Bruce LaBruce (born Justin Stewart; January 3, 1964) is a Canadian writer, filmmaker, photographer and underground gay porn director based in Toronto, Ontario. 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.

Biography

LaBruce was born in Tiverton, Ontario. He studied film at York University in Toronto and wrote for Cineaction magazine, curated by Robin Wood, his teacher.

He first gained public attention with the publication of the queer punk zine J.D.s, which he co-edited with G.B. Jones. He currently writes and photographs for a variety of publications including Vice, Nerve.com and BlackBook magazine, and has also previously been a columnist for the Canadian music magazine Exclaim! and Toronto's eye weekly, as well as a contributing editor and photographer for New York's index magazine. He has also been published in Toronto Life, the National Post and The Guardian.

His filmmaking style is marked by a blend of explicitly pornographic depictions of sex with more conventional narrative and filmmaking techniques, as well as an interest in extreme topics which mainstream audiences might dismiss as shocking or disturbing taboos. For instance, his films have depicted scenes of sexual fetish and paraphilia, BDSM, gang rape, racially-motivated violence, amputee fetishism, male and female prostitution, and zombie and vampire sexuality. He has frequently been identified with the subversive New Queer Cinema movement that emerged in the 1990s, 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.

His movie, Otto, or, Up With Dead People debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. L.A. Zombie was banned from the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2010 because, in the opinion of Australian censors, it would have been refused classification. However, the film was subsequently able to screen at OutTakes, a New Zealand lesbian and gay international film festival, in May 2011.

In March 2011, LaBruce directed a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Pierrot Lunaire at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre in Berlin. This iteration of the opera included gender diversity, castration scenes and dildos, as well as a female to male transgender Pierrot.

Unlike most of LaBruce's earlier films, the forthcoming Gerontophilia is not sexually explicit, instead representing an attempt on his part to make a film more palatable to a mainstream audience. The film will, however, retain LaBruce's traditional interest in exploring sexual taboos, dramatizing an intergenerational relationship between a young man and a senior citizen.