Bruce LaBruce: The Advocate For Fagdom

Combining independent cinema and gay porn is just one of the things Bruce LaBruce is famous for. Besides being a successful, provocative director, the 46-year-old Canadian is a photographer, journalist and theatre director based in Toronto. He is also a diva – not in terms of extravagant outfits, but in terms of attitude and self-confidence: you can literally hear his eyes roll. By day he is a bohemian and by night he tweets after having sex with men half his age.

Before becoming an underground gay icon, he had a shockingly pastoral childhood: Justin Stewart grew up in a small family farm together with his four siblings in Ontario, Canada. He approached cinema very systematically, pursuing film studies in Toronto and film theory at New York University. In the 1980s, Justin became Bruce LaBruce and launched the independent queer punk zine J.D.s, giving the finger simultaneously to the punk and the mainstream gay scenes at the time. He practically gave birth to the so-called Homocore or Queercore movement, which corrupted a whole new generation of homosexuals.

Bruce’s career as a director started with a series of short, low-budget movies. He gained international acclaim with Super 8 1/2, a bio-pic about his rise to cult stardom that became a favorite in high-profile festivals like Sundance and Berlinale. In 1996 he directed Hustler White – the flick that reinforced his initial success, proved his great talent and featured a sex scene with an amputee gigolo. The movie paid homage to classic Hollywood and combined porn industry aesthetics with classical cinema techniques. With it, Bruce LaBruce officially became a movie-genre supercollider, mashing up revolutionaries, skinheads, deaf gay hairdressers and terrorists in detailed, close-up sex scenes.

Bruce’s latest passion is the zombie-horror genre. The “melancholic gay zombie picture”Otto Or Up With Dead People premiered at Berlinale in 2008 and became his most commercially successful project to date. It was followed by LA Zombie, the story of an alien zombie (played by porn star Francois Sagat) who wanders around LA’s ghettos, fucking dead people back to life.

Oh, and by the way: every year Bruce LaBruce stages a play in Berlin. Since 1998 he has contributed as a journalist/editor/photographer to diverse magazines like Dutch, BUTT, Index Magazine, Dazed and Confused and Vice. He wrote two books and in February 2010 also debuted as a visual artist with an exhibition of silk screens from LA Zombie.

In her portrait of this controversial filmmaker Angélique Bosio combines rare archive material with statements from his collaborators and famous colleagues including John Waters, Gus Van Sant, Harmony Korine and Richard Kern. The film also includes an interview with Berlin producer Jürgen Brüning, for LaBruce’s most recent films (including the 2004 work THE RASPBERRY REICH), were all made in Berlin. Bruce LaBruce: “It’s great filming in Berlin. The city is one of the best places to film in the world; it has spectacular locations where you can either film for nothing or very cheaply.”

Unfortunately for you, the movie is sold out already.

Read my interview with Bruce after the premiere of LA Zombie.