LaBruce has racked up roughly 10 movies as a director and writer and has starred in half of them. Some of the beautiful titles include I Know What It's Like To Be Dead, No Skin Off My Ass, and most recently, Hustler White, staring x-Madonna guy pal Tony Ward.

What makes a Bruce LaBruce film recognizable? Throw in punk sensibility and aesthetic, mix in a nod to Fassbinder, Warhol, or Anger, shoot some scenes on super 8 film, and wrap it in ironic situations, that's what. Always one to get mixed reactions from his audience, Bruce plays upon what complacent (gay) people hate to see -- themselves at their ugliest.

Skin Gang is a new turn for Bruce. Using imagery of cartoon replications of racist skinheads to tantalize the viewer, he tries his hand at explicit pornography. Being the token skinhead here at Nightcharm, I got to chat with LaBruce about his thoughts on gay culture, past movies and his current porn venture, Skin Gang.

Shane Tanner: What is the difference, would you say, between Skin Flick and your previous movies (apart from the hard core vs. soft core)?

Bruce LaBruce: Skin Flick/Skin Gang was the first movie I've done which was actually commissioned by a porn company, the Berlin based Cazzo Film. I purposefully wanted to make a product which works within the conventions of porno, and yet which still has some of my signature trademarks. Porno is a very conventional medium, so I had to work within fairly strict parameters. The narrative had to operate to accommodate the requisite number of porn scenes which involve the characters equally and at strategic points in the film. I've never worked in video before, but I wanted to have that modern porn look, but I juxtaposed it with super 8 black and white footage, a medium that I often work in, to give it another quality. Skin Flick also is, I guess ironically, a more serious and in some ways even political movie than I've done before. It starts out somewhat funny, and ends up going to a very dark place. For me it was partly an investigation into the relationship between homosexuality and fascism, which isn't exactly the funniest topic you could come up with for a porno.

What is the film "about" and how would it be described on the box if it were on a shelf in the West Hollywood Blockbuster Video Store?

Skin Flick is about a group of Neo-Nazi skinheads who break into the house of a mixed race bourgeois gay couple and sexually terrorize them. It's an investigation into the way that homosexuality has traditionally fetishized images of cruelty, domination, authority, and power, including the military, police, and fascist figures, and at the same time comments on the phenomenon of homosexual behavior occurring in extreme right wing and paramilitary organizations which is not identified by its participants in any way as being "gay" or part of "gay culture." It also functions as a straightforward fuck movie.

You star as the "bashee" in the opening of the movie. Was this a reflection of some unfulfilled fantasy, a fear, or just an ironic personification of what you thought some people might want to do to you after they see the movie?

The bashing scene at the beginning of Skin Flick was a direct reference to the opening of Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons in which the transsexual/homosexual main character, played by Volker Spengler, gets fag-bashed in a cruising park by a gang of ruffians to the accompaniment of romantic music. The scene sums up the project of Skin Flick -- the difference between homosexual behavior and homosexual identity, the former actually being able to exist as something which is hostile towards the latter and might even want to annihilate it.

Seeing your films, one can sometimes pick out some of your favorite influences. Can you talk a bit about who you really appreciate?

I guess my biggest influences film-wise have been Warhol, Cassavetes, and Jerry Lewis. They all essentially at one point were making experimental narrative black and white movies.

Do you find sex and fetishes funny?

I find them both funny and sad, but if I'm personally into them I find them neither, just sexy. However, most of the extreme fetishes I depict in my movies are not ones which I practice in real life.

What are your thoughts on how some people get hung up on particular imagery in your films -- such as the amputee fucking scene in Hustler White?

The whole point of the stumping scene in Hustler White was to minimize its shock value by presenting it in a romantic and humanistic way. One of the few critics who got the movie wrote in Cahiers Du Cinema that in a world in which the norm is extreme fetishism, sexual violence and perversion, the last taboo is tenderness. That really sums up what the movie is all about.

So there was absolutely no feeling inside of you that you were exploiting the amputee actor in his scene?

No, not at all. The part (or lack thereof) was explained to the actor very carefully, so he knew exactly what was expected of him during the shoot. The actor was a model whom Rick Castro had been using in his photographs for years, so I assumed they had some sort of understanding. Afterwards the actor did accuse Castro of exploiting him over the years, but that was a personal conflict between them which had nothing to do with me.

What was Rick Castro like to work with on Hustler White?

The pre-production and shooting with Mr. Castro were fine, but we had a falling out during post-production which severed our alliance.

Do you think the Nazi imagery in Skin Flick/Skin Gang conjures up similar hang-ups people have?

I think the Nazi imagery is much more overtly political and yet at the same time more conventionally fetishistic in Skin Flick. For me the scene in which the Neo-Nazi novitiate jerks off onto a copy of Mein Kampf encapsulates the entire project of the movie: it is a scene which is meant to turn you on and off at the same time. Is he jerking off on this object as a kind of reverence to it, or is her defiling it? Is it sacred or profane? In terms of sexuality, and in particular homosexuality, sometimes the line between the two is distinctly blurry.

So what did you put in place of the sex scenes for the "PG" version?

I much prefer Skin Flick, the soft-core version. The points I make are made much clearer in that version, and it plays more like my other movies. There is some brilliant text by Tom International/Yaroslav Mogutin, the Russian in the movie. He is a great poet in real life, and I used some of his poetry about fascism and desire and Russian-German relations which for me articulates exactly what the movie is about. Some of this text is read over sex scenes, which also accomplishes what the film is about: the attempt to engage the intellect and sexual desire simultaneously, as an experiment. There's also more singing of national anthems and whatnot.

I know irony and tragedy are themes in your work. What others do you like to sink your teeth into?

More than irony, I'm interested these days in paradox. Irony is the rhetorical device of saying one thing while meaning the exact opposite. Paradox is saying two apparently contradictory things simultaneously while nevertheless having both statements remain true. I'm also heavily into dialectics these days, which is kind of like Advanced Paradox.