'Skin' Flick Sunday

Caught a screening of Bruce LaBruce’s “No Skin Off My Ass” at IFC Center last night, having previously seen only “Hustler White” (1996) from his body of work. His 1991 debut follows a lonely gay hairdresser, played by LaBruce, who brings a handsome, seemingly mute skinhead home from a park and becomes obsessed with him -- a punk variation on Robert Altman’s “That Cold Day in the Park.”

LaBruce describes its mix of romance, political satire, fetishism and underground porn as “agit-porn,” with a romantic-comedy premise summed up as “boy meets boy, boy takes boy home, boy discovers boy may be a fascist.”

Like “Hustler White,” the film isn’t particularly good, even on its own terms. (That the skinhead is hot and usually naked is largely what makes it watchable.) G.B. Jones, who plays the skinhead’s radical filmmaker sister, is its only reliable source of humor, bringing a John Waters sensibility that I wish had been more abundant throughout. 

Still, there’s something appealing about its indie spirit and the way it treats gay desire as normal rather than shameful. I found more to appreciate in its attitude than in its execution.

By coincidence, I’d watched “Last Tango in Paris” for the first time the night before, and despite their different sensibilities and budgets(!), I was struck by how both make sex and nudity part of the storytelling. (You might be surprised to learn which one had the anal rape scene that used butter as lube.)

LaBruce himself embraces pornography as part of his artistic vocabulary: In a 2018 Interview conversation with Slava Mogutin, his longtime friend and “Skin Flick” collaborator, LaBruce argued that sexually explicit work can also be elaborate and conceptual. It made me think about how readily we treat pornography and serious filmmaking as mutually exclusive.

After the film, Mogutin moderated a short Q&A during which we learned that Klaus von Brucker, who plays the skinhead and is 10 years Bruce’s junior, was his real-life boyfriend at the time, and that a brief fling with a gay-for-pay hustler who later became a neo-Nazi fueled LaBruce’s lifelong skinhead fetish, helping inspire the film. (He suggested that fetish porn is a good outlet for desires we might not want to pursue in real life.)

We also learned that LaBruce and Jones co-founded the gay punk fanzine J.D.s, making her role feel like a natural extension of their shared underground roots. (LaBruce also alluded to a falling-out with Jones that I probably need to look up.)

I didn’t stick around for the subsequent screening of “Super 8 1/2” (1994), but there’s more LaBruce to explore at home: The Criterion Channel’s October collection includes “Hustler White” (1996), his campy take on “Sunset Boulevard” set among L.A. male sex workers; “Otto; or, Up with Dead People” (2008), a darkly comic tale of a goth zombie with an identity crisis; and “Gerontophilia” (2013), a tender, sexually frank romance between a young man and an elderly nursing-home resident.

Funny side note: My companion for the evening, the hilarious writer Tim Anderson, recalled renting the film decades ago while spending a year teaching English in Tokyo, hoping for a little sexual satisfaction so far from home. Instead, he found black bars covering all the “goodies” to comply with Japan’s censorship rules -- so he was happy to finally see what he’d been missing!