Bruce LaBruce is an independent film-maker and writer who has created a number of renowned and award-winning films. His well-known feature Hustler White, starring himself and Tony Ward, screened at the Cannes Film Festival while his last film Skin Flick was released in hard- and soft-core versions, and won attention at, respectively, the gay adult video awards and film festivals around the world. His latest film, The Raspberry Reich, won Best Film at the 2004 Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) and can now be ordered on DVD.

More information on Bruce can be found at his website, www.brucelabruce.com

Bruce spoke with Mark Adnum via email in December 2004.

MARK ADNUM: The politics of gay screen representation are pretty schizo: gay big screen films and characters can only be bright, gay-positive, and earnest, yet in gay porn films amoral, Nazi-esque characters beating, torturing and dominating others is par for the course. I mean, you show a gay guy Deliverance and he’ll tell you it’s vile and homophobic and yet you show him a gay porn about camping buddies getting gang-fucked by strangers in the woods and he’ll happily beat off to it, and lend it to his friends. Your films seem to operate on a bridge between this schism, so what’s your view on all of this?

BRUCE LABRUCE: Well I think you're exactly right. I personally never thought for a second that Deliverance, which is a cinematic masterpiece, was in any way homophobic. I mean, it's about homosexual panic, like most great horror movies, but it's not homophobic in that simplistic sense. The entire film is about masculinity and how it is inscribed: urban/rural, ruling class/working class, intellectual/primal, civilization/nature, etc. The fact that the rural hillbillies use sexual violation to attempt to exert their power over the citified (and arguably feminized) males speaks volumes about the power relations inherent in sexuality and the aspects of aggression and dominance that are inherent in all sexual relations. Oops, sorry. I'm regressing into intellectual sissy-speak. You see, I'm a recovering academic, and since The Raspberry Reich came out, a film which had me revisit my university training, the jargon is all flooding back. Let me proceed with caution.

One reason that my movie Skin Flick, and the hardcore version Skin Gang, was so contentious was that it didn't subscribe to the conventions that you've mentioned above vis-a-vis mainstream representation of homosexuality and porn. When it comes to the part where the black character gets raped by the white power skinheads, according to porn conventions he should have given in and just enjoyed the good fucking he was getting - and his white "life partner" probably should have joined in on the fun. But I played it more according to dramatic film convention, so that the couple is portrayed as being traumatized by the rape. Rape in porn usually ends up with the person being violated becoming a willing participant, and I played against that expectation. I guess that's the point of most of my movies - playing against the expectations of the genres I'm working in to show how conventional they really are, or to make people think about why these stock representations exist.

Also, I believe that porn operates like a collective unconscious in which all sorts of politically incorrect fantasies, including rape and racially-based sexual enslavement, can be explored without the usual concomitant guilt and shame.

MA: The Vito Russo style of gay film appreciation, which climaxed with the ludicrous anti-The Silence of the Lambs protests outside the 1992 Oscars, seems to have taken hold as the model for gay-themed film making. Hence, All Over The Guy or Mambo Italiano. These films are so shrill that someone like yourself is branded as a “shock-meister” and is marginalised as subversive, punk. In the days before AIDS, the gay psyche seemed to be a lot more flexible and was responsive to the new, the irreverent and the unexpected. My theory is that the Stockholm Syndrome is in effect, with gays coming out of the trauma of AIDS as dogma-loving automata enchanted by rules, repression the need to be clean and normal. Do you mourn the gay of old, or is this devolution just part of a greater cycle?

BLB: That's a big question. First off, I've always argued that AIDS really was a disaster for the gay movement not just because of the obvious tragedy of the unnecessary deaths and the unforgivable way that the Reagan administration swept it under the carpet (or quilt), but because it reduced all gay activism to this one, singular moment of an immediate health crisis.

The primary victim of this phenomenon was gay aesthetics and perhaps also what you call the ability of the gay psyche to be flexible and responsive, which I think was true. Before AIDS, gays were more of an avant-garde, more subversive and underground, and more of an invisible influence on fashion, art, and culture. AIDS activism forced a lot of gays to become more visible and institutionalized - and inevitably toned down and 'responsible' – in order to take on the government and the pharmaceutical companies, which are really one and the same, at the expense of its more extreme and unruly members. Add to this that, as Fran Lebowitz claims, AIDS killed all the cool people, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Now with the cocktail and the illusion that AIDS is under control, you do see some people drifting back to their old school ways. But the main thrust of the gay movement currently is toward assimilation, respectability, and the quest to be considered normal and mundane. I think the true gay movement is now dying the same death that feminism died in the early to mid 90's. Feminists also got to the point where they were trying to police the representation of women so strictly, like Stalinists, that they lost all credibility. Anti-porn feminists really killed feminism, just as today's gay prudes, who want a very asexual, cleaned-up, even monogamous and family-oriented version of homosexuality - decorative and benign - are killing true gay activism. But I'm fine with it. I think it will all just pave the way for the homosexual intifada.

MA: My favourite gay film character is Harold, from The Boys In The Band. Who’s yours?

BLB: From Boys in the Band? Michael. Outside of Boys in the Band? Sister George. Or Alexander.

MA: I always thought you should collaborate with Jane Campion and do a great film about Christine Jorgensen. What’s the chances of this ever happening?

BLB: Nil, although it's not a bad idea. But you know the original Christine
Jorgensen story, which I caught on TV in some lonely hotel room this year, is pretty amazing. I'm surprised they don't revive it a la Myra
Breckinridge.

MA: Still on gay film, I noticed that the moment Oliver Stone’s film Alexander was declared to be a flop, gay voices stopped caring about its potentially controversial gay content and started celebrating the film as a inconsequential future camp-classic, replete with a serpentine Angelina Jolie ham acting in opulent gowns and jewellery. Yet, the much-discussed relationship between Alexander and Hephaestion did indeed get short shrift in the film, and while Colin Farrell screws plenty of chicks, he doesn’t go near a bloke. I guess this is no longer an issue since the film isn’t going to dominate the Oscars.

BLB: It's interesting, because I actually think Alexander is a really subversive movie, and I'm getting really sick of all these tired American film critics - especially, it seems, the liberal ones - who can't get past the bad dye job and the eye-liner and the camp acting and actually examine what the movie is saying and how radical it is to be saying it at this particular moment in history.

I saw the move at the Stockholm International Film Festival when I was on the jury there a few weeks ago, and Oliver Stone was the guest of honour so I met him at the afterparty. I told him I quite liked the film because it was a "great gay epic", which he quite liked. But I think it's more than that. It's such a pointed critique of the Bush regime and their style of imperialism. I loved the moment in Alexander when he tells his generals that he's disappointed in them for having such little respect for cultures which are so much older than theirs. It's such an obvious dig at the current American involvement in Iraq, and yet I read no critique of the movie that went near this angle at all.

The camp aspects of the film, whether totally intentional or not, fit in perfectly with the conventions of the sword and sandal epics of fifties Hollywood - pageantry, over-wrought acting, anachronisms - and if you can't get beyond that, you're an idiot. It's like the fools that say they can't get past the bad acting in my movies. Get a grip! They're porn movies, using real porn actors. It's a given. Get over it. For porn actors, who have never been asked to act before, they're doing a damn fine job.

Alexander's relationship with Hephaestion, besides being hot, is cinematically unprecedented. It's the focal point of the entire movie, and yet it's not mired in any domesticated or normalized version of homosexuality like all other current gay representations in Hollywood. They're both promiscuous and libertine, and yet they have a strong and passionate bond with one another. I for one found it invigorating. I think the fact that they aren't showed having sex with each other makes it even stronger, making the point that the sex between them was only one aspect of their complex and deep relationship. That's how the usual relationship between male and female leads in Hollywood movies is treated. Alexander's ludicrous bedroom romp with Rosario Dawson was more trite and explicit - almost pornographic - because his relationship with her wasn't as profound. Two thumbs and one dick up.

MA: Hollywood is offering you a thirty million dollar budget to write and direct a remake of Philadelphia. What do you write, and who do you cast?

BLB: First of all, I'd ask for 33. Then I'd set it in Pittsburgh. It would be called Pittsburgh. The main character, played perhaps by Colin Farrell, would have contracted AIDS from having been a complete bare-backing, drug-addled faggot slut, not from one brief blow-job in the balcony of a porn theatre a la Tom Hanks. His ethnic lover would be black and extremely queenie. I see Mos Def in the part, because he's such a good actor. (He's amazing in The Woodsman.)

As for the Denzel Washington role, he's the one who should be Latino, because that's where all the really serious homophobia is coming from these days. Gael Garcia Bernal would be the obvious choice. But he would end up in a threeway with Colin Farrell and Mos Def in Colin's hospital bed at the end. Safe sex, of course. The family would all have disowned Colin by this point so they wouldn't be interrupted. Colin dies and Mos Def and Bernal head off to Burning Man together, into the sunset. The End

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