It takes a while to track down Bruce LaBruce. The 59-year-old Canadian filmmaker is in London, directing a hardcore porn remake of a Pier Paolo Pasolini film (more on that soon). When not filming, his social life, chronicled wittily on his Instagram feed, is a dizzying array of gallery openings, club nights and selfies with hip young fans—some of whom ask him to autograph their backsides. 

When we finally get to speak, LaBruce is back home in Toronto doing press in preparation for his appearance at the Provincetown Film Festival, where old friend John Waters will present him with the Filmmaker on the Edge Award.

LaBruce’s public persona can be imposing: eyes sheathed in his trademark bug-eye sunglasses, his arms roped with tattoos and fingers sprinkled with gold rings reading “Cunt” and “Daddy”. In conversation he’s surprisingly quiet and softly-spoken, polite in a uniquely Canadian way, thoughtful and drily funny—quite unlike the skinheads and ferocious left-wing revolutionaries who rampage through his films. 

For anyone who survived the turbulent 1990s, LaBruce was an indispensable presence. After making short films and editing queer punk zine J.D.s from the mid-eighties through to 1991, he made a head-turning feature debut that year, No Skin Off My Ass, a dramedy about a gay hairdresser who falls in love with a cute skinhead (played by LaBruce and his then-boyfriend Klaus von Brücker). Filmed in black-and-white on a shoestring budget, No Skin combines full-frontal nudity and explicit BDSM sex scenes with music cues from The Carpenters and The Sound of Music. An unexpected arthouse hit, it attracted celebrity fans including Nirvana rock god Kurt Cobain, who declared it his favourite film. 

As LGBTQ+ cinema crawls towards mainstream acceptability, LaBruce’s work continues to push sexual and moral boundaries, clocking up an astonishing array of taboos: gang-rape and gay Nazis in Skin Flick, horny gay zombies in Otto; or Up with Dead People and L.A. Zombie, sex with seniors in Gerontophilia, and incest between identical twins in Saint-Narcisse. He also regularly directs porn films, including 2022’s The Affairs of Lidia, with orgasms aplenty for its omnisexual characters.

His current project, The Visitor, is a remake of Pasolini’s 1968 existential drama Theorem, in which a young and gorgeous Terence Stamp moves in with and seduces a bourgeois family. In Pasolini’s version, the parents go crazy and the daughter falls into a coma, while the son comes out of the closet and starts making art with his own urine. LaBruce has made the Stamp character a refugee in post-Brexit Britain, and—as you might expect—ratchets up the sexual hijinks to NC-17 levels. In a provocative tribute to Pasolini’s Salò, LaBruce invited a public audience to peer through peepholes as he directed live sex scenes with his actors.

Letterboxd: Can you talk about your cinematic influences? 
Bruce LaBruce: For me, Pasolini and [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder are the masters. They were both left-wing and political in their filmmaking and came from a pre-liberationist gay politics that I identify with. They were able to embody contradictions in their work and also in their personal lives. [Pasolini] was also interested in how the human body is controlled by political forces like fascism, which is something I address in my own work. 

We should also mention Kenneth Anger, who died a few weeks ago, and to whom you pay tribute in Hustler White. What’s this about Anger putting a curse on you.
The character I play [in Hustler White] is called Jürgen Anger, who’s a cross between my producer Jürgen Brüning and Anger. He’s driving around the streets of Los Angeles, where all those scandalous Hollywood stories took place [as recounted in Anger’s 1959 book Hollywood Babylon], so it was a homage to him but also poking some fun. My collaborator Rick Castro generously showed Anger the movie. He really hated it. He said he wanted to drive me out to the desert and throw me on a cactus, then come back three days later and shoot me between the eyes.

It sounds like something that would happen in a Bruce LaBruce film. How did you deal with the curse?
I had an imaginary bottle of HexOff and I would spray myself all over so that the hexes would bounce off. Later in the century my husband, who is Cuban, would do protection rituals to protect me from bad spells. I did finally meet [Anger], about five years ago. He didn’t know who I was, and I wasn’t about to tell him. I bought a coat jacket from him with “Lucifer” embroidered on the back. 

It’s interesting how the queercore and New Queer Cinema movements were fighting against those two extremes—homophobes who wanted gays to go back into the closet, and gays who wanted to assimilate into straight culture. 
AIDS had a lot to do with that as well. There was a panic about it, and people started to be critical and judgmental about gay men having a lot of sex and multiple sexual partners. That created a conservatism within the gay community that we wanted to push against.

There’s a scene in Super 8 ½ where your character lists all the celebrities who died of AIDS. It’s played for laughs, but it’s a reminder that AIDS wiped out a generation of artists and cultural leaders.
Yeah. Fran Lebowitz always said, “AIDS killed all the cool people.”

Your early films were made at a time before the internet, when gay sex and BDSM was still underground and access to those images was very restricted. If you wanted to watch men having sex, you either had to rent a porn film or buy a dirty magazine. Do you ever miss those days?
Oh yeah. You had to identify other homosexuals through a coded language. In my movies, I would use a lot of punk imagery and music, juxtaposed with classic Hollywood soundtracks and a lot of old-school camp references that straight audiences wouldn’t always understand. My friends and I used to joke about bringing back “old-school gay” values and practices and making a case for going back into the closet. We were also questioning all sorts of politically correct ideas in both feminism and the gay movement at that time. 

In No Skin Off My Ass and The Raspberry Reich, you have a lot of references to left-wing figures like Angela Davis and the Baader-Meinhof Group, which contrast sharply with your gay Nazis in Skin Flick. What’s the appeal of portraying those extremes on screen?
Both the Black liberation movement and the gay liberation movement started with Marxist philosophy, which I was very influenced by when I was in college. I was also hanging out in punk clubs. In the late 1980s there was this influx of neo-Nazi skinheads in that movement, and they were hot as hell. I had a boyfriend who was a hustler who transformed after I broke up with him. He turned into a neo-Nazi. I ran into him years later and he was homeless. He ended up staying with me, until he beat the shit out of me and I had to throw him out. So that began my romance with extreme right-wing figures on a sexual level, which I’ve investigated through my films. 

There’s a genuine sense of sweetness and romance in those sex scenes, even when someone’s being wrapped in cling-film or being banged under a swastika flag. Romance seems to be as important a part of your aesthetic as politics and violence.
Part of that is my old-school camp attachment to Hollywood melodrama, especially female melodrama, where everything is felt so intensely. I’ve also tried to portray radical politics in a romantic way. Revolutionaries are by definition romantics and idealists. The Symbionese Liberation Army used to fuck each other in the back of the van on their way to blowing up buildings. I have a light touch with very extreme subject matter, and I think that it’s part of undercutting it, like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Your work is attracting new generations of young, politicised fans, most of whom weren’t born when you started making films. What are your observations about Gen Z?
We call them Gen Zed in Canada. It’s hard to generalise, but a lot of them are much more open minded about sex, and they are more sapiosexual. There’s more openness to experimenting with gender and having sex with different age groups and body types. 

Your work has always included sex of all orientations, which has been quite confronting for some audiences. I remember a screening of Skin Flick in the 2000s where people walked out when one of the skinheads had sex with a woman.
When I started making films, we encountered so much misogyny and sexism in both the punk and gay and worlds, which still persists. Sometimes in the gay world you feel like you’re forced to decide to be bottom or top or to be completely gay. So those scenes are a real provocation. I screened a short film called Give Piece of Ass a Chance in the Castro once, with a mostly gay male audience. There’s a scene in it with a very long, very close-up shot of lesbian cunnilingus. Half of them were totally grossed out and the other half were cheering, so there is a division.

We live in a sexually saturated age, with the same kinds of steroid-pumped hairless gym bodies in porn and in mainstream cinema. Is that something you’re trying to address in your work?
I would challenge that assumption. My producer Jürgen co-founded Cazzo Film, the first porn company in Berlin, which now has an international porn film festival. There’s so much amazing, experimental queer porn being made. It’s cleansing all the conventions of mainstream porn around body type and gender and exploring issues about domination and submission in a very interesting way. 

I love that you’ve become corrupted with mochaccinos. Speaking of corruption, you and Sofia Coppola each released films in 2017—The Misandrists and The Beguiled—based on the same source material. You even use the same italic font in the credits.
It was a complete coincidence. They were both inspired by Don Siegel’s 1971 film The Beguiled, with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page. Mine was truer to the spirit of the original, which was very lesbian. [Coppola’s] version played down the lesbianism, which I didn’t like at all. She also removed the Black maid from the story. I mean, so did I, but at least my version had Black characters.

You’re a respected cinephile and you’ve written extensively about neglected cult films. What would be the four films you would recommend for an anti-Pride Pride Month party?
Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which is all about repressed homosexuality. [William Friedkin’s] The Boys in the Band and Cruising are, for me, canonical texts. They exemplify the pre-gay liberation era and nail very accurately what the gay world was like at that time. The Killing of Sister George is another sacred text. It plays every lesbian trope you can imagine, but it’s very emotional and sincere and heart-breaking. Oh, and Making Love, which is one of my favourite 1980s films. It’s essentially a female melodrama with gays. I still cry watching that movie. It’s the old-school gay in me.