Bruce LaBruce is a controversial guy, that’s for sure. Due to the radical nature of his films, he draws equal amounts of hatred from mainstream culture and from gay circles that feel he is not representative of gay culture. Regardless of the polemics he often finds himself thrown into, in this (not new) interview, during the promotion of Raspeberry Reich (a porn flick where he explores totalitarian ideologies and how they manifest in sexuality), he makes some interesting points:
I became disillusioned with the gay movement very early on, even back in the mid eighties deciding that it had become politically stagnant, aesthetically bankrupt, and hopelessly bourgeois. (The current assimilationist trend toward sexual conformity, marriage, and respectability has certainly vindicated my point of view – the oppressed have demonstrably become the oppressors!) I turned to punk because it seemed to be challenging defiantly the status quo, the ascendance of corporate interests and control, and the attempts of the dominant ideology to police, dominate, and neuter all forms of dissent, otherness, and individuality. My first wake up call was realizing that even punk, this supposedly radical subculture, was sexually conformist. This led to an interest in other manifestations of social and political protest, including an investigation into the terrorist or para-military organizations of the late sixties and seventies such as the SLA, the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, and, of course, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the RAF. Each of these groups took very seriously the notion that Godard posited in his movie Numero Deux: le cul, c’est la politique: the sexual is political. They believed that revolution could only be achieved if it was accompanied by a radical rethinking of sexual mores and conventions. People forget nowadays that back then there actually was such a thing as a sexual revolution, when even members of the middle class were experimenting with promiscuity, group sex, bi- and homosexuality, communal living, sex and spirituality, etc. In university I had taken such courses as Protest Literature and Movements, and Psychoanalysis and Feminism, so I already had a background in the teachings of such thinkers as Reich, Marcuse, and other radical theorists who believed that sexual repression was responsible for much of the violence and apathy and spiritual malaise in technologically advanced cultures. I was also very interested in the way that emerging counter-cultural minorities of that era – particularly the black, gay, and feminist movements – adopted a kind of proto-military style and rhetoric, often borrowing from the kind of guerilla insurgencies that had emerged simultaneously in Central and South America. These movements were all initially Marxist-based, defiantly militant, and organized on a kind of decentralized, anarcho-syndicalist model. They emerged out of or gained momentum from the anti-Vietnam war movement and the strikes and student protests of May ‘68, so they were geared towards labour and empowering the common people and predicated on notions of correcting social and political injustices and inequalities based on race, class, and gender. The platforms of the ultra left wing terrorist groups which emerged from this milieu were based on these humanist, egalitarian ideals. They believed, however, that any ends justified the means to achieve these goals, which placed them in morally untenable situations, eventually rendering them almost indistinguishable from their avowed enemies
The interview is much longer and in depth. Certainly worth a read.
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