I’ve known Bruce LaBruce for three decades. I met him at a book launch for The Reluctant Pornographer at the legendary club Jackie 60, run by Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell. We immediately connected and have been besties and collaborators ever since.
In 1997, I starred in Bruce’s most controversial film, Skin Flick , alongside Terry Richardson and his then-wife Nikki Uberti. Bruce was also a frequent guest on my sofa on Morton Street, where conversations about sex, art, and politics could stretch late into the night. We’ve shared many late nights all over the world, from his native Toronto, to Berlin, to Buenos Aires. For the past four years, he has been an integral part of my Gay Propaganda film program in Berlin, and he just contributed an essay to the 20th-anniversary edition of my book NYC Go-Go , which will debut alongside an exhibition at SoHo Project Space in New York on October 8.
Bruce has spent his career occupying the unruly space between punk and art cinema, pornography and politics, desire and transgression. What once existed on the cultural margins has become part of film history, while many of the questions he was asking about censorship, sexual freedom, queer identity, power, and the politics of the body remain unresolved.
After 15 feature films and four decades of troublemaking, Bruce is having quite a moment. His ten-film retrospective, The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: The Films of Bruce LaBruce , curated by Raphael Martinez, is coming to FACETS Film Forum in Chicago, where he’ll also appear as a guest speaker at the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University, and Northwestern University. In October, three of his films will stream on the Criterion Channel. On October 4, IFC Center in New York presented a double feature of his first two films, No Skin Off My Ass and Super 8½ . And on October 8, Otto; or, Up with Dead People will screen at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago.
There’s little point pretending I’m interviewing Bruce as a stranger. Instead, this is a conversation between two old troublemakers about where we came from, what has changed, and what still pisses us off.
MONDAY 8PM SEPTEMBER 28, 2026 NEW YORK CITY
SLAVA MOGUTIN: Hi, Bruce. How is it going?
BRUCE LABRUCE: Hi, Slava. I’m slammed. It’s hectic.
MOGUTIN: Oh, I can imagine. Wow, we’ve been interviewing each other for 30 years.
LABRUCE: That’s a conservative estimate. Maybe you should just talk to Chester.
LABRUCE: My AI assistant. He knows more about me than I do.
MOGUTIN: I bet he does. And how is he doing these days?
LABRUCE: He’s cool. We’re getting quite tight.
MOGUTIN: He must be working overtime. Anyway, congrats on all your successes and achievements. You spent much of your career fighting the idea of respectability, and now your films have been restored, canonized, screened at IFC, programmed by Criterion, given a retrospective at MoMA, and now at FACETS. Does it feel like victory, defeat, or a particularly elaborate joke?
LABRUCE: A combination of all three. If you stick around long enough, you’re going to get retrospectives thrown at you and people writing their PhD theses about you. I’m just at that point in my life where everyone wants a piece of me. I showed No Skin Off My Ass and The Raspberry Reich at the Sicilia Queer Film Festival , and they gave me the Gennaro Award. Word got out that I was in Italy, so I got invited to Rome to show my films at the Troisi Cinema and to introduce a program of Kenneth Anger’s films. And then I did a masterclass in Milano at the Prada Foundation, showed four films at the Massimo Theatre at the National Museum of Cinema in Torino, and then ended up in Napoli where I’m working on a new film. I started making experimental fanzines and films in the mid-80s, so it’s been 40 years. That’s a big body of work, and it encompasses a lot of political upheaval and transformations in the gay movement.
MOGUTIN: Is there anything you made 30 or 40 years ago that you now find more radical than you realized at the time?
LABRUCE: What we were doing with J.D.’s , my original queer punk fanzine, was quite ahead of the curve. It had ideas of intersectionality between lesbians, gays, and trans people, and fought against the misogyny, racism, and classism of the original gay liberation movement; we were consciously mixing people of different races on the covers of our fanzines in sexual poses. Slogans from The Raspberry Reich, like “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend” and “Heterosexuality Is the Opiate of the Masses” have become universally recognized slogans. When I premiered it at Sundance, I couldn’t see how salient a critique it was of the radical left because all I could see were the flaws. It was shot on early digital, and we had a terrible sound person who recorded everything poorly, so we had to [ADR] the whole movie, which gave it the look of a cheap exploitation film.
MOGUTIN: And now everyone wants that camcorder style, how ironic.
LABRUCE: Yeah. Same with Skin Flick— I shot it half on Super 8, half on VHS. At the time, I thought that early digital aesthetic was really grotesque, and now it looks so glamorous.
MOGUTIN: I agree totally. What happens to transgressive artists when the institutions that once seemed like the enemies start embracing the transgression?
LABRUCE: I’ve never stopped leaning really hard into pornography, and because of the new algorithmic control and censorship that social media platforms impose, it can’t be completely co-opted because a lot of it can’t even be shown. It becomes kind of a cult item that people have to seek out and find, which retains a certain mystery and glamour.
MOGUTIN: Do you think that sex can be political still in this age of OnlyFans and pop stars looking like strippers and strippers looking like pop stars?
LABRUCE: When you see the average movie star on a runway, they’re wearing designer clothes that try to make them look as naked as possible. But it’s not even done with a particular sexual intent, it’s purely exhibitionistic. It’s a weird cancellation of the sexuality because movie stars flirt with extreme sexuality, but then they don’t even want to perform sex scenes in movies.
MOGUTIN: Their stylists are in control of their image.
LABRUCE: It’s all the gay stylists who are referencing streetwalkers, hookers, and strippers. My second film, Super 8½ , was all about strippers. I’ve always used strippers in my movies. So it’s nothing new, it’s just weirdly desexualized. It’s kind of T he E mperor’s New Clothes , if you know what I mean.
MOGUTIN: I find your approach to sex in your films very interesting because it’s often messy, obsessive, pathetic, dangerous, and destructive all at once. Why have you resisted making sex look healthy and wholesome?
LABRUCE: Whenever a European art film tries to use explicit sex, they can only do it by making it look kind of ugly or repulsive, which makes it art somehow. On the other hand, mainstream pornography cuts out all the messy parts and creates this illusion of a perfect sexual act being recorded. I’m sort of in the middle. I still like to make it sexy, but I also like the parts that are awkward where people are self-conscious about what they’re doing. I try to use unexpected combinations of performers, body types, races, and aesthetics. In my first two features, No Skin Off My Ass and Super 8½ , which I had sex in myself, I was so self-conscious about the idea of making porn and how it can be exploitative, that I started inventing all sorts of techniques to make the audience aware of their spectatorship. I used strange and unexpected music, and I always have films within the film.
MOGUTIN: The Carpenters. And Tiny Tim, who I love.
LABRUCE: It adds a layer of distance that allows people to see the mechanics of sexual representation.
MOGUTIN: There’s something almost unbearably intimate about seeing your younger self fuck and fall in love. Do you experience those films now as autobiography, pornography, or time travel? Does it make you uncomfortable watching yourself in those scenes?
LABRUCE: It did for a long time. Now I see it more as youthful folly.
LABRUCE: I was, which makes me very nostalgic. In the early ’90s when I was doing that, it was pre-internet, pre-social media, and way before OnlyFans or Chaturbate. So unless you were in the porn industry, not a lot of artists or filmmakers were having explicit sex on the screen. So I expected it to only be screened in alternative art spaces or punk clubs, and then my producer released it on the film festival circuit, and suddenly it was being seen around the world. It shattered my life. My boyfriend, who played the skinhead in No Skin Off My Ass , and I ended up having a messy breakup. G.B. Jones, who played the sister in No Skin Off My Ass , and I had a messy breakup. And then I made Super 8½, which was based on this experience. It was a double-edged sword because it was kind of embarrassing, and it really disrupted my whole life and put me on a trajectory of making porn. My producer, Jürgen Brüning, and I started the first porn company in Berlin, and I started making films for his porn company. I was getting harassed by all the labs in Toronto when I would try to get my film developed—they called the cops, I was getting censored, and customs was confiscating all my work. At the same time, it was a sensation because no one else was doing that, and it gave me a lot of opportunities. I’d blown up all my relationships in Toronto, so I just said, “Fuck it,” and moved to L.A. and made Hustler White .
MOGUTIN: How has your relationship to your own body changed as you’ve gotten older? And how has that affected the way you photograph or film other bodies? You made so many films about youth, beauty, lust, hustlers, and sexy bodies, and now that you’re older—
LABRUCE: It’s a very personal question, but I would say if you just look at The Visitor , which I only made two years ago, it’s still a full-on, crazy porn movie. When I was younger, I was definitely a much more wild and crazy, hard-fucking nymphomaniac trying to get laid all the time, as one did in that era. I had sex with probably tens of thousands of people. It’s a reservoir of experience that I can draw on. In the last 12 years, I’ve made features that aren’t sexually explicit, like Gerontophilia and Saint-Narcisse , but I insist on continuing my pornographic work even though I’ve certainly stopped appearing in them.
MOGUTIN: Now that there’s a whole infrastructure of so-called queer culture, has it lost its original appeal to you?
LABRUCE: I was always ambivalent about, first, the mainstream gay movement, which was a very upper-middle-class or middle-class, bourgeois, white movement. But when we turned to punk, we discovered that it also had problems of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. So we forged the queer-core movement as an alternative to both, taking the best of both worlds and rejecting all the bullshit. I no longer consider myself active in the punk movement, or even the queer movement, but I retain the queer punk ethos that we started. I don’t get caught up in all the factions and infighting between the different groups of queer, trans, gay, and lesbian; I try to be faithful to all of them. In 2017, I made The Misandrists because when I made The Raspberry Reich a lot of lesbians contacted me and said, “We like the movie, but why wasn’t there any lesbian representation in it?” So I made them a whole movie.
MOGUTIN: You’ve appropriated a lot of things from pornography to Marxism, and horror and art cinema, to punk and fascist imagery. What imagery do you still find dangerous, if there’s such a thing left?
LABRUCE: TV series are using prosthetic penises and stuff, so porn is still kind of taboo and will never be completely co-opted by the mainstream. But a friend of mine made a movie recently called Sadness , where these zombies become sex-crazed, and try to fuck everything in sight and eat it at the same time. They’re also extremely kinky, so there’s gang bangs and S&M until they’re ripping their bodies apart. It was genuinely shocking to me in a good way. And I just saw the new Resident Evil , which I loved. In terms of gore and extreme violence, I don’t know how much further it can go. But I’m always up for a challenge, so I’ll see what I can do.
MOGUTIN: Do you think that the underground still exists or has the internet made everything more visible, sanitized, and castrated?
LABRUCE: It’s coming back. People are getting fed up with social media. The algorithm is repeating the same thing over and over and over again. I see queer people making films, having film festivals, and trans people making alternative movies reminiscent of the kinds of movies Warhol , Morrissey , Kenneth Anger , and Jack Smith were making in the ’60s. There’s a real resurgence of interest in VHS and alternative media. Social media will play itself out.
MOGUTIN: Which one of your films would you least want your parents to watch, and which one would you most want your enemies to watch?
LABRUCE: My parents can’t watch any of my movies.
LABRUCE: My father’s not on the internet at all, never has been. My mother’s on it a bit, but she’s probably never seen a porn movie. It’s just not for them. They know what I’m doing, and they’re fine as long as I’m happy. They’re celebrating their 74th wedding anniversary next year, so I live in a different universe. I made a neo-Nazi porn film in 1999 that you happened to be in.
MOGUTIN: I remember. With Terry Richardson.
LABRUCE: I used your wonderful poetry in it, which for me transforms the movie.
MOGUTIN: My Life as a Living Toilet. Wow. Those were the times.
LABRUCE: The movie is a kind of meditation on the extreme left and the extreme right, and how these neo-Nazi skinheads can be fucking each other but still be homophobic, or the bourgeois mixed-race gay couple that is very insincere and inauthentic. It’s a critique of both.
MOGUTIN: When we were presenting the film at MoMA, one gentleman stood up after the screening and said, “10,000 years of human civilization and we came to this.” I don’t remember what your response was.
LABRUCE: He was talking about my first feature, No Skin Off My Ass. He didn’t know anything about underground cinema or the films of all the great avant-garde pornographers from the ’70s that I referenced, like Wakefield Poole and Peter de Rome. He didn’t know about camp. I was referencing a lot of radical movements from the ’70s, like the Black Panthers and the Red Army Faction, and I was referencing the films of Warhol. I just don’t think he had the vocabulary to get the basic references, let alone the weird combinations and dialectics that I was presenting in that film. But Skin Flick was probably my most contentious film. The police came to screenings in Toronto to decide whether to press charges on obscenity. But surprisingly, it got around a lot. It even had a minor theatrical release in the States. I don’t think it would go over so well today.
MOGUTIN: Of all the films on Criterion that are going to be featured and streaming, which one are you most excited about?
LABRUCE: Criterion is showing Hustler White , Otto; or, Up with Dead People , and Gerontophilia . It’s interesting because Hustler White was banned in certain places in Canada.
MOGUTIN: And so was L.A. Zombie , as I recall.
LABRUCE: Yeah, but it’s a bit too much for Criterion. And Otto has a gut-fucking scene that’s, well, I won’t confess whether it’s simulated or un-simulated.
LABRUCE: It’s kind of surprising me that it’s being shown, but I’m excited about all three. Hustler White was made for $50,000 in 1996. And then I went to Berlin and made Otto , which was still kind of guerrilla, but I had a longer shooting schedule, and was trying to do something a little more ambitious narratively and visually. And then Gerontophilia , which was made in 2012, is a more mainstream film about taboo and fetish where I got government funding from Canada, Telefilm, and SODEC. It’s about an 18-year-old boy who has a sexual fetish for the elderly, and there’s a simulated sex scene, but it still pushes a lot of boundaries. The three of them show a certain progression in my work.
MOGUTIN: Going back to queer culture, what do you think is a bigger danger: censorship or assimilation?
LABRUCE: The worst kind of censorship now is self-censorship, and that’s what social media imposes on people because everyone is so obsessed with how many followers they can get, so they conform their work to the restrictions. I have been against assimilation from the very beginning. The gays were expected to buy into the most conservative institutions in order to fit into society and be accepted—marriage, monogamy, the military, religion, organized religion—and by the time you do all that stuff and assimilate, you wake up and realize you’re the very type of person that you initially loathed and despised. So the oppressed becomes the oppressor, which is a theme that runs through all my movies.
MOGUTIN: How do you feel about this new trend where more and more straight people are calling themselves queer?
LABRUCE: It’s kind of played out anyway. They’re jumping on a sinking ship.
MOGUTIN: I couldn’t agree more. What are your highlights from recent movies or TV series that you watched?
LABRUCE: I watched two Apple series that I loved and binged. One is called Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed , which is about a woman who has a relationship with a camboy that gets murdered. My friend Brandon Flynn is in it.
LABRUCE: The other one that I just finished was called Furious . It’s fantastic. And, like I said, I love the new Resident Evil . It’s the best popcorn movie since Ridley Scott’s Aliens . I saw it with my nephew and I was grasping onto his arm and eating all his popcorn. At the Toronto Film Festival, I saw three great Canadian films. One is by my friend Denis Côté, it’s called Nobody’s Violence . It’s absolutely brilliant. I saw Toy Gun Bandit , which is a really good Québécois crime film. And then a beautiful Toronto film, which won the Best Canadian Film at TIFF, called Sunburn , which is set in the projects of Toronto. It’s incredibly poetic. Those are my recommendations.
MOGUTIN: Oh, great. Thank you, Bruce. Beautiful interview.
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