The Raspberry Reich

Bruce LaBruce is a writer, film-maker, and photographer stuck in the gulag otherwise known as Toronto, Canada. He started out as a child, then quickly moved on to the production of homo punk fanzines (J.D.s [with G.B. Jones], Dumb Bitch Deserves To Die [with Candy Parker]) and super 8 movies (Boy/Girl, I Know What It’s Like To Be Dead, Bruce and Pepper Wayne Gacy’s Home Movies [with Candy Parker], Slam!). These products helped to launch the so-called Homocore or Queercore movement which corrupted a whole new generation of homosexuals.

In 1991 LaBruce released his first feature length film. No Skin Off My Ass – an exploration of the sordid relationship between a faggoty hairdresser (played by LaBruce himself) and a mute, handsome young skinhead – went on to become a world-wide cult hit. His follow-up feature Super 8 1/2 (1994) is a harrowing cautionary bio-pic about LaBruce’s rocky rise to cult stardom. LaBruce may or may not be playing himself in this disturbing film, an aging porn star/director whose career is on the skids owing to his inability to cope with his emerging identification as a cineaste. Super 8 1/2 went on to become a film festival circuit favourite, earning slots in such high-profile fests as Sundance, London, Berlin, Dublin, Thessaloniki, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and Tokyo.

LaBruce’s Hustler White, made in collaboration with L.A.-based photog Rick Castro, was released in 1996. Co-starring supermodel Tony Ward and LaBruce himself, Hustler premiered at Sundance and similarly went on to become a film festival and cult favourite. LaBruce plays Jurgen Anger, a foreign faggot who visits Los Angeles to check out the Santa Monica Boulevard hustler scene, strictly for anthropological reasons. It’s love at first sight when Jurgen spots Montgomery Ward (Tony Ward) plying his wares at Plummer Park. Hustler White went on to win the grand prize at the International Trash Film Festival.

In late August 1998 LaBruce flew to London, England to shoot his first legitimate porn movie. Skin Flick, produced by Berlin’s Cazzo Films, concerns a gang of adorable neo-nazi skinheads which breaks into the home of an annoying, mixed-race, salt-and-pepper, bourgeois gay couple and sexually terrorizes them. The film stars such exiting new stars as Tom International and high fashion model and actress Nikki Uberti, as well as a cast of rising porn stars. Thankfully, LaBruce only has a cameo in Skin Flick, playing a gay-bashing statistic.

In 1998, LaBruce expanded into several new areas – as a photographer and columnist for such magazines as Honcho and Inches, and as a photographer, writer, and interviewer for New York’s Index Magazine, to which he was recently named a contributing editor. For many years LaBruce wrote regular columns for Toronto’s Eye Magazine and Exclaim, an alternative music monthly. As a writer and/or photographer, LaBruce has contributed to the National Post, the UK Guardian, Vice, Dutch, Butt, Strut, Dazed and Confused, Loyal, Doingbird, The Breeder, Bon, and K48. He has also produced two books, The Reluctant Pornographer, his premature memoirs, from Gutter Press, and Ride, Queer, Ride, a survey of his work from Plug-In Books. —http://brucelabruce.com