Bruce Labruce

Canadian gay cult figure, underground filmmaker, actor, photographer and writer. While still in his 20’s, Toronto-based Bruce LaBruce edited and produced "homo punk" fanzines and super-8 movies ("Boy/Girl," "I Know What It's Like To Be Dead," "Bruce and Pepper Wayne Gacy's Home Movies," "Slam!") which contributed to the launch of the so-called radical Homocore or Queercore movement in Canada and elsewhere. In 1991 LaBruce released his first feature length film. Shot on super 8 and blown up to 16mm, "No Skin Off My Ass" - which explores the sordid relationship between a queeny hairdresser (played with little effort by LaBruce himself) and a mute, handsome young skinhead (played quasi-convincingly by his then-boyfriend Klaus Von Brucker) - went on to become a world-wide cult hit. His follow-up feature "Super 8 1/2" 1994 - shot in both super 8 and (mostly) 16mm - is a harrowing cautionary bio-pic about LaBruce's rocky rise to cult stardom. LaBruce plays an aging porn star/director whose career is on the skids as he is unable to cope with his new found fame. After meeting an underground lesbian film-maker, he consents to appear in a documentary about his sordid life, only to realize that she is ultimately exploiting him to further her own career. "Super 8 1\2" went on to become a film festival circuit favorite, earning slots in such high-profile festivals as Sundance, London, Berlin, Dublin, Thessaloniki, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Tokyo, etc. LaBruce's "Hustler White," made in collaboration with L.A.-based photographer Rick Castro, was released in 1996. Co-starring supermodel Tony Ward (ex-consort of Madonna and Christina Applegate) and LaBruce himself, this 16mm feature premiered at Sundance and similarly went on to become a film festival and cult favorite. In this controversial movie, LaBruce plays Jurgen Anger, a gay tourist who visits Los Angeles to check out the infamous Santa Monica Boulevard hustler scene, "strictly for anthropological reasons," where he spots Montgomery Ward (Ward) plying his wares at Plummer Park. "Hustler White," which stars a cavalcade of underground luminaries and porn stars, went on to play at numerous film festivals including Cannes, and won the grand prize at the International Trash Film Festival. His first legitimate porn movie, "Skin Flick" 1999, about "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," was shot in London and produced in Berlin. In 1998, LaBruce became a professional visual artist and writer, as a photographer and columnist for such gay porn magazines as Honcho and Inches, and as a photographer, writer, interviewer, and contributing editor for New York's Index Magazine. LaBruce writes regular columns for Toronto's Eye Magazine, a free weekly, and Exclaim, an alternative music monthly, and now has a monthly column in Inches magazine entitled "Bruce LaBruce Must Be Killed". His book of memoirs, "The Reluctant Pornographer" 1997, were preceded by "Ride, Queer, Ride", a catalogue of his artistic work. Link to Wikipedia biography