On Refusal, Negativity, and Hustler White

This article has been peer reviewed

The oeuvre of the Canadian icon and “reluctant pornographer”¹ Bruce LaBruce is largely absent from both academic and popular discussions of queer cinema. I argue that it warrants inclusion because there are connections between LaBruce’s films and those of venerated queer directors and because they resonate with “queer negativity,” or the “anti-social turn” in queer theory.² I pursue this argument with respect to LaBruce’s film Hustler White (1996), a crucible of concepts associated with negativity, specifically Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”³ as well as Lee Edelman’s theory of “sinthomosexuality” and critique of “reproductive futurism.”⁴ I first examine the dearth of writing on LaBruce in view of his complicated politics and success on the festival circuit. I then perform an intertextual reading of Hustler White through the lens of negativity that evinces continuities and resonances with other films. Hustler White is not unlike canonical entries in queer film studies that have achieved recognition at queer and “mainstream” festivals. Why, then, has it retained such little scholarly attention? 

Refusing any ostensible boundary between art cinema and gay pornography, LaBruce’s guerrilla filmmaking is experimental and politically incorrect while retaining a degree of levity and ironized self-awareness.⁵ It is precisely because his films are difficult to comprehend and assimilate into extant categories that LaBruce remains absent from much work in queer theory and film studies, including books and articles that attend specifically to queer, Canadian, and pornographic cinemas. As Thomas Waugh notes in Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006), LaBruce “makes the job of the critic especially hard, if not superfluous,” with his “anti-sentimental iconoclasm.”⁶ LaBruce’s first feature, No Skin Off My Ass (1991), premiered at the Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival in 1991 and features explicit sex scenes between a punk hairdresser (LaBruce) and a mute skinhead (Klaus von Brücker). A favourite of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, LaBruce states that the film was part of “the burgeoning gay and lesbian film festival circuit” and “just sort of became a cult film.”⁷ However, No Skin and the later Super 8½ (1994), a TIFF premiere about a failing pornographer and a lesbian filmmaker, went unacknowledged in queer cinema studies for years. Pointing to gaps in the work of senior scholars like Richard Dyer, film theorist Eugenie Brinkema remarks that it is “astonishing that so little has been written about the works—literary, cinematic, photographic, and otherwise—of Bruce LaBruce. He simply is not there—if you seek him in academic discourse, you will likely never find him.”⁸ While scholars such as Waugh, Dean Allbritton, Matthew Hays, and Jasmine McGowan have since risen LaBruce’s academic profile,⁹ his work has almost certainly been disregarded due to erotophobia, or because his films occupy an “otherwise” position between gay pornography and experimental film.¹⁰ Although Waugh was a pioneer of gay pornography studies in the 1980s,¹¹ it was years after Linda Williams published Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989) that film studies began to take pornography seriously as a genre.¹² 

No Skin Off My Ass

To further complicate matters, LaBruce rejects academic film studies and the categories used to describe and organize his work. He notably refuses inclusion under the New Queer Cinema banner, preferring instead to be associated with the “Queercore” movement, which, as Brinkema notes, marked an effort to “introduce erotic anarchy into the sexually complacent (and not a little homophobic) punk movement.”¹³ Coined by B. Ruby Rich in 1992, New Queer Cinema refers to a constellation of independent festival films made by queer directors in the early 1990s that allegorize the AIDS epidemic, thematize criminality, and foreground marginal subcultures within the queer community.¹⁴ In a statement reprinted in Waugh’s book, LaBruce claims: “I don’t feel I have a lot in common with a bunch of rich kids who have degrees in semiotic theory, who make dry, academic films with overdetermined AIDS metaphors and Advocate men in them.”¹⁵ Moreover, LaBruce’s politics are less earnest that those of New Queer directors.¹⁶ Anecdotally, the “amputee sex” scene in Hustler White, which I later discuss, is notorious in queer and Canadian film circles because it is said to be a “bad” representation of persons with disabilities. While it is described by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as “a complex exploration of how subculture is articulated through style, and a poignant study in erotic fascination,”¹⁷ No Skin is undoubtedly off-putting because of its skinhead character, or because LaBruce privileges the punk aesthetic regardless of what it might signify outside of this context. 

Despite his idiosyncratic politics and fraught relationship with academe, LaBruce is a cult figure at festivals, seeing attempts to ban his work as promotional opportunities. Dismissing it as “gay zombie porn,” the Australian Film Classification Board banned LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie (2010) from the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2010.¹⁸ LaBruce was “delighted,” pointing out the fundamental irony of censorship: “I’ll never understand how censors don’t see that the more they try to suppress a film, the more people will want to see it. It gives me a profile I didn’t have yesterday.”¹⁹ While festivals have historically contributed to the cultural capital of queer directors,²⁰ LaBruce is ambivalent when it comes to normative modes of garnering critical recognition and acclaim, disrupting both the hetero- and “homonormativity” of queer and “mainstream” festivals. Defined by Lisa Duggan as a “politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption,”²¹ homonormativity took root in the late 1990s and early 2000s when causes such as marriage equality began to dominate the gay and lesbian political agenda. At that time, “queer” media entered the “post-queer” era, when films like John Schlessinger’s The Next Best Thing (2000) and television shows like Will & Grace (1998-2006) presented gay and lesbian subjectivities as anodyne and consumptive non-actors disinvested from the public and political spheres. For cultural theorist Dion Kagan, this was partly a disavowal of AIDS and the spectacle of abjection wrought by mainstream representations of the disease during its “crisis years” (1981-1996).²² As Stuart James Richards argues, queer film festivals are often beholden to the logic of “social enterprise,” where programmers secure popular films to financially sustain their festivals.²³ Such films “adhere to homonormative identity politics, which works in the service of dominant contemporary economic and political systems” and “further marginalises those that challenge conventional kinship structures, the gender binary, and other dominant hegemonic manifestations.”²⁴ Conversely, when his films are not banned, LaBruce is rewarded for breaking taboos. In 2004, his “terrorist chic” polemic The Raspberry Reich (2004) won the Special Jury Award at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. In 2023, he received the Filmmaker on the Edge Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival and gushed about “trash” filmmaker John Waters selecting his film Saint-Narcisse (2021) as one of the best of 2021 for Artforum.²⁵ 

Queer negativity is perhaps the most contested term in the field of queer theory. In “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), Leo Bersani negatively although un-moralistically links sex between gay men to the death drive—compulsive self-destruction untethered from the “drive for mastery and resolution.”²⁶ Under this framework, sex is masochistic and “self-shattering”—so painful and pleasurable as to undo coherent selfhood and interrelationality.²⁷ As Jack Halberstam writes, Bersani rejects “the comforting platitudes that we use to cushion our fall into mortality [and] incoherence,” replacing them with a “radically realistic recognition of both the selfishness of sex and its destructive power.”²⁸ Following suit, anti-social queer theory posits queer sexuality’s negativity—its threat to community, self-sovereignty, and heteronormativity—as a site of political refusal. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Edelman argues that society is organized around reproductive futurism, the enduring rhetorical construction of the Child as the emblem of innocence in need of protection and the queer as a threat to both the Child and the future.²⁹ The opposition of the Child and the “sinthomosexual”—the queer figure on whom the death drive is projected because they are seen as destructive to themselves and to society—“can never be acknowledged as the engine driving the reproduction of the social itself.”³⁰ Just as the Child stands as the “fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,” the only queerness to which we could aspire would have us abjure the logic of reproductive futurity and accede to the threat queerness poses to mainstream society through “meaningless eruptions of jouissance” that may well destroy us.³¹ Meaninglessness is key here as Edelman derives the sinthomosexual from the Lacanian “sinthome,” which “refuses the Symbolic logic that determines the exchange of signifiers” and “admits no translation of its singularity and therefore carries nothing of meaning.”³² For Bersani and Edelman, the negative and the anti-social refer to a range of politically threatening (sexual) behaviours and figurations. However, other conceptions of negativity have emerged in queer theory for various reasons. As Robyn Wiegman notes, the anti-social turn has not been wholly accepted within queer theory due to differing views on “self-shattering,” what many perceive as its overreliance on gay white male authors and archives, and its purported blind spots where race is concerned.³³ José Esteban Muñoz famously critiqued the anti-social turn as the province of whiteness,³⁴ while Halberstam moves to define queerness in more cooperative terms as a mode of “crafting alternatives with others.”³⁵ As an amendment to negativity, Muñoz proposes “the performance of queer utopian memory,” a deferral to the archive of the queer past where utopia “understands its time as reaching beyond some nostalgic past that perhaps never was or some future whose arrival is continuously belated.”³⁶ Put otherwise, Muñoz argues that we can look to the queer art of the past for alternative projections of a future that has not yet arrived, and thereby reimagine the present in utopian terms for a wide range of queer subjects. Similarly, Halberstam asks after a vision of negativity not tied to gay male aesthetics and experiences, reformulating negativity along the lines of equity and intersectionality.³⁷ As Wiegman writes, those who revise negativity from more communitarian perspectives nevertheless “write the dissolution of the social as we have known it as the precondition of queer subjectivity and collectivity alike,” even if they frame negativity “in more affirmative, if not utopian, terms.”³⁸ This is clearly evidenced in Berlant’s work. In Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant writes that a relationship of cruel optimism appears “when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.”³⁹ Put otherwise, cruel optimism occurs when one finds themselves attached to something—a job, an ideology, a fantasy—that seems liberating and affirming but forecloses on self-evolution and divergent becomings. While detaching from the object can be distressing, Berlant asks that we accept moments of “being incomplete, contradictory, and out of control” as rousing “different atmospheres and potentials.”⁴⁰ Indeed, detaching from a cruel object, or at least accepting oneself as “non-sovereign,”⁴¹ can produce new ways of being. In my analysis of Hustler White, I take an expansive view of negativity as self-shattering, unbecoming, and the difficult project of detachment and reimagination. While the film gives rise to a Bersanian view of sexuality, its characters occupy a space “where survival and threats to it engender social forms that transform the habitation of negativity’s multiplicity.”⁴² Negativity is not one thing in Hustler White but exists along a spectrum of operations and interactions replete with utopian potentials. 

Co-directed by photographer Rick Castro, Hustler White premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996. It tracks the eccentric anthropologist Jürgen Anger (LaBruce) as he explores Santa Monica Boulevard to write an exposé on male hustlers. Chronologically, we begin with the titular hustler, Monti (Tony Ward), face down in Anger’s jacuzzi—a nod to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Voices loom over the film to create a chilling, sibylline effect. The first is Monti’s, setting the stage for the game of cat and mouse that led him to Anger. Another is that of an unknown interviewer probing the future Monti about his sexuality and relationship to Anger. The film refuses the conventions of form and narrative, presenting one abstractive sex scene after another punctuated by quick dialogues and point-of-view shots from Anger’s perspective. As Teresa de Lauretis would say, Hustler White resists the “generic pressure of all narrative toward closure and the fulfilment of meaning.”⁴³ Anger first sees Monti on the street through a car window. Their gazes meet as Monti titillates the wide-eyed Anger with a devilish smile. Anger then sees Monti doing shirtless pull-ups on the street. He develops a crush and begins to pursue him relentlessly. We are given unexpurgated access to the handsome rent-boy and his unconventional life, like when he cripples fellow hustler Eigil (Kevin P. Scott) by accidentally running over his foot. Anger regularly shows Monti the shirt he used to wipe Eigil’s blood from his car, which he found at the site of Monti’s pull-ups. “I think I might have something of yours,” Anger says, before Monti, thinking Anger is a cop, takes off. As Anger continues to pursue Monti, the film shows the young hustler’s quotidian routine of lurid sexual encounters with johns, porn directors, and other hustlers, including his job as a “fluffer” on the site of a porn flick. We are privy to Eigil’s encounters, too, inclusive of the film’s notorious amputee sex scene in which Eigil removes his prosthetic leg and penetrates a client with his stump. In one of the film’s most shocking encounters, the real-life porn star Kevin Kramer, playing his buff self, goes in for a supposed job interview, where he is gang-banged by several African American men as an “exercise of Black Power.” This scene is a clear illustration of queer negativity and Bersani’s theory of sex as both a “self-shattering jouissance” and “a tautology for masochism.”⁴⁴ He writes that masochism arises when “the opposition between pleasure and pain becomes irrelevant, in which the sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges when it is ‘pressed’ beyond a certain threshold of endurance.”⁴⁵ As the Black Power figures run a train on Kramer, shot-reverse-shot editing establishes a connection between his face and those of his “interviewers,” between their sadism and the double-edged sword of his pleasure and pain. In this moment, Kramer expresses a collapse of joy and agony and of the self, while those fucking him embody an extreme sinthomosexuality. As Edelman writes, the sinthomosexual, through his accession to the “meaninglessness associated with the sinthome,” figures an “unregenerate” sexuality “whose singular insistence on jouissance [rejects] every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism.”⁴⁶ 

Kevin Kramer learning of his “interview”

Anger finally convinces Monti to show him around Hollywood’s gay hustling scene. He returns his shirt to him. They end up at Anger’s apartment. Anger goes inside to make margaritas. Monti slips on a bar of soap, hits his head, and lies unconscious in the jacuzzi. Anger concludes that he is dead, drives his body to the beach, and prepares to dump it in the ocean. To his surprise, Monti wakes up. They enjoy a steamy make out session before running wild. Innocence plays a significant role in subverting our expectations in Hustler White. At the beginning of the film, as Monti lies in the water, we are led to believe something has gone wrong—that he has been harmed by a john or fallen victim to drugs. But all along, he had only slipped and fallen. While clients are presented as pursuing gigolos for their own unsavoury purposes, Anger’s interest in Monti is largely academic. Moreover, in one of the film’s earliest sex scenes, another hustler, Piglet (Iver Johnson), just wants Eigil to kiss him, but Eigil doesn’t kiss as a matter of policy. Piglet asphyxiates himself, forcing Eigil to resuscitate and therefore kiss him. Eigil is angered and leaves, only to have Monti run over his foot. Piglet was searching not for sex but connection and intimacy, the same things Anger and Monti find at film’s end. His face when he later learns of Eigil’s death tells us all we need to know about his sense of longing—about the difficulty of having feelings tied up in carnal knowledge. Despite the sordid onslaught of sex in Hustler White, the unusual group of men we are presented with are deeply complex both emotionally and spiritually. As Berlant would argue, they remain caught between fantasy and reality, optimism for and refusal of the future. Anger’s interest in Monti is projective as his attachment stems from an investment in hustlers as totemic symbols of sexual liberation, while Piglet is struck by cruel optimism, or an investment in a particular mode of living that stifles him. Hustling does not work for Piglet, but he remains stuck in that world because he is convinced he will find meaning there—a fling, a boyfriend, or just a kiss. As per Berlant, Piglet wants more in this life but can neither detach from a world that negates him nor imagine a more expansive “field of affective potentialities, latent and explicit fantasies, and infrastructures for how to live beyond survival, toward flourishing not later but in the ongoing now.”⁴⁷ Conversely, Monti’s relationship to sex work is distant. It is a means to an end, a way of supporting his infant son, or “cool baby.” In Hustler White’s most jarring sequence, we cut from a sex scene to Monti bathing his son. The juxtaposition of explicit sexuality and pure innocence points to an investment in reproductive futurism that at first seems incongruent with the film’s ethos until we remember that the film is above all about people making space in a world that uses and then rejects them.⁴⁸

Hustler White asks what we can bear to know about sex and intimacy, and what remains unseen and unknowable in the most forthright and seemingly dispassionate sexual encounters. In this sense, it is like David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), in which a cabal of symphorophiliacs repeatedly stage car crashes for their own gratification as “the body is invaded by the sexual as a drive with no reachable aim or object choice, beyond gender and beyond desire.”⁴⁹ Thematically, it is also like Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), which centres on a Toronto strip club where “characters suffer from reminiscences and forgetting, return compulsively to the primal scene, [and] act out fundamentally narcissistic behaviours.”⁵⁰ Much like Anger’s semi-erotic fascination with the hustlers, the Exotica club owner, Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), its host, Eric (Elias Koteas), and an emotionally damaged regular, Francis (Bruce Greenwood), similarly cannot shake their bizarre obsessions with the young exotic dancer Christina (Mia Kirshner). They neurotically return to the club to keep their desires alive—to watch Christina, (re)live sexual fantasies, and in the case of Francis, project the loss of a child onto her. Moreover, despite his vexed relationship to New Queer Cinema, LaBruce’s films bear more than a passing resemblance to the movement. Like Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1992), Hustler White is about male sex workers, but it more closely resembles Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), where two HIV-positive gay men—a muscular Advocate man, Luke (Mike Dytri), and a nerdy film critic, Jon (Craig Gilmore)—evade police after the former kills a homophobic police officer. Their passionate trysts in vehicles and motel rooms do not measure up to the graphicness of LaBruce’s sex scenes, but both films similarly shatter time and narrative as a means of formalising sexual ecstasy and masochism. In an article on Gaspar Noé’s films Irréversible (2002) and Seul Contre Tous (1998),⁵¹ Brinkema connects Bersani’s “self-shattering” motif to the Deleuzian “time-image”—the moment in post-World War II cinema in which the “sensory-motor schema” of classical narrative cinema collapses and is subordinated to time as a series of “pure optical, sound (and tactile) image[s]” where “time is no longer the measure of movement but movement is the perspective of time.”⁵² For Brinkema, there is continuity between self-shattering and the breakdown of time and space that inheres in the controversial rape scene in Irréversible.⁵³ As Julianne Pidduck similarly argues, the time-image in the surrealist New Queer videography of Canadian artist Mike Hoolboom manifested in the “splicing together of incommensurable fragments” gives rise to “unexpected articulations of memory, causality and meaning” and “a disintegration of corporeal and biographical boundaries.”⁵⁴ The prismatic audiovisual landscape of Tom (2002), for instance, combines home movies, pop culture ephemera, and historical documentary footage to establish an indeterminate connection between the demolition of old Lower East Side buildings and the destruction of filmmaker Tom Chomont’s life and ego.⁵⁵ The time-images of Araki and LaBruce are like those of Hoolboom and Noé, although unlike Hoolboom’s, there is no interspersing of archival or video footage, and unlike Noé’s, they are considerably less violent. In The Living End, the sex between Luke and Jon manifests in various “temporal loops, drifts and stalls”⁵⁶ that work against narrative coherence while establishing both the dissolution of self and the repudiation of futurity. In one scene, Jon is shown giving “road head” to Luke. As the car moves along the highway to the place where it is implied they will die, the camera pans left to show Luke’s ecstatic face as if to signify a concomitant pleasure between sex and death. In the opening sequence of Hustler White, an image of Monti masturbating is crosscut with him being fucked by a client in what Gilles Deleuze terms an “any-space-whatever,” an indeterminate milieu “extracted from a given state of things.”⁵⁷ This sequence establishes the disavowal of narrative and the negation of self that will follow in the rest of the film, as Monti’s ego will be shattered, at least temporarily, by another dose of “rough trade.”

Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) has fun in a car dealership in Crash

Christina (Mia Kirshner) performs onstage in Exotica

Luke (Mike Dytri) and Jon (Craig Gilmore) have shower sex in The Living End

Hustler White foregrounds the complexities of sex and desire, demonstrating, as Shannon Bell argues in Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (1994), that the sex worker “has no inherent meaning and is signified differently in different discourses.”⁵⁸ Moreover, the film plunges into the depths of incoherence where everything and nothing make sense, where no one is the master of their domain. As Heather Love would say, this world “makes evident the value of refusal, of negativity, and of engagement with difference as a project without a limit.”⁵⁹ And yet, the world of Hustler White is also innocent, lovely, and full of longing. It impels us never to consign to oblivion those from whom we derive pleasure or might otherwise relegate to the messy but never dull realm of hustling. Beyond Hustler White, LaBruce has seen remarkable success on the film festival circuit both in North America and internationally. This is due in part to a voyeuristic audience waiting to see what he will do next—an attachment to LaBruce as being like a sinthomosexual, or a figure who delights in the disruption of sexual conservatism. We live vicariously through LaBruce and the abject sexuality of his films. We enjoy the self-shattering on screen partly because we, too, are shattered. However, LaBruce also remains popular because, as my reading of Hustler White demonstrates, he is a talented filmmaker whose work is legitimate. Yet, there is no academic monograph on LaBruce as there are Cronenberg and Egoyan.⁶⁰ He remains absent from or simply glossed over in countless volumes on queer cinema. Even his retrospective at the MoMA and supposed move to the mainstream with Saint-Narcisse have not yielded more academic attention.⁶¹ With few exceptions, our knowledge of LaBruce’s filmography generally but Hustler White specifically is quite trivial.⁶²

While LaBruce’s films are thorny and difficult to comprehend, I maintain that it is academia’s overwhelming erotophobia that has generated an intellectual near embargo on them. Unfortunately, contemporary queer theories and spaces do not help matters. As “queer” is now used to refer to a stable identity rather than a social formation that challenges identity politics, and “queer studies” is now so often devoid of sexuality,⁶³ it does not appear as though LaBruce will soon be welcomed onto the glossy pages of academic exegesis or into queer theory classes. As Edelman brilliantly puts it, “critical discourse” remains focused on “questions of rights (civil, natural, and human), of sovereign power and states of exception, of the definition and limits of the human, and of the distribution and control of populations through the categories of citizen and noncitizen. Sex, in this context, can carry the odour of anachronism, narcissism, or something irreducibly and disconcertingly personal, and any impulse to linger on its place in the social, cultural, and political fields can suggest a stubbornly narrow gaze or a refusal to move on.”⁶⁴

Endnotes