October 2, 2002

By Glen Helfand

IT ISN'T AN accident that Bruce LaBruce's first San Francisco exhibition of iconoclastically sexy photographs opened on the eve of this past weekend's pervy Folsom Street Fair. Javier Peres, director of the new Peres Projects gallery, is tapping into the randy energy that continues to lure erotic-tourist dollars to San Francisco. LaBruce's pictures of naked and aroused skinheads, ex-cons with hard-ons, and underground superstars (sneering sexual icons Slava Mogutin and Asia Argento among them) are visual representations of sexual outlaw status – a status that is greeted with a Welcome Home mat in San Francisco.

The appeal of LaBruce's work isn't strictly local. These images have invaded galleries in LaBruce's hometown of Toronto, as well as Vancouver, Milan, and New York (in the latter city, at Alleged Gallery, where a number of street- and skateboard-culture Bay Area artists have appeared). But the show's 40-plus images possess qualities that queer S.F. should relate to: all that pouty, rebellious punk boy energy and a lineage that includes nods to Catherine Opie's mid-1990s portraits of her sexual underground community. A good chunk of the pictures were taken for Honcho magazine spreads or during the making of LaBruce's porno films, most notably Skin Gang (which screens as part of the exhibition). Others document a blood-soaked sexual performance-art installation at a notorious Los Angeles gay hookup motel.

LaBruce faces one of those potentially lucrative early 21st-century dilemmas: his subcultural leaps create ambiguity and confusion – but also an active, ever multiplying roster of projects. Is he a pornographer who has written and directed films that eroticize muscular neo-Nazis, or an artist whose photographs present more than mere titillation yet still manage to find their way into fashion magazines? And what does one make of the fact that he copublished the legendary queer zine JD's but now writes columns for mainstream and alternative weeklies – albeit from the perspective of a cranky queer with well-tended brains (he has a master's in film theory) and libido (he has joined the hardcore action in his own films, such as Super 8 1/2)? Above all – as his masculine-feminine, double-the-Bruce moniker suggests – LaBruce is a carefully constructed personality. Think de Sade in a mosh pit, a zone where there's a lot of possibility for joy, and for bruises.

With glib poise, LaBruce's work is balanced on a designer barbed-wire fence between smutty and smart, and whichever side it falls on, it usually finds adoring fans. The aforementioned Argento is one. Equally iconoclastic, the Italian actor-filmmaker appears in LaBruce's exhibition, naked and eight-and-a-half months pregnant, defiantly smoking a cigarette. If nothing else, the image is proof that this Canadian filmmaker-artist has some cachet – in a phone interview from Toronto, he reports that he's been placed on a Canadian celebrity continuum including Pierre Trudeau and Celine Dion. During the conversation he favors the role of artful egghead over that of low-rent Larry Flynt. The talk seems suited more to art world rhetoric than to any other realm. It's all about his hybrid practices.

LaBruce quickly points out the obvious: for him, the pornographic is political. His primary reason for getting into the business wasn't, he says, strictly the sex, but a political strategy. He started off – with a fellow band of outsiders that included the lesbian artist G.B. Jones – making Super 8 movies and fanzines (including JD's) in the 1980s. "We were bored with the gay scene, so we turned to punk but found there was homophobia in the punk scene," LaBruce explains. "It was surprisingly conventional in its attitudes about sexuality, especially as it progressed. Mosh pits have a latent homo vibe, but when you were blatant about it, it didn't go over. We were trying to shock the punk scene out of its complacency with our films and zines."

This impulse now reads like a chapter in queer history, yet the activist impulses are still admirable. "That early work was more in an avant-garde tradition – it wasn't coded strictly as porn," LaBruce says. "But because I was working in explicit sexual imagery, I started tending toward dealing with actual conventions of porn and working within the industry proper." LaBruce's more recent porn work has made a return journey to art-world terrain. Some of his pictures for Honcho are featured in the Peres Project show. His latest movies, while made for porn production studios, have had healthy and arousing lives on the film festival circuit.

His first full-length directorial effort, 1991's unexpectedly charming No Skin off My Ass, deals with power dynamics. Those dynamics stem from the nonsimulated carnal acts performed by LaBruce (whose character is a femme-y hairdresser) and his then-boyfriend Klaus Von Brucker (whose near-mute skinhead presence doesn't require much "acting"). LaBruce reveals that No Skin off My Ass was largely shot – with help from an autofocus feature – by a dyke friend (Candy Pauker). ("But we told her not to look," he jests.) Though he views it as "naive," there's a gritty sweetness to the film, which adds a few blow jobs to the scenario of Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park.

"Years later, when I came back to the same topic – the way gays fetishize these monstrous power figures – I was making [a movie] in the porn industry, [so] it was a much harsher and darker take," LaBruce says. He's referring to Skin Gang, which screens at Peres Projects in a popper- and lube-scented room. The 1999 film features a scene in which a neo-Nazi skinhead masturbates and comes on a copy of Mein Kampf. It's not long before the same willowy white guy is getting down in a gay orgy – with other masculine skins who call him "faggot." The film, bankrolled by a German production company, exists in hardcore and softcore editions and has a loose Pasolini-ish plot that revolves around the skinheads sexually terrorizing a mixed-race bourgeois gay couple who eat sushi and listen to classical music. As is often the case in LaBruce's work, the sets are filled with signifiers – Mapplethorpe photographs, for example, evoke a flip side to the film's version of homo-fascism.

LaBruce's next porn project, also to be made in Germany, will follow the politicized sexcapades of a Bader Meinhoff-like terrorist group. "It's about terrorist chic and glamorizing that point at which the oppressed becomes the oppressor," he says. "I do use all this imagery for more than nefarious purposes, for ideological reasons. It is insulting to me when people dismiss me as simply being a pornographer or pervert."

Looking at the photographs in the show, one can understand how that confusion arises. It is difficult to see beyond the button-pushing of a picture of a pig-masked Mogutin feeding his erect penis to a guy who kneels before him within a blood-spattered white room. The photo stems from an art installation at Platinum Oasis, a motel's worth of queer art installations staged for Los Angeles's Outfest film festival. LaBruce identifies the project as an homage to Pasolini's film Pigpen. But does this information add contextual depth to the image's mess of carnage and carnality?