Over his nearly 40-year career as a filmmaker and photographer, Toronto-based artist Bruce LaBruce has worn all labels possible for someone working in the subterranean margins of queer cinema.
LaBruce has been called a radical leftist, a queer punk Marxist, an enfant terrible provocateur pornographer whose cult classics have hardcore and softcore cuts, many available on porn sites. He nods nonchalantly at this label soup today. Reflecting on his career a decade ago in a piece he wrote for IndieWire on the eve of a comprehensive retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, LaBruce didn’t want to be called an “aging” enfant terrible. “Challenging the status quo should not be age-specific.”
The past four decades have seen the sweep of the AIDS crisis, 9/11, numerous wars and recessions, the legalization of homosexuality in some countries, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and the global rise of the far right. Westerners — even the less hetenormative — might need all these labels to make sense of the dazzling variety in LaBruce’s movies.
They have shock value, explicit sex, loud semiotics, and unabashed rhetoric that give horny-zombie protest-anthem vibes — their underground, zinelike B-movie camp aesthetic giving way to both tenderness and cinematic seriousness. And yet so many interviews and portraits of this divisive figure can’t help but make sense of him by asking some version of the same simple question: Does Bruce LaBruce make art or porn?
Talking to IndieWire over Zoom from Toronto, LaBruce is nothing like the enfant terrible one would expect. He’s assured by the success of his latest film, 2024’s “The Visitor,” an adaptation of Italian master Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema.” It’s a crowning snapshot of LaBruce’s fascinations: an early scene of coprophagy becomes foreplay for a bourgeois London family about to undergo a sexual liberation, courtesy of an alien-refugee played by nonbinary performance artist Bishop Black.
“I think I’m one of the few filmmakers who is kind of allowed to go back and forth between making films that are very pornographic and films that aren’t sexually explicit,” he said. “A lot of filmmakers want to dabble in porn but then they transition to more mainstream filmmaking, and they’re embarrassed about their porn past. For pornographers, there’s kind of a glass ceiling, where when people see their resume, they’re reluctant to give you financing or recognition. I totally identify as a pornographer and express solidarity with them. But in 2012, I made a [non-porn] film called ‘Gerontophilia,’ which was a bigger-budgeted indie film, made in the industry style with a union crew in Montreal, and Variety magazine, which had dismissed my films almost completely up until that point, ran [a review] with the headline, ‘Bruce LaBruce goes limp.’ So I was like, I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t. Somewhere, maybe, there’s a balance that I haven’t figured out yet.”
That Variety review wondered if this intergenerational romance between an 18-year-old assisted-living orderly and an 81-year-old resident showed signs that “age is tempering LaBruce’s excesses.” It’s curious. At several points in LaBruce’s career, writers have wondered if the “randy iconoclast” who “ignites a fuse from the groin on up to the critical faculties” might go “mushy on us,” as suggested in a 2002 Salon interview (one of his earliest online) circa a San Francisco photo exhibit of his work. This exhibit included pictures of his devout South Asian Muslim boyfriend (who LaBruce started dating shortly before 9/11; the relationship would last about four years), which according to Salon, revealed a “more considered kind of iconoclasm.”
Similarly, a 2015 Slate headline asked straight up if LaBruce can remain “subversive now that his queer films are taken seriously.” If LaBruce was even a little fazed then about cultural mavens concerned about his relevance — in the Slate piece, LaBruce insisted, “Why can’t I be both a crazy underground filmmaker and a commercial filmmaker, on my own terms?” — he has certainly received a boost of confidence in 2025 with “The Visitor,” currently on IndieWire’s list of the year’s best films so far.
When asked how “The Visitor” makes him feel he is “allowed” to go back and forth between art and porn, he said he was given carte blanche by London arts organization a/political, which supports artists whose work can’t be easily financed. After scoring great reviews out of Berlinale, the film was picked up sales agent Best Friend Forever, and sold to distributor Utopia for the U.S., UK, and Canada, as well as to Imovision, a large distributor in Brazil. And there have been some fantastic screening events: In London, the film premiered to a packed audience of 700 people at Klub Verboten, where afterward a sex-party was held. In Brooklyn, there was a full house at the beautiful opera-house-like Roulette space.
While LaBruce feels gratified by such recognition, he still feels the sting of being overlooked by otherwise supportive venues. Although his features since the 1990s have screened at well-known international festivals, LaBruce said, “Strangely, in the last 10 to 12 years, my films have been shadow-banned by mainstream gay film festivals, especially in America, like Outfest, Frameline, and the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. [They] used to always show my films when I was starting out. Outfest [even] gave me a lifetime achievement award in 2012.”
He added, “I’ve 1751031703 been shadow-banned because I don’t make the kind of films they like. I don’t show an orthodox representation of homosexuality, [or films that] correspond with current trends of sexual identity politics. I also don’t like making what I call ‘LGBTQ-cheerleading’ films. So strangely, my films have been playing at international non-gay festivals. They show up in India or Moscow, Argentina, Brazil, or Korea, [where they are seen] more as independent cinema made in a kind of arthouse style.”
What about film festivals back home in Toronto? Not much luck there, either. LaBruce said, “The Toronto Gay and Lesbian Film Festival rejected my 2017 film, ‘The Misandrists,’ because they considered it transphobic. Then, it played at very trans and lesbian-identified festivals. For me, to say [the film] is transphobic is insulting and ridiculous.”
This makes sense from LaBruce’s point of view, even with the shorts he has made, like “Offing Jack,” about a relationship between two trans men, or the daughter in “The Visitor,” played by transmasculine actor Ray Filar. Beyond that, LaBruce’s lifelong affiliation with the “queercore” movement, which has roots in punk rock, suggests that his work speaks to the most marginalized queers, drawing from feeling alienated by both gay and punk subcultures. He still identifies with both.
“As a kid in my 20s, I was a queer punk, and I was making fanzines, which was part of the queercore movement, which was very aggro and in your face. With the zine ‘J.D.s,’ G.B. Jones and I really leaned heavily into the porn. I critique the extreme right, which is an easy thing to do. It’s more difficult to critique the left, and my films are quite often a satire of the radical left. My pet peeve is liberal tolerance, and the kind of liberal view of homosexuality that, as long as you are well-behaved, you can have your rights, and as long as you make certain kinds of films, then you can be accepted in the mainstream.”
He added, “That’s why we were in this punk scene, which was supposed to be very leftist and progressive, but there was a lot of homophobia, so we made these queer films that were very homosexually explicit to push it really in their face and say, ‘No, we don’t want your liberal tolerance. You take us as we are, or not at all.’ That tendency has never left me.”
His queer punk roots appear in his earliest features like “No Skin Off My Ass” and “Super 8 1/2,” which since retrospectives MoMA’s in 2015 are becoming more seen in public spaces, and owe their referential style to LaBruce’s training in postmodernism and semiotics in the ’70s at York University in Toronto.
LaBruce said the punk movement has its own “strategies of provocation, its shock value, which I learned from John Waters, who I consider a friend and mentor, [as] a perfectly legitimate form of expression that is in itself valuable because it shocks people out of their complacency. The other things about punk: Paradox is much more interesting to me than just plain irony, and also dialectical thinking, which I get from Pasolini, the idea that two seemingly contradictory things can exist at the same time. Pasolini is the Catholic atheist homosexual communist — everything that he is contradicts one another — and yet it all makes sense. There’s some kind of synthesis where he’s able to make something powerful and meaningful out of all these seemingly irreconcilable forces.”
If Pasolini, whom LaBruce regards as one of the great queer filmmakers along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was a direct influence for “The Visitor,” then “No Skin Off My Ass” was inspired by Robert Altman’s “That Cold Day in the Park.” “No Skin” was the first LaBruce feature that also starred in — and he performs unsimulated sex in the film.
Between these two films a third of a century apart, most of LaBruce’s hardcore work has a revolutionary fervor that cannot be separated from the porn, be it the zombies in “L.A. Zombie” or “Otto; or, Up with Dead People,” who fuck wounds on corpses to reanimate them. Or the fanatical emancipatory queer acts demanded by characters such as Big Mother and Gudrun played by LaBruce’s perennial collaborator, Susanne Sachsse, in both “The Misandrists” and “Raspberry Reich.”
In “Raspberry Reich,” Gudrun coins the slogan “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend,” which could nimbly sum up LaBruce’s career. It appears on screen in the outrageous strobe-like graphics that characterize and visually disrupt so many of LaBruce’s films. He attributes the influence to agitprop, to filmmakers like Dušan Makavejev (“W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism“) and 1960s Godard movies like “Made in U.S.A.” LaBruce said in a 2022 interview in Montreal publication Cult MTL that these films had to be porn because they were about sexual revolution. “I had to put Marxism where my mouth is,” a statement which itself lends to imagery of gay sex.
Does it all cohere? Altman and Pasolini as inspirations, queercore works that hack deeper away from the mainstream at any hint of homophobia, and romantic, non-NC-17 fetish films like “Geronotophilia” and the 2020 twincest film, “Saint-Narcissse”? As an active participant in the social movements of the ’80s, he’s honed a distinctive style across an extraordinarily diverse body of films as sexually charged as they are politically.
It’s certainly both for the pornographic films, which often employ a distancing strategy toward erotic images. “I developed this kind of self-reflexive kind of tendency in my work with distancing techniques,” he said. “I think it’s partly because I have a lot of ambivalence about porn. I’m completely attracted to it, seduced by it, and at the same time I’m kind of repelled by it for obvious reasons, because there’s a lot of exploitation in porn, not that I have any political correct intervention in that regard. But also just because it can be a very crude, undifferentiated mass of signifiers that are intimidating to weed through.
“But also because I started out performing sex myself in my films, I developed these somewhat defensive or reflexive kind of techniques to kind of distance myself from the intimacy that I was presenting, to make the spectator aware of their own complicity in the pornographic spectacle, and how their viewership is not just about pure pleasure, but it’s a mediated and directed pleasure, a mirror of their own desires, reflected back in a fractional kind of way,” he said.
“For my first feature ‘No Skin Off My Ass,’ for example, not only is it in black and white and super 8; it’s post-dubbed and obviously not in sync. It’s very much a collage aesthetic. There’s a lot of comedy and satire, and ironic use of music. There’s so many film references. It’s a remake of Robert Altman’s ‘That Cold Day in the Park’ but also references Warhol’s films like ‘Flesh.’ So there were so many things that create these shards of reflective signifiers that are partly meant to make the viewer self-conscious of their complicity with the desire, but also reflect my own ambiguity.”
My own history of coming across “Raspberry Reich” coincided with my coming of age in the early 2000s with independent cinema in general, and with French filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s polarizing works “Romance” and “Anatomy of Hell,” and particularly the extreme 2000 revenge slasher road movie “Baise-Moi” (“Fuck Me”) by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. The latter New French Extremity film about two female serial killers appears to reference LaBruce’s film-within-the-film in “Super 8 1/2,” where two lesbian sisters go on a sex rampage and kill straight men.
“I saw ‘Baise-Moi’ when it came out and really loved it, and felt that I was doing the same kind of work. I subsequently met Virginie Despentes when I was making a little documentary for Arte. I met Catherine Breillat 15 years ago when we were both invited to the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, and [‘Baise-Moi’] is one of the films that I showed her, and she really loved it. It’s interesting that that’s my cohort, these peers I end up meeting, the same with Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noé. There’s the New Queer Cinema, but there’s also the unruly children of the New Queer Cinema, the ones who let their bad imagination go wild. You see it with Alain Guiraudie, who made ‘Stranger by the Lake’ and ‘Misericordia.’ These are the filmmakers that I’m more aligned with.”
LaBruce said his films are “often also about other filmmakers. Not only am I endlessly remaking other people’s films and stealing dialogue and scenarios from films I like, but also constantly referencing myself and reconfiguring symbols. I’m not even aware of it anymore. For example, after I watched ‘Saint-Narcisse,’ I [realized] I basically remade my first film, ‘No Skin Off My Ass,’ which also has [among other things] a scene of a beautiful young skinhead having his head shaved.”
Regarding his work on zombies, which has been brilliantly dissected ever since “Otto; or, Up with Dead People” in 2008, LaBruce said there’s a throughline across “Otto,” “L.A. Zombie” with porn star François Sagat, and “The Visitor.” They are all about “outsider characters who have a queer sexuality that almost gives them a kind of mystical power that is actually just an expression of their own oppressed state,” he said. “As the character Media says in ‘Otto,’ ‘For the misfits, the sissies, and the plague-ridden faggots who have been mercilessly abused by the heterofascist majority.’ These outsider characters project the hatred and paranoia of society through their ‘zombieness.’ ‘The Visitor’ isn’t technically a zombie film, but it’s about the Black Other and people projecting their repressed sexual guilt and shame, making these characters into monsters.”
In 2025, LaBruce is still very much the enfant terrible provocateur with no signs of mushiness, and he hinted he will continue to make variations of the same kind of films, like a film about zombie terrorists. To future writers, these might recall the “terrorist chic” of “Raspberry Reich” or the lesbian separatists of “The Misandrists.” He has two films in development like “Gerontophilia” — one with the working title “Queer Window” — and said they’re in a more popular idiom that might reach a wider audience. He’s getting funding from the Québécois, “who like me a lot better” than the English Canadians, he said.
As for the contradictions in his own reputation over the years, LaBruce said that he’s heard “the sign of an auteur is they’re just making the same film over and again.” He would be just fine with that, and hopefully with new global audiences.