Bryan Bruce
b. January 3, 1964, Southampton, Ontario


Bruce LaBruce, Canada’s leading auteur-pornographer, Wizard of Odd and self-styled Prince of Homosexuals, has stated: “My work is about creating a persona and injecting it into a scenario and watching it from a distance. I do have a real detachment from it. Even Bruce LaBruce is a construction for me.”

A distant descendant of the medieval Scottish patriot Robert the Bruce, LaBruce was born Bryan Bruce and grew up with a God-fearing, Presbyterian family in a small, rural Ontario farming community also named Bruce. An iconoclastic, controversial and confrontational cult figure, he adopted a Warhol-type persona and constructed an identity based on blatant, self-conscious abnormality and characterized by tireless narcissism and self-aggrandizement.

A writer, filmmaker and photographer, he started out in the eighties producing homo punk fanzines, such as J.D.s and Dumb Bitch Deserves to Die, and numerous Super 8 movies. His preening, goading and verbose writings developed an offshoot of hardcore punk called Queercore, which saw LaBruce rail against the way homosexuality was being corrupted by gays. He earned an M.A. in film theory form York University but eschewed academia in favour of underground filmmaking.

His first feature length film, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), about the sordid relationship between a hairdresser and a mute, handsome skinhead, became a worldwide cult hit. He followed this with Super 8 ½ (1993) – a shockingly clever parody of porn and art films that focuses on LaBruce’s rocky rise to cult stardom – and Hustler White (1996), which were both well received at international festivals such as Sundance, London, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Toronto, Vancouver and Tokyo, among others. Hustler White was also released commercially in Tokyo and Paris. In 1998 he made his first legitimate porn film, Skin Flick, which was financed by German producer and provocateur Jürgen Brüning. LaBruce collaborated with Brüning on his next film, the Godard-esque agit-prop porn parody The Raspberry Reich (2004), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and played at festivals around the world.

As a writer, LaBruce has contributed to Exclaim! magazine, Eye magazine, the National Post, the UK Guardian, Vice, Butt, The Breeder and many others. In 1998 he began working as a photographer, writer and interviewer for New York’s Index Magazine, to which he was recently named a contributing editor. Emphatically uninterested in entering the mainstream, he has also written two books, The Reluctant Pornographer and Ride, Queer, Ride, edited by Noam Gonick. In his contribution to the former, Director Gus Van Sant surmised that LaBruce’s films “describe where things are at, and where they are going to be.”