Bruce LaBruce | |
|---|---|
 LaBruce in 2011 | |
| Born | January 3, 1964 Southampton, Ontario, Canada |
| Occupation(s) | Actor, writer, filmmaker, photographer, underground adult director |
| Years active | 1987–present |
| Website | brucelabruce |
Bruce LaBruce (born January 3, 1964) [1] is a Canadian artist, [2] writer, filmmaker, photographer, and underground director based in Toronto.
LaBruce was born in Tiverton, Ontario. [3] He has claimed both Justin Stewart and Bryan Bruce as his birth name in different sources. [4] He studied film at York University in Toronto and wrote for Cineaction magazine, curated by Robin Wood, his teacher.
He first gained public attention with the publication of the queer punk zine J.D.s , which he co-edited with G.B. Jones. [1] [5] He has written and photographed for a variety of publications including Vice, the former Nerve.com and BlackBook Magazine , and has been a columnist for the Canadian music magazine Exclaim! and Toronto's Eye Weekly , as well as a contributing editor and photographer for New York's Index Magazine . He has also been published in Toronto Life , the National Post and The Guardian .
His movie, Otto; or Up with Dead People debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. L.A. Zombie was banned from the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2010 because, in the opinion of Australian censors, it would have been refused classification. However, the film was subsequently able to screen at OutTakes, a New Zealand lesbian and gay international film festival, in May 2011. [6] [7]
In March 2011, LaBruce directed a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Pierrot Lunaire at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in Berlin. This iteration of the opera included gender diversity, castration scenes and dildos, as well as portraying Pierrot as a transgender man. [8] He subsequently also filmed this adaptation as the 2014 theatrical film Pierrot Lunaire .
Beginning with Gerontophilia in 2013, LaBruce dropped some of the more sexually explicit aspects of his filmmaking style. He retained his traditional interest in exploring sexual taboos, dramatizing an intergenerational relationship between a young man and a senior citizen, but opted to do so within a film that would be more palatable to a mainstream audience. [9]
In 2018, LaBruce directed the short film Scotch Egg as part of Erika Lust's XConfessions series. The short is about a Scottish gay man who has sex with a woman in a gay bar. LaBruce was inspired to create the film after reading a confession sent to XConfessions by a heterosexual woman who fantasized about going to a gay bar and having sex with a homosexual man. [10] [11] [12]
His short film collection It Is Not the Pornographer That Is Perverse... was released in 2018. The title refers to Rosa von Praunheim's film It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971). [13]
In 2024, his film The Visitor was selected in the Panorama section at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival where it premiered February 17. [14]
According to Courtney Fathom Sell of South Coast Today, some of his films explore themes of sexual and interpersonal transgression against cultural norms, frequently blending the artistic and production techniques of independent film with gay pornography. [15]
LaBruce's filmmaking style is marked by a blend of explicitly pornographic depictions of sex with more conventional narrative and filmmaking techniques, as well as an interest in extreme topics which mainstream audiences might dismiss as shocking or disturbing taboos. [16] For instance, his films have depicted scenes of sexual fetish and paraphilia, BDSM, gang rape, racially-motivated violence, amputee fetishism, gerontophilia, male and female prostitution, twincest, and zombie and vampire sexuality. [16]
He has frequently been identified with the New Queer Cinema movement that emerged in the 1990s, [16] although at the height of that movement's prominence, he rejected the association on the grounds that he felt more personally aligned with the queercore movement. [16] The queercore movement was born in the 1980s and LaBruce was one of the fathers. Noted as the avant-garde and unapologetic gay answer to the punk movement, queercore expressed the very same discontent with society as the punks were stating. [17]
Queer is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', queer came to be used pejoratively against LGBT people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to reclaim the word as a neutral or positive self-description.
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Queercore is a cultural/social movement that began in the mid-1980s as an offshoot of the punk subculture and a music genre that comes from punk rock. It is distinguished by its discontent with society in general, and specifically society's disapproval of the LGBT community. Queercore expresses itself in a DIY style through magazines, music, writing and film.
Vaginal Davis is an American performing artist, painter, independent curator, composer, filmmaker and writer. Born intersex and raised in South Central, Los Angeles, Davis gained notoriety in New York during the 1980s, where she inspired the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn's prevalent drag scene as a genderqueer artist. She currently resides in Berlin, Germany.
A gay skinhead, also known as a gayskin or queerskin, is a gay person who identifies with the skinhead subculture. Some gay skinheads have a sexual fetish for skinhead clothing styles.
J.D.s was a Canadian queer punk zine which started in 1985 and ran for eight issues until 1991. The zine was co-authored by G.B Jones and Bruce LaBruce and is credited as being one of the first and most influential queer zines. The zine's content was centred around anarchic queer-punk themes and heavily discussed queer-skewed punk music from the late 1980s.
No Skin Off My Ass is a 1991 comedy-drama film by Bruce LaBruce.
Fanorama is a Rhode Island–based zine and zine-distro produced by journalist/activist REB. According to their website it is the "grand-daddy of the queer zine scene".
Holger Bernhard Bruno Mischwitzky, known professionally as Rosa von Praunheim, is a German film director, author, producer, professor of directing and one of the most influential and famous queer activists in the German-speaking world. A pioneer of Queer Cinema and gay activist from the very beginning, von Praunheim was a key co-founder of the modern lesbian and gay movement in Germany and Switzerland. He was an early advocate of AIDS awareness and safer sex. His films center on queer-related themes and strong female characters, are characterized by excess and employ a campy style. They have featured such personalities as Keith Haring, Larry Kramer, Diamanda Galás, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Judith Malina, Jeff Stryker, Jayne County, Divine, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and a row of Warhol superstars. In over 50 years, von Praunheim has made more than 150 films. His works influenced the development of LGBTQ+ movements worldwide.
Daniel "Deke" Frontino Elash is an American zine editor, musician, actor, activist and historian.
Erika Lust is a Swedish erotic film director, screenwriter and producer. Since the debut of her first indie erotic film The Good Girl in 2004, Lust has been cited as one of the current leading participants in the feminist pornography movement, asserting that an ethical production process sets her company apart from mainstream pornography sites.
Homocore was an American anarcho-punk zine created by Tom Jennings and Deke Nihilson, and published in San Francisco from 1988 to 1991. One of the first queer zines, Homocore was directed toward the hardcore punk youth of the gay underground. The publication has been noted for popularizing the queercore movement on the United States west coast.
G. B. Jones is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, musician, and publisher of zines. She is best known for producing the queer punk zine J.D.s and her Tom Girls drawings.
CockyBoys is an independent New York City-based producer of gay internet pornography, managed by CEO Jake Jaxson and his two partners, RJ Sebastian and Benny Morecock. The 2012 reality television feature film Project GoGo Boy is considered the studio's breakout hit.
William Grant Munro was a Toronto artist, club promoter, and restaurateur known for his work as a community builder among disparate Toronto groups. As a visual artist, he was known for fashioning artistic works out of underwear; as a club promoter, he was best known for his long-running Toronto queer club night, Vazaleen.
Gerontophilia is a 2013 Canadian romantic comedy-drama film directed by Bruce LaBruce and written by LaBruce and Daniel Allen Cox. The film had its world premiere in the Venice Days section at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on August 28, 2013, and was screened in the Vanguard section at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.
Pierrot Lunaire is a Canadian/German film, which premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.
It is Not the Pornographer That is Perverse... is a 2018 English and German language collection of four gay pornographic short films directed by Bruce LaBruce for CockyBoys studio. The title refers to Rosa von Praunheim's film It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971).
Zombie pornography is a subgenre of pornography involving zombies, a type of undead being with uncontrollable appetites but no personal desire. Films in the subgenre emerged during a surge in the 1980s Italian sexploitation industry and saw minor release in the United States the next decade, but their use of zombie sex was primarily to shock the viewer. Film-maker Bruce LaBruce released Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) and L.A. Zombie (2010), two prominent gay zombie porn films seen by scholars as subverting homophobic tropes about gay life; in the films, zombification is physically similar to AIDS, a disease typically associated with gay men. While zombie porn may be appealing to some because it breaks taboos related to necrophilia, and plays with male viewers' fear of castration, zombies are also ferocious creatures that can destroy their sexual partners. As a result, the genre has remained largely unappealing.
DINX is a Canadian short comedy film, directed by Trevor Anderson and released in 2008. The film stars Farren Timoteo as Zack, a young man who works as a shooter boy in a gay strip club but is dissatisfied with his job and aspires to be allowed to perform as a stripper; when called to the office by his boss, however, he unexpectedly finds himself transported, still clad in go-go shorts and carrying a shooter tray, back in time to childhood to revisit the day when he tried to protect himself from bullying by taking the blame when his school's two main troublemakers spray-painted "DINX" on the school wall.
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