Bruce LaBruce (born January 3, 1964)[1] is a Canadian artist,[2] writer, filmmaker, photographer, and underground director based in Toronto.
Life and career
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.
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]
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]
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]