35 years later, Bruce LaBruce’s DIY masterpiece remains unmatched

Filmmaker Bruce LaBruce is known as “the godfather of queercore” for good reason.

After getting his start with the influential queer zine J.D.s in the ’80s, he brought that same anarchist spirit to the world of film, crafting low-budget indies that tackled transgressive themes and frequently featured explicit sexual content.

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Around that same time, the New Queer Cinema movement was beginning to take shape, which saw LGBTQ+ filmmakers take the reins and bring our stories to the screen with work that showcased the full complexity of the queer experience, as opposed to the gay stereotypes—whether positive or, more often than not, negative—previously seen in mainstream media.

Because of that, LaBruce was frequently associated with New Queer Cinema, though it’s a label he outright rejected, believing himself to be an outsider more aligned with the queer punk scene.

And as time’s gone on, that’s only become more true. Since the ’90s, we’ve seen more and more LGBTQ+ stories break through with great acclaim among wider audiences, and many of the trailblazing figures of New Queer Cinema have become revered talents in the industry, writing & directing films with major financial backing.

Yet LaBruce has continued to operate on the fringes of the film world—and that’s exactly how he likes it. For example, his last feature, The Visitor, is the story of an otherworldly man taken in by a family, seducing them each, one by one. There’s not much in the way of plot, its intentionally taboo shattering, and its packed with shocking, un-simualted sex acts.

Even at 62, over four decades into his career, Bruce LaBruce hasn’t lost his edge. In fact, he might be sharper than ever.

But it’s fascinating to see where it all began, and thanks to a number of retrospectives of the filmmakers’ career taking place this fall, you can do just that. Specifically, LaBruce’s debut feature No Skin Off My *ss has been screening timed to its 35th anniversary, giving audiences a chance to see the origins of one of queer cinema’s premier provocateurs.

A true DIY affair, No Skin Off My *ss was filmed on a grainy black-and-white Super 8 with a “budget” of $1.95, starring LaBruce himself, his then-boyfriend Klaus von Brücker, and a number of close friends like G. B. Jones, with whom he founded the aforementioned J.D.s zine.

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A queer subversion of Robert Altman’s early film That Cold Day In The Park, the film follows a lonely male hairdresser (LaBruce) who picks up a handsome skinhead at the nearby park—seemingly mute and unhoused—inviting him over for a bath.

Although the two can’t really communicate, it’s clear there’s an attraction between them, and the hairdresser eventually locks his guest in the bedroom, thinking he’ll be able to help him. When the skinhead manages to escape, he visits his sister Jonesy (Jones), a radical feminist filmmaker, who winds up becoming something of a matchmaker for the two men.

Though relatively simple in its plotting, No Skin Off My *ss addresses big ideas around the intersection of politics and sexual fetishization, particularly among queer men.

“The movie was partly inspired by my own relationship with a hustler who later became a neo-Nazi skinhead,” LaBruce reveals in a statement to the IFC Center, “which only intensified my fascination with the strange homoerotics of skinhead culture: all those shaved heads, boots, braces, uniforms and aggressive male bonding combined with a frequently violent homophobia.”

LaBruce considers the film his first foray into “agit-p*rn,” a subgenre he’s continue to play in throughout his career, wherein the political and the erotic are one and the same.

The potential for danger of these two particular characters connecting only heightens the erotic charge between them, and even before things get overtly sexual—depicted explicitly, albeit artistically—their intimate moments in the bath together buzz with yearning.

You could almost call it romantic… in a very Bruce LaBruce-ian way. That’s perhaps why the filmmaker has said it’s the closet thing he’d make to a classic rom-rom: “Boy meets boy, boy takes boy home, boy discovers boy may be a fascist.”

No Skin Off My *ss just screened alongside Super 8 1/2—LaBruce’s follow-up feature—at the IFC Center in NYC this past weekend, and are now playing at Facets in Chicago as part of “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend,” being touted as the director’s “most comprehensive American retrospective” to date (tickets & more info here).

And if you’re not able to catch those, also this month The Criterion Channel’s service has a new program called Bruce LaBruce: Reluctant Pornographer, which spotlights some of the filmmaker’s most transgressive works, like the queer Sunset Boulevard pastiche Hustler White, the zombie satire Otto; or, Up with Dead People, and the age gap love story Gerontophilia.

In other words, it’s a Bruce LaBruce October!

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