While all of our guests on i-Dentity this series are considered ambassadors of subculture, few embody the spirit of rebellion quite as fully as artist, writer, photographer, and shock cinema auteur, Bruce LaBruce. Since the early 80s, he’s fearlessly interrogated, subverted and teased dominant social ideologies through photography, DIY published projects, and films that delight in dancing all over the boundary between arthouse cinema and porn. 

It was in Toronto – where he moved from rural Ontario to study film at 18, and which he still calls home today –  that he started to hone his idiosyncratic approach. After leaning into the city’s gay and punk scenes, he became disillusioned by the racially-homogeneous homonormativity that prevailed in the former, and the commonplace homophobia in the latter. As a response, along with G.B. Jones, Bruce published J.D.s – a DIY, queer punk zine that was a “direct rebuke to the mainstream gay movement. We were challenging all of its orthodoxies,” Bruce explains, “making a point of putting people of colour on the cover of our fanzines, having interracial sex scenes and also expressing the solidarity between lesbians, gays and non-binary people. It was very intersectional and inclusive for its time.” 

The rejection that Bruce and his community of radical misfits experienced only fuelled their adamancy in “being extremely, unapologetically queer”, leading to the development of what Bruce and G.B. Jones came to dub ‘queercore’: an aesthetic and lifestyle movement centred on rejecting social conventions. “It’s one of the reasons why we became so aggressively sexual in terms of making our fanzines and films,” Bruce notes, recalling early Super 8 experiments in which he’d splice together footage of punk moshpits with clips from gay porn films, drawing out the implicit queer subtext in the images of violently thrashing masses of male bodies. “We kind of teased and tried to humiliate the punks for pretending they're so radical and political in their posture, but they couldn't stand a little ass-fucking in a movie.”

These early experimentations eventually culminated in the production of his first feature film in 1991, No Skin Off My Ass, a comedy-drama starring himself, G.B Jones and Bruce’s then-boyfriend Klaus von Brücker. The film established the aesthetic and thematic tenets of Bruce’s style: a kitschy reverence for golden-age Hollywood; an intentionally ambivalent presentation of queerness that refuses to be politely assimilated into mainstream identity narratives; a use of porn as a tool for unbridled social commentary; and a jagged, sociopolitically-charged wit. 

Over the years, this idiosyncratic cinematic language – along with his photographic and writing practices – has made Bruce’s name a synonym for shock art. Films like Hustler White, Raspberry Reich and L.A. Zombie have earned cult reputations for scenes that ‘transgressive’ barely covers –  think amputee porn, racialised gang rape and resurrections as consequences of penetrative sex with open wounds. Removed from their layered contexts, scenes like these have been written off for their ‘shock jock’ crassness. Such readings are, in a sense, justified, but ultimately overlook the exploration of the humanity – and even romantic potential – implicit in even the most extreme desires, and the rejection of the moralistic pathologising of those that harbour them which lies at the heart of much of Bruce’s work. “The purpose of shocking people is to shock them out of complacency, to shock them out of their pre-assumptions, their comfort zone,” he says. “to shock them out of relying on conventions of polite society.”

Today, Bruce is considered one of cinema’s greatest – and most provocative – queer auteurs: his films are regularly screened at festivals worldwide, and in 2015, MoMA staged a screening programme of his oeuvre at its Midtown Manhattan flagship. Despite his acclaim in the cultural mainstream, he’s stoically maintained the subversive spirit that’s been the impetus for his work for the past four decades. Just watch his most recent film, The Visitor – a porn-heavy interpretation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorama, darted with an astute commentary on contemporary British immigration politics – for proof.

In this episode, Bruce unpacks his radical approach, from his days as a queer punk antagonist in Toronto, through the making of some of his most shocking films, and finally to the cult icon status he enjoys today.