have a feeling I'll end up working with her again 'cause she's so great. So what does it take to be in a Bruce LaBruce film? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. * Still hankering for more Bruce? Visit his website. More Shane? Read his review of Skin Gang or his recent Drub column. Nasty, hardcore vid stills from Bruce's Skin Gang? Nightcharm Inner Circle members can click here for their fill. Not a member of the Inner Circle? We're crushed! Click here to sign up. |
