You would be really fascinated by it because it’s a really strange vibe. is also really scary and weird right now. Zombie is a mood and a feeling that has really materialized in the culture. OTTENBERG: The PrEP zombie, bringing gay sex back, because gay sex is back, baby. So it’s kind of just a metaphor for this reversal of the pathology. They’re dead and he fucks them and they’re resurrected. And it’s kind of an attempt to reverse that because the zombie fucks dead people back to life. It made it this tainted kind of thing that’s associated with disease. That film is a kind of a response to the way that AIDS pathologized gay sex. Because you don’t want this blood-splattered zombie to show up at a funeral. And then there was a funeral going on when he was walking through, when we arrived and he got out of the car and everyone was freaked out. In the final scene, Francois is walking through this cemetery and we had to go all the way to Pasadena to shoot it, to find a place that would allow us to shoot. doing a no-budget film with blood splattered cars. I won’t get into the details because it’s insane, but we were running around L.A. Francois Sagat’s prosthetic cock is the demon star of this book to me. OTTENBERG: Yes, it’s incredible, the prosthetic. I mean, the softcore version is still hard, but it only has his big, fake alien penis. My American distributor has the softcore version. And then there’s the full-length hardcore porn movie, which is called L.A. There’s the kind of version I did for the festival circuit and for theatrical release. Where can I see it? I want to watch it now. Zombie, I’m such trash and a bad friend and also a loser. OTTENBERG: “A symphony of death!” as Peggy Gravel exclaimed in “Desperate Living.” One of my favorite lines of John Waters, and one of my favorite lines of anything really. But that’s part of the fun of it, because they’re performing. And that’s what makes some of the images very disturbing-people really do look like they’re dead. I often get people to make it look as real as possible, which makes it even more fun. It really is kind of a carnival atmosphere when I do these performances. And so, to have people in real life at an event participate in these orgies of sex and violence and with buckets of gore and blood, it kind of takes the piss out of it and relieves people’s anxieties somewhat. It’s almost as if all that stuff has been packaged as entertainment now. Like, you go online to any New York paper and there’s scenes of people getting literally killed, gunned down in the street, which didn’t happen 20 years ago or even 15 years ago.Īnd then there was all the ISIS beheading videos that were produced like slick Hollywood commercials. There are all these images of death that are being forced upon us like never before. There’s a certain element of fun and play to it, and it’s also very cathartic.
And you would expect that it’s a negative thing, but if you’ve ever been to one of these performances, it’s quite the opposite. I do these live Polaroid and photographic performances where I have models dressed up as revolutionaries, terrorists, zombie terrorists, what have you, and acting out these scenarios of abduction and torture and sexual torture. A lot of the images are from these performances that I’ve done over the last 20 years with people at my art gallery opening and at certain art events and galleries. But a main part of the book is the sort of catharsis of it. So looking at this book now feels really interesting. There’s just so much pain and so much ignoring it. We’re in the dystopian present and death is everywhere and we are numb to it. We were talking about the Death Book in January, and by March I thought, “Oh god, Bruce can’t do a book about death now, it’s just not the right thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah because people are dying and COVID is taking over the world.” And now I’m looking at the book and I was so wrong.
I have another book coming out early next year, Fixations, which is more of a retrospective of my work in general. Can I help you with another book someday? OTTENBERG: I was gonna help you with this book but 2020 happened and shit went off the rails. MEL OTTENBERG: Hi, Bruce! I love your book. Below, LaBruce caught up with Mel Ottenberg, Interview‘s creative director and his old friend, to discuss gay zombies, prosthetic cocks, and death in 2020. The book builds on themes that have long concerned LaBruce: good, evil, sex, death, and the lines that blur them all. His latest tome, Death Book II, is a collection of rare photos from his storied career, most of which are decidedly not-so-SFW.
Zombie, marrying independent film and gay porn.
Gay porno movies with a story skin#
The Canadian artist and filmmaker has made a career of films with titles such as No Skin Off My Ass, Hustler White, and L.A.