BRUCE LABRUCE’S CINEMA occupies a liminal space between haute couture pornography and experimental narrative film. The prolific artist-provocateur is releasing his new book, The Revolution Is My Boyfriend, to coincide with his fifteenth feature film, The Visitor. LaBruce is also a savvy cultural critic and contributed an article titled “Notes on Camp—and Anti-Camp” to this magazine in 2014 (March–April issue). A hallmark of his sui generis œuvre is the delightful metafictions of his cosmology. One of his first big films, Hustler White, references Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, and his new feature film, The Visitor, pays homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema.
A fan of his moviemaking, I must confess I also collect his still photographs. My favorite LaBruce movie, L.A. Zombie, starring mega-pornstar François Sagat is mega-hard to stream. The plenitude of pithy penises often mark LaBruce’s films as too dirty for narrative platforms and too arty for porn sites.
I interviewed LaBruce in his Toronto home from my West Hollywood apartment via Zoom on May 1st. Spencer Toulouse, my assistant, facilitated the research, recording, and transcription of the interview.
Phil Tarley: My sources tell me that you grew up in or around Toronto—are they right?
Bruce LaBruce: I grew up on a farm 150 miles northwest of Toronto. I came here to study film and dance.
PT: I think of you as a highly transgressive artist, as much of your work flagrantly violates conventional morality. What inspires you to take on the standard rules and norms?
BLaB: Outsiders and misfits—the kind of people who test the conventions of society. In the 1980s, I was in the punk movement, and I always had crazy boyfriends, like hustler boy-friends, and I lived with female strippers. I surrounded myself with people who inhabited the fringes of society. These are the characters who interest me. Many of my films are based on fetishes. Fetishists tend to be outsiders. But everyone has a fetish of some sort. Even with a fetish that seems really perverse, you can have a romantic connection to the fetish object. Even if it’s an amputee stump or a dirty foot, you can still feel an almost religious devotion to it. These characters and their fetishes have always interested me.
PT: What, may I ask, are your fetishes?
BLaB: I’m a basic foot fetishist. I have a hustler fetish. I have a skinhead fetish. Most of my films feature skinheads in one form or another, whether they are skinheads, monks, or punks. It’s the actual shaved head that sets me off.
PT: Interesting. Even though your characters do nasty, kinky things to each other, they’re often very tender, and there’s a love between them, a light and airy sweetness. Can you talk about that?
BLaB: Well, part of it is like what I was saying about fetishists. People think they’re nasty and dirty, and they don’t have any real human emotions. I always found them very human, and spiritual. Just because you look like a mean, aggressive punk or skinhead doesn’t mean that you don’t have a gentle or empathetic side. Insane characters actually have a heart as well. In Hustler White, Piglet, the skinhead hustler—all he wants is a kiss. He doesn’t care what anyone does to him, all this extreme sadomasochism, choking, and autoerotic asphyxiation—all he really wants is a kiss. A French critic who reviewed Hustler White wrote: “In a world that’s characterized by extreme fetish, Sadomasochism, and violence, the last taboo is tenderness.”
PT: Queer curator Ruben Esparza and I were talking about all the movies you’ve shot here in Los Angeles. What’s the attraction to L.A.?
BLaB: Well, it’s really an old-school gay thing. My parents were farmers with only a grade-school education, but they loved Hollywood cinema, which made them much more liberal and sophisticated than they otherwise would have been. We lived on this isolated farm. Their love of Hollywood movies rubbed off on me. That was my escape. Watching the “Late Late Show” was my window on the world. It sophisticated me. I was a baby gay; I got my queer education from watching Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Sunset Boulevard, and All About Eve. My identification with these tortured female stars was my emotional outlet. I had to repress my sexuality for a long time, until I moved to the city.
PT: Tony Ward [the star of Hustler White]wanted me to ask if you would please put him in a new film. He also wanted to know when you’re coming back to L.A. to shoot again, maybe “Hustler White, Part Two”?
BLaB: He just messaged me on Instagram with his new boyfriend. It made me think how much I loved shooting Hustler White in L.A. and L.A. Zombie—Tony had a cameo in that one, as a homeless person. I’d love to work with him again. I’ll see what I can come up with.
PT: Hustler White is very Warholian. Tony Ward reminds me of Andy War-hol’s “It boy,” Joe Dallesandro.
BLaB: I just interviewed Joe for Interview magazine.
PT: I was reading the passage in your Dallesandro interview where you asked him about writing a part for him. Maybe you could put Joe Dallesandro and Tony Ward together.
BLaB: That’s a great idea. It was discussed back in the day. When Hustler White came out, some people tried to think about projects for them. In my interview, Joe was talking about his crazy childhood. His mother was a car thief, and with all the crime going on and rough times—he and Tony have been through the mill. They’ve been through so many crazy experiences, but have both remained these very centered, sweet kind of men. I like the idea that these are tough guys who still have hearts of gold and are just salt-of-the-earth characters.
PT: You recently directed a remake of Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema titled The Visitor (2024). Why a remake of the Pasolini film?
BLaB: I’m interested in the basic narrative, an archetypical Searchers narrative that Schrader and Scorsese are obsessed with—Fassbinder and John Houston, too. Loner characters where a girl or a vulnerable person is kidnapped, and they must go on a journey to save this innocent person who’s been taken by a kind of savage element. In The Visitor, the family is taken over by an outsider, coded as a kind of hustler. The interloper descends on the family unit and ends up fucking them all and somehow transforming them. The Visitor is a political allegory. I’m intrigued by this disruption of the nuclear family by an outsider character who’s queer.
PT: In Hustler White, L.A. Zombie, and The Visitor, it seems people are always popping out of suitcases. What’s the symbolism here?
BLaB: The suitcase is kind of the key. It’s the part standing in for the whole; it’s symbolic of all refugees. Just this basic suitcase—somebody who’s been exiled or who’s been forced to leave their country, and they’ve arrived. The suitcase is used by all travelers who are between places. It’s a symbol of never being at home or in any one place, constantly being forced to leave your home and find a new one. In Hustler White, it’s a symbol of death. The hustler gets chopped up and ends up in a suitcase. It represents the transition from life to death. I’ve lived my whole life making movies, spending so much time in hotel rooms, traveling, and never really being quite at home anywhere. You know, that’s sort of part of the queer experience.
PT: I often hear your movies compared to those of John Waters. What do you think of that comparison?
BLaB: Of course, John’s films greatly influenced me, especially his early movies like Mondo Trasho and Multiple Maniacs. I borrowed a lot from his strategies of shock value and shocking for the sake of shock. And leaning into all the filthy aspects of life that disrupt polite society and make people turn up their noses. That’s always fun, but John does it with elegance and panache. His movies are very astute in a satirical way. John has been a great friend and mentor. Whenever he can, he comes to my film premiers in New York and lends his support. He had me down to the Provincetown Film Festival this past year, and they gave me the Filmmaker on the Edge Award.
PT: John Waters has a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Would you like to have one too?
BLaB: John was thrilled about it because the stretch of Hollywood Boulevard that has his star is so trashy, like homeless people vomiting on the stars of yesteryear.
PT: You like to make homeless people sexy. What’s that all about?
BLaB: I got that from Samuel Delaney and his famous book The Mad Man, about a character who had a sexual fetish for the homeless, which I always wanted to make into a movie. In Hustler White, Rick Castro and I were obsessed with homeless guys on Santa Monica Boulevard. We’d go window shopping, looking at all the hustlers driving up and down the strip. And we’d see these guys who were ripped, clearly homeless, but their shirts were open, and for some reason they always had a black grease stain on their chest. I don’t know where all this grease came from, but we put it in Hustler White. At the end, I have black grease hair dye, and I wipe it on Tony Ward’s chest. It always stimulated my imagination to think how somebody who looks like a model with a ripped body ended up, you know, homeless and hustling on Santa Monica Boulevard. A lot of people come to make it big in Hollywood, and a lot of them fall through the cracks and end up living on the street or being addicted to drugs. But there’s something still very sexy about them. It’s poverty porn.
PT: How would you like to be remembered?-
BLaB: Oh, God, I’m not into this idea of immortality in that sense. I will say that the one thing that kind of keeps me going is that I do get a lot of feedback from people who say that my work gave them permission to be queer, gave them permission to explore their pornographic imagination, gave them permission to have an identity outside of the orthodox or conventional way of being gay. And that my work has really influenced them. When they felt isolated, when they felt alienated from gays, or from the mainstream world, I gave them hope and kind of some direction. So that’s what keeps me going. Like this idea that I’m actually having a positive influence on people, on queer people. Because, when I was young and alienated and feeling suicidal and bullied and all that stuff, it was movies that gave me hope. So I’m sort of giving back in that way.
Phil Tarley’s essays and photography have appeared in LA Weekly, The WOW Report, The Advocate, Out magazine,Genre, and others.
