Gay Guerrilla Filmmaking and Terrorist Chic: Toronto Filmmaker Bruce LaBruce Discusses His Latest Art/porn Feature, the Raspberry Reich

Some of the most exciting contemporary queer work is emanating from Canada. The Great White North has spawned what seems a small army of gender/cinema revolutionaries, from the exemplary documentary work of Lynne Fernie and Aerlyn Weissman in Forbidden Love to the formal experimentation of John Greyson to the theatrical adaptations of Robert Lepage. Among them is Bruce LaBruce, who has forged his own path of cultural fusion, marrying hardcore pornography with arthouse traditions, creating a rich and varied oeuvre that has remained largely low-budget and from the trenches. His sensibility can be traced back to Toronto's '80s punk scene, where LaBruce was so appalled by the homophobia of that underground milieu he produced a series of zines to challenge the attitude. His first film, No Skin Off My Ass, was an erotic punk fable, and an odd ode to Sandy Dennis's performance in Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park. He has continued to write and direct sexually explicit films, including the semi-autobiographical Super 8 1/2 and Hustler White (which starred Tony Ward). With his two most recent films, LaBruce has further pushed the envelope of his own art/porn or homocore sub-genre, making Skin Flick, a film that involves race-related violent rape between gay men of colour and neo-Nazis, and The Raspberry Reich, about sexually experimenting German terrorists, in double versions: one, for hardcore porn distribution, and the other, more softcore version, for the festival circuit and repertory cinema distribution. In The Raspberry Reich, with multiple nods to Dusan Makavejev's W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, LaBruce takes on the radical left, concocting a merry band of sexual renegades who fashion themselves on the infamous Baader-Meinhof gang, the most notorious band of post-WWII German terrorists. The film itself is alternately hilarious, erotic and disturbing; creatively and stylistically speaking, it is as though Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Radley Metzger are having a threesome. As well, LaBruce has worked extensively as a photographer, and was one of the co-founders of the film journal you are now holding in your hands. He sat down with CineAction to talk about politics, making Raspberry Reich and his thoughts on Team America. Hays: It seems The Raspberry Reich couldn't be more timely, what with the Bush victory. It seems we really are ready for a gay Intifada. Bruce LaBruce: I think so too. I'm really hocking the T-shirts now which have slogans about the gay intifada on them. It's perfect timing. Hays: You've said it's almost better that Bush got elected than Kerry. LaBruce: It probably would have been disastrous for the Democratic Party, not that I really care about the Democratic Party, but they would have been inheriting this unwinnable war and a huge deficit and probably another terrorist attack. It's probably better that Bush be left to deal with it. They'll mess it up and that will usher in a Democratic regime. But you know the Democrats are more conservative than our Conservative Party is, so it's not much of a choice. It seems the whole system must be destroyed! Hays: I find it ironic, because they're saying that the issue of gay marriage pushed many into Bush's camp, and yet the people who are pushing for gay marriage are often gay conservatives. LaBruce: It was a total wedge issue, along with stem-cell research. It's typical of navel-gazing gays to think that their little struggle is more important than saving the world. I don't believe in gay marriage anyway. Obviously, I believe in civil unions and equal rights under the law, but to try to have it sanctified, it's totally unnecessary. I hate gay conservatives as much as I hate hip-hop corporate blacks who have loads of money and claim to represent the interests of disenfranchised low-income blacks. Driving around in Bentleys and drinking champagne. It's really the oppressed becoming the oppressor. …

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