An Interview With Bruce LaBruce - The Visitor (2024), The Advocate For Fagdom (2011) & No Skin Off My Ass (1991) (Spoilers)

Disturbing Cinema: I would like to start off this interview by asking you what your fag awakening was and what inspired you to combine blatantly pornographic portrayals of sex with more traditional narrative and filming approaches, as well as an interest in extreme issues that mainstream viewers may disregard as shocking or disturbing taboos?

Bruce LaBruce: My fag awakening started with Dr. Smith from the original “Lost in Space.” He was my fag mother. But that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a camp gay sensibility. And then collaterally I was turned on sexually as a kid by Dr. Smith’s arch-nemesis, Major Don West, the macho, can-do, single astronaut who was bewildered by Smith’s flamboyant Machiavellian machinations. (In one episode, in which an Amazonian female race tries to take over the universe, Smith refuses to help Don and his other male space mates fight the women, saying “I refuse to participate in this dreary masculine protest!”) In terms of porn, I remember watching certain movies on TV as a young teen – the CBC in Canada, the public broadcasting channel, used to play some provocative movies in the 70’s – like Robert Altman’s “That Cold Day in the Park” (1969) and Paul Almond’s “The Act of the Heart” (1970) that were so psychosexually twisted that I thought they must be what people are talking about when they refer to pornography. I ended up doing a queer remake of the former, with my first feature “No Skin Off My Ass,” and I’ve referenced the latter in my films “Otto; or, Up with Dead People” and “Saint-Narcisse.” In “The Act of the Heart,” a girl (Genevieve Bujold) has sex with a priest (Donald Sutherland) on the altar of a church, and at the end she goes to a park, douses herself with gasoline, and sets herself on fire as the end credits roll. I’ve never recovered from that. It was so shocking to me as a kid. 

Sullivan: From No Skin Off My Ass (1991) to your more recent work, how has your attitude to transgression and queerness in film changed over time?

Bruce LaBruce: It really feels like I’m making the same movie over and over again, even though they all seem very different in terms of aesthetics or genre or subject matter. It’s very strange; it all happens on a subconscious level. So “No Skin Off My Ass” (1991) has a scene with a skinhead swimming naked in an underground swimming pool, and then you can find a character with a shaved head emerging from a body of water in “L.A. Zombie” (2010) and in “Saint-Narcisse” (2020). And then in my latest film, “The Visitor” (2024), you have a black man with a shaved head in an underground swimming pool. I didn’t script it; the location we used happened to have an underground swimming pool, so I improvised a scene with the main character in the pool. There are many narrative and visual motifs that continually crop up, like scenes of head shaving and of characters making films within the film and scenes of sex in graveyards and of characters shot from vehicles walking down the street. In terms of transgression, I just try to keep pushing the envelope further and further. It’s like a game of oneupsmanship with myself. I learned the importance of shock value from the great John Waters, who I consider a mentor, that shock for shock’s sake is a good way to shake people out of their complacency and make them confront their own boundaries. Sometimes I push my own limits so far that I even freak myself out! You get a queasy feeling that you’ve gone too far, which usually means you’re on the right track. I’m all up into representing the unrepresentable. In terms of queerness, it’s all about challenging the gay orthodoxy and not being afraid to be a bad gay. I started to use gay porn as a way of fighting liberal attitudes of tolerance, to question the way that mainstream gay culture expects you to act or make art in a particular way, to behave, to tone things down, to not be too flamboyant, or too femme, or too butch, or whatever. I’ve always pushed gay or queer sex in people’s faces to test their tolerance! Make them squirm, I say!

Disturbing Cinema: You have worked and gotten to know a lot of sex workers in your career, and I'd love to know if your perspective on sex work and sex workers was different before entering that world, and what was something valuable that you learnt from being apart of it.

Bruce LaBruce: Well, I started out making sexually explicit art films, not really considering myself a pornographer. But after a while I realized that people just regarded me and my producer, Jurgen Bruening, as rank pornographers anyway, and they started treating us in that kind of judgmental, condescending way that people often treat pornographers and sex workers, so then we just decided we might as well really lean into it and get our freak on. So Jurgen started the first ever porn company in Berlin, Cazzo, and started the first porn festival, and about five of six of my films were produced by his porn companies, four of them with hardcore versions distributed as porn. So then I realized we were pretty much sex workers ourselves! So I guess I went from having an appreciation for them to becoming one of them. Of course i performed sexually in my first two features, so that’s pretty hooker-y. What can I say, I’ve always loved hookers and hustlers! So why not become one? Everyone’s a hooker anyway. I also did a little street hustling when I first came out. One thing, though, when i started living with strippers and hanging out in strip bars, and also making porn, it’s a bit of a demystification experience. You start seeing how “fake” a lot of it is, how performative, and you also see how much exploitation there is. So that can be a bit sobering. You also become aware of the workaday aspects of it, the grind, the constant hustle, which can get kind of boring. But then it gets re-glamourized in a different way for you. You start to appreciate the artifice and the craft and the sleight of hand, but also the professionalism and the creativity and the commitment and the fearlessness.  

Sullivan: In an era where mainstream queer representation is becoming more sanitized, do you believe there is still room for authentically subversive queer cinema, or is the underground the only place for it?

Bruce LaBruce: I don’t think it’s that binary. There’s a whole spectrum of queer cinema and representation between what is considered mainstream and what is considered underground. There are so many different kinds of films now, so many different genres, different streaming platforms, different markets, different film festivals. It’s much more niche now. I think it’s difficult to get bigger budgets for movies that are politically incorrect or that don’t tow the party line when it comes to queer or trans or racial representation. There are a lot of gatekeepers, there’s shadow-banning, there’s cancel culture... It’s a bit of a minefield now. I will say that with a film like “The Visitor,” which is very pornographic and politically charged, that there are relatively mainstream sales agents and distributors now that are more willing to take on difficult movies, whereas before they would just say, “Oh, this is undistributable” and walk away. When a third of the audience walked out en masse during the world premiere of my movie “Hustler White” at Sundance, during the amputee stump fucking scene, some of them were offended but some just thought oh, this will never get any distribution. (Thankfully Strand Releasing always supported me in the USA.) BFF was my sales agent for my movie “Saint-Narcisse,” which for me was a somewhat more mainstream movie, and then they took on “The Visitor” as well because they liked it and they wanted to support me as a filmmaker. My UK/US/CAN distributor Utopia/Circle Collective has also been very supportive by coming up with creative new ways to promote and exhibit the movie. For example, for the London premiere, the film’s producer A/Political partnered with them to present the film in a massive venue which doubled as a BDSM sex party. It’s about making a spectacle these days, making the movie a participatory event. It’s giving William Castle, it’s giving Barnum and Bailey...

Disturbing Cinema: You've covered a wide range of topics in your work, including BDSM, gang rape, racially motivated violence, amputee fetishism, gerontophilia, male and female prostitution, twincest, zombie and vampire sexuality, and much more. The Visitor featured plenty of that, and I was thinking to myself as I watched the film,"Damn, I can't imagine my conservative slavic grandmother watching this." Have you ever considered or told yourself, "Okay, I've gone too far. " I'd love to know what crosses the line for you, or whether you're like Madonna, who famously stated,"Got no boundaries and no limits."

Bruce LaBruce: Is that what she said? Lol. Well she’s never done porn, unless you consider A Certain Sacrifice (1985) to be pornographic. In fact, we asked her, back in the day, to give us money to make “Hustler White,” which starred her recently ex boyfriend Tony Ward, and she said she couldn’t be associated with pornography. But that was probably because she had just published her brilliant SEX book and she realized that she really had gone too far, Goddess bless her! It almost ruined her career! Well my latest movie, “The Visitor,” has a scene of coprophagia, and another scene in which the cross-dressing maid gets fucked in the ass by the Visitor with a Jesues-on-the-cross dildo, and another scene in which the Visitor fucks an orifice in the bottom of the father’s feet, and there are is also sex scenes between the father and his son and daughter. So I guess as the slogan in the movie says, Sex Has No Borders! But I’ve never done cannibalism. Doesn’t really appeal to me. 

Sullivan: According to writer and critic Romain Blondeau's short documentary "The Advocate for Fagdom", your work does not fulfill a masturbatory function. How significant is that? Do you believe it needs to be nuanced?" 

Bruce LaBruce: My work does not fulfill a masturbatory function? I beg to differ. I’ve seen many people over the last three decades jerking off in public while watching my movies, so you can only imagine what they do in the privacy of their own homes! 

Disturbing Cinema: I have to confess that I did pause the film midway to bust a nut. When I was 17, I watched Pink Flamingos and Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom on a hot summer day, and had a similar experience. Those two films got me really aroused, I had a boner, and I sweated like a whore in church. I was embarrassed and confused since a film like that turned me on, therefore my question to you is whether there is any film that you find disturbing and seductive at the same time, or if any film has impacted you sexually.

Bruce LaBruce: People don’t really have a choice about what turns them on sexually unless they’re really locked down and repressed. For example, I never trust anyone whose sexual fantasies totally correspond with their political beliefs. There has to be some ambivalence or conflictedness or contradictions, otherwise it’s just not sexy. I get sexually aroused by completely inappropriate things all the time. Sexual desire has no conscience. That’s the function of pornography – to allow us to work out our most dark and disturbing sexual fantasies, no matter how politically incorrect, in an environment of fantasy and the imagination, hopefully without shame or guilt, which is where the real problems start. I mean, I think at least fifty percent of all porn has some incest angle. Taboos are really what get people going sexually. The sexual fantasy of being coerced into sex is also very prevalent in porn. I suppose one example of inappropriate sexual arousal is that i only ever use sports as pornography. Never mind divers or gymnasts, I can get turned on by hot badminton or ping pong players, or curlers! In terms of movies, there are too many to mention. There are hot serial killers, hot terrorists, hot kidnappers, hot slashers, hot priests! I used to get turned on by watching Flipper!

Sullivan: We recently saw that your submission for THE VISITOR got humorously rebuked. Is rejection by your peers something you often encounter, in contemporary cinema or queer spaces?

Bruce LaBruce: Oh that was par for the course. “The Visitor” is going to offend some people, without question. But these days they try not to make too big a deal out of it. It’s more effective to just pretend you don’t exist.

Sullivan: Can you walk us through your creative process while writing THE VISITOR along with Alex Babboni and Victor Fraga — what’s the BLaB essence and recipe?

Bruce LaBruce: Fraga and Babboni. Sounds like a trapeze act! Victor and Alex were instrumental in the whole creative process of “The Visitor.” The movie started out as an art/fashion shoot for Alex Babboni’s “Doesn’t Exist” magazine, which dedicates each issue to a single filmmaker/artist. They asked me to be the subject of one of the issues, for which I did a photo shoot with them in Antwerp where I was having an exhibition with my jewelry collaborator Jonathan Johnson at the CASSL gallery. The photo shoot was meant to represent a fantasy of a movie, acting as if the photos were production stills, as it were, from an already existing movie. I chose as my concept a sci-fi version of Pasolini’s “Teorema,” which I had always want to remake. (I wanted to do it after “Hustler White” and have its star, Tony Ward, play the Visitor and Catherine Deneuve play the Mother, but it never happened.) I chose a black model to play the Visitor, and I introduced the idea of having him coming from another dimension. So when it came time to launch the issue of Doesn’t Exist in London, Victor and Alex introduced me to A/political, an arts organization that works with “difficult” and outsider artists. They were big fans of my movie “The Raspberry Reich,” and we came up with the idea of turning my photo spread into an actual movie. There only stipulation was they wanted to make it in my kind of agit-prop style, like “The Raspberry Reich” and “The Purple Army Faction.” So it was all very meta! The movie took on a life of its own, and I worked very closely with Victor and Alex on the pre-production, via internet, on choosing the cast and crew. They sent me multiple options for each creative role, and I cast and crewed up just by looking at various videos and photos and CVs. I followed the original narrative of “Teorema” in very broad strokes, and introduced elements that were site specific to the locations we chose. Victor provided all the voice-over at the beginning, which is all taken from actual right wing propaganda and speeches, including Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech. I read the novel that Pasolini wrote concurrently with the making of the “Teorema,” and I took ideas and bits of dialogue from both, as well as from his movies “Porcile” and “Salo,” the three movies comprising his trilogy about the psychosexual pathology of the bourgeoisie. Alex and Victor collaborated with me on the “confessions,” which I cribbed from various sources. And they also gave me the idea for the adult birth of the Visitor at the end, which is a reference to the Brazilian film “Macunaima” (1969). So it was quite collaborative, and A/political was also very involved creatively with suggestions and input, as was the cast, and our intimacy coordinator, Lidid Ravviso, who was born in Ostia, the town outside of Rome that Pasolini was assassinated in. She taught me a lot about Pasolini.  

Sullivan: French singer Serge Gainsbourg has always thought painting was the superior art form, despite being a singer. What do you think is the superior art form?

Bruce LaBruce: Cinema, of course!

Disturbing Cinema: Finally I would like to conclude this interview by asking you one of my signature questions which is what is the most disturbing film you have ever seen and why?

Bruce LaBruce: “Bambi,” for obvious reasons, followed closely by “Eden Lake.” I was angry at the person who made me watch it. I actually hate torture porn, believe it or not! Third runner-up for most disturbing film: "Darwin's Nightmare" (2004), a documentary by Hebert Sauper about he effect of fishing the Nile perch in Tanzania's Lake Victoria. Basically this predatory fish devours all native species, and then they are sold to European markets while the local native Tanzanian families have to live on the bones and heads of the fish. Meanwhile, the women are raped and ravaged by AIDS and also the cargo planes that come in to collect the fish smuggle in weaponry and armaments to feed local wars. Terrifying!!

Disturbing Cinema & Sullivan: Congratulations on the film, and thank you once again for taking your time answering our questions, Bruce LaBruce. It was an absolute pleasure interviewing you.

The Visitor (2024) Plot Summary: A refugee is among multiple identical men appearing around London. Masked as a homeless man, he visits the home of an upper class family and befriended by their maid. He intimately interacts with each catalysing their spiritual awakenings.

You can buy The Visitor (2024) here:

Vinegar Syndrome: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/the-visitor

The Advocate For Fagdom (2011) Plot Summary: The Advocate for Fagdom unites the puzzle pieces one by one. Testimonies are combined with rare archive images. Art galeries present movie extracts that are succeeded by images shot on location. And the other way round. Writers, film makers, art galeries owners, actors and actresses, photographers, producers, friends and loved ones all join in a game of interpretation, analysis or simple anecdotes. John Waters, Bruce Benderson, Harmony Korine, Gus Van Sant, Richard Kern, Rick Castro and others deliver their impressions, theories and confessions. Everything blends into the fascinating portrait of a singular person blessed with singular talents. A complex personality at war not with a system but all systems. The portrait of a man constantly moving between his punk attitude and extreme sensibility.

You can buy or rent The Advocate For Fagdom (2011) here:

Prime Video: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Advocate-for-Fagdom/0TB4QNNGB7K61FITHT0FYB4Q10

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theadvocateforfagdom

No Skin Off My Ass (1991) Plot Summary: A lonely hairdresser watches the title sequence of "That Cold Day in the Park" then visits a local park to invite a down-and-out skinhead to his apartment. He draws the silent man a bath and talks to him as he soaks. He locks his guest in a bedroom. Next day, the skinhead leaves through the window and visits his sister, who's making a film called "Sisters of the SLA." He helps with a screen-test. The hairdresser has dreams and fantasies involving the skinhead, the skinhead returns to visit him, and then the filmmaker pays a call on the two men, exposing her brother as faking his silence and pretending a lack of sexual interest. Fantasies can come true.

You can buy or rent No Skin Off My Ass (1991) here:

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/noskinoffmyass

Epicentre Films: https://www.epicentrefilms.com/film/no-skin-off-my-ass/vod/