The Spanish obscenities of Bruce LaBruce

ABSTRACT

This article examines Bruce LaBruce’s exploration of obscenity and pornography in the Spanish context, studying three of his recent Spain-based pornographic films alongside his 2012 photographic exhibition ‘Obscenity’ at the LaFresh Gallery in Madrid. By filming in Madrid and Barcelona while casting Spanish adult film actors and celebrities from popular culture for his porn and photography, LaBruce playfully toys with the boundaries separating transnational and local porn production. Through close readings of his films and photography, this article considers the cultural narratives, characters, and celebrity personas of LaBruce’s ‘Spanish’ work both within Spanish culture and transnational media. In doing so, we see how his productions challenge the form and national nature of pornography in Spain, destabilizing what might count as ‘Spanish’ or not. Such purposeful instability becomes a new sort of transnational Spanish pornography, with LaBruce’s Spanish films adhering at once to cultural and transcultural narratives even as they push against the borders of the obscene and the pornographic in Spain.

KEYWORDS:

• Spain
• porn
• Bruce LaBruce
• obscenity
• queer

In an often-recounted exchange in 1984 between philosopher Bernard Williams (who was at the time chairing the British Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship) and a French official, Williams asks the official to define what makes a film pornographic. The official replies: ‘Everyone knows what a pornographic film is. There are no characters, there is nothing but sexual activity and it is not made by anyone one has heard of’. Williams presses the official in response: ‘But … what if these criteria diverged? What if a film of nothing but sex were made by, say, Fellini?’ (as quoted in Kappeller 1984, 26). Williams’ rhetorical question pushes against the distinctions that separate one object as pornographic and another as artistic, asking the French official to consider how porous and malleable they may be. Further, by querying the presumptive connections between lack of notoriety and obscenity, Williams also holds open the possibility for pornography and obscenity to meaningfully speak about and to a culture, demonstrating its particularities and sexual mores. Although such an assertion may no longer be wholly novel, the truth is that pornography and obscenity are often held in tandem and still only infrequently regarded neutrally (at best) by whole swaths of society; instead, they are more frequently cast as social and cultural outliers, bad products of bad elements.

As a figure who is no stranger to these epithets, famed New Queer cinema provocateur Bruce LaBruce has long toyed with the mediation of obscenity in his films. Eugenie Brinkema has argued that LaBruce’s:

corpus not only discursively exists on the boundary between [art cinema and pornography], but explicitly theorizes its position thusly. In turn, his works bear witness to the aesthetic and historical crisis of this borderland, speaking the wild language of the indeterminable. (2007, 97)

Brinkema compellingly describes LaBruce’s filmmaking as a queer in-between, a space where art and porn commingle and emerge as something new. Drawing on this aspect of his work, this article examines LaBruce’s exploration of obscenity and pornography in the Spanish context, studying three of his recent Spain-based pornographic films alongside his 2012 photographic exhibition ‘Obscenity’ at the LaFresh Gallery in Madrid. By filming in Madrid and Barcelona while casting Spanish adult film actors and celebrities from popular culture for his porn and photography, LaBruce playfully toys with the boundaries separating transnational and local porn production. Through close readings of the three films and the photography exhibit, this article considers the cultural narratives, characters, and celebrity personas of LaBruce’s ‘Spanish’ work. In doing so, I consider how his productions challenge the form and national nature of pornography in Spain, destabilizing what might count as ‘Spanish’ or not. Such purposeful instability becomes a new sort of transnational Spanish pornography, with LaBruce’s Spanish films adhering at once to cultural and transcultural narratives even as they push against the borders of the obscene and the pornographic in Spain.

The pornoprovocateur

By all accounts, LaBruce is no stranger to the pornographic. The notorious director-provocateur’s filmography is punctuated with films that dance the thin line between pornography and art house cinema, and which often straddle both genres comfortably: No Skin Off My Ass (LaBruce, dir. 1993), Hustler White (LaBruce and Castro, dirs 1996), The Raspberry Reich (LaBruce, dir. 2004), or L.A. Zombie (LaBruce, dir. 2010), to name only a small selection. Of these, Raspberry Reich and L.A. Zombie both had uncut versions that were released and marketed much more clearly as pornography by gay porn producers Cazzo Films and Dark Alley Media, respectively; and while not overtly connected, LaBruce’s pornographic film Skin Flick (1999) had a number of thematic links to the earlier No Skin Off My Ass. In this way, and as LaBruce himself attests, his work embodies radical queer punk aesthetics that fly against the assimilationist tactics of mainstream gay politics.

In a Vice Magazine article, LaBruce (2011) frames his contentious relationship to gay politics most succinctly: ‘The gay movement is a zombie movement. It vaguely looks like its former self, operating remotely like it used to, going through the motions. But there’s no real life to it, no purpose, beyond bland consumerism’. His boredom with gay culture palpable, LaBruce (2011) becomes nostalgic for the adventurousness and ‘extreme sexuality’ of gay culture of the past, leading him to postulate that ‘pornography appears to be the last bastion of sexual radicalism. That’s why I always express solidarity with gay pornographers. They’re the last glimmer of glamour in the gay movement’. This is not to say that LaBruce’s relationship to pornography is so straightforward, however, as he has similarly critiqued the standardization of adult cinema for its lack of innovation and boring repetitions. While shooting the sex scenes in L.A. Zombie, for example, he wrote:

I must confess that I always lose interest in the explicit scenes when I’m shooting a porno. I guess that probably isn’t a good sign. The mechanics of porn really aren’t very sexy at all, and it’s very difficult to shoot sex in a novel way, so it always seems like the same thing every time you do it. (LaBruce 2009)

In effect, consumerism has tainted gay cultures for LaBruce by making them more bland and more conservative, while pornography appears as radical potential. The consumer-driven type of porn required by audiences, however, necessitates a set of mechanical exercises and positions that negates any sort of ‘sexual radicalism’ or ‘glamour’, frustrating LaBruce’s artistic appetite and further killing off the potential dynamism of pornography to radicalize gay cultures.

The type of films that LaBruce makes, then, can all be defined by a Debordian desire to resist the consumptive urge towards bland consumerism. Additionally, by nature of LaBruce’s own claims to provocation, they work to electrify the fences that separate genres, art forms, and social boundaries. Along these lines, Shaka McGlotten writes that:

LaBruce’s films underscore homonormative/national refusals of an earlier politics of sexual liberation and the consequences of these refusals for contemporary queer sociality, namely the anaemic ways of imagining queer collectivity – absorption into a murderous, imperialist military industrial complex or into the inherently conservative institution of marriage or through increasingly hierarchized and commodified erotic ‘marketplaces’. (2014, 373)

Framing LaBruce’s films through the lens of his frequent recurrence to zombies – that is, his figurative critique of gay cultures through film and the recurrence to the literal living dead – McGlotten compellingly argues for a way of viewing the director’s work as both intimate and opaque, at once erotic and ambivalent. For McGlotten, ‘in these zombie allegories, sex connects one to others, and it does not’ (2014, 369). The explicitly pornographic shock of LaBruce’s films thus provokes a response from the viewer – be it arousal or disgust, or some queer combination of the two – and as such, they refuse the tired non-politics of everyday life by calling forth obscenity and sex in equal measures. As McGlotten argues, be it through the critique of tired gay cultures or the recurrence to the figure of the zombie, LaBruce looks to reanimate the dead.

Now playing in Spain

LaBruce’s disruption of what constitutes the obscene and the pornographic often roots itself in specific spaces and places, at once playfully engaging with and disturbing localized histories of sexuality. He purposefully calls forth the concept of ‘obscenity’ in his works, positioning himself as a purportedly radical alternative to what he sees as the milquetoast productions that surround him. Although such a move clearly casts himself in a favourable light and as a champion of the obscene, it is true that LaBruce’s works often push the boundaries of what is formally or narratively acceptable to the media within which he works. In the interplay between obscenity and pornography, for example, LaBruce is able to question where one ends and the other begins, dabbling with pornographic elements that are obscene in novel (i.e. non-sexual) ways.

LaBruce’s explicit naming of ‘obscenity’ in his works further offers spectators the opportunity to consider the concept itself. Both obscenity and pornography are often seen as constitutive of the other: pornography is considered obscene, and obscenity itself is frequently made to indicate pornographic elements at play. Indeed, in this pairing readers may hear echoes of Linda Williams’ often-cited neologism ‘on/scenity’, which she has described as ‘the gesture by which a culture brings on to the public scene the very organs, acts, “bodies and pleasures” that have heretofore been designated ob-off-scene, that is, as needing to be kept out of view’ (1999, 282). Pairing the pornographic and the obscene, even when the two are patently not always synonymous, is a provocatory move by LaBruce. This is to say that the recurrence to the concept of obscenity evokes legality and state-sanctioned oppression, which in turn allows LaBruce to transgress against what is considered to be sacred, right, decent, or even legal. Such transgressions are not purely notional, either. For example, dismissing official city permits for filming as both cost-prohibitive and fascistic, LaBruce’s more low-budget forays are often carried out in a frenetic guerrilla style. The director has cheekily called this type of filming a terrorist act, describing Raspberry Reich as ‘guerrilla filmmaking, we had to make everything on the cheap, on the fly, without permits, running around [Berlin] with guns, trying to be secret, getting found out and then getting kicked out of places’ (Hays 2005, 24). The fictionalization of the Red Army Faction itself in Raspberry Reich might similarly be read as an obscene act of sorts, one which recurs to violent and localized histories of terrorism for camp effect.

In his work to explicitly call forth obscenity to both enhance and subvert its meanings, I see LaBruce as working with local cultures of profanity and pornography. This is seen in the examples of Raspberry Reich from earlier, but also in films like L.A. Zombie, which parodies and abstracts the city’s thorny relationship with its unhoused and remarks on the ways in which Los Angeles surveils, polices, and disrupts its unhoused population.¹ In an interview about one of his more recent films, Saint-Narcisse (LaBruce 2020), LaBruce frames the film within a history of Quebecois cinema of the 1960s–1980s, which to his estimation consisted of ‘spooky indie films that tackled taboo subjects like incest and the intersection of sex and religion. Saint-Narcisse is my homage to this style of cinema’ (Sayej 2020). Devoting this film to the exploration of sex and desire between two twins (or ‘twincest’, the film’s original title), LaBruce sees his film as pointedly commenting on contemporary cultures of narcissism and social media usage at the same time as it offers deep – even loving – references to classic Quebecois cinema. Many of his other films, similarly, are closely connected the locations they are filmed in. By embedding his films in the specific cultures of places like Berlin, Los Angeles, Toronto, Madrid, and Barcelona, LaBruce’s filmography carefully considers the political, cultural, and sexual stakes of its locations even as he injects and heightens these with transnational elements.

But perhaps there is something already slippery about national cinema – and about Spanish national cinema in particular – that makes it difficult to define, as has been noted by many who write about contemporary cinemas in Spain. With its convoluted system of governmental subsidies, lacklustre box office performances for domestic releases, and a high tax on entertainment, Spanish cinema has long struggled to articulate itself within its own context. In an essay on Spanish cinema and national identity, Barry Jordan finds it useful to separate out national cinemas from a national film industry, noting that:

we can obviously have a national film industry employing many people and making lots of movies, but these may well not be ‘national’ movies, in the sense of offering representations of the lives, times and cultures of a country’s population(s) and their everyday situations and concerns. (2000, 69)

Jordan’s definitional sense of what constitutes a ‘national’ movie, which may be only somewhat reductively read as the depictions of everyday life and everyday problems, is nevertheless limited by what we can conceptualize as Spanish in the first place. That is, understanding a film as an example of Spanish cinema seems more an act of normalizing cultural situations and lives, and the spiky differences that give nuance to cultural life are flattened into something intelligibly Spanish. Accounting for this, Jordan makes several concessions: that ‘in a global environment, the definition of what counts as a properly or recognizably “national” concern becomes somewhat problematic’ (2000, 69); that ‘definitions of the “national” and national identity are bound to vary and change over time’ (2000, 69); and that the ways that some ‘understand “Spanishness” may differ, often radically, from official definitions’ (2000, 69–70). These nuances lead Jordan to conclude that ‘though we may be able to talk of the Spanish state in political terms, we cannot sensibly talk of a unitary national culture or for that matter a uniform national cinema’ (2000, 70), which in turn leads him to speak not of national identity but identities, and not of national cinema but its cinemas.

How does this debate about what constitutes national or transnational cinema – and the growing effects of multinational media marketplaces and consumptive practices – find its way into the types of pornography that we create and consume? While Mariah Larsson agrees that ‘in a global marketplace, one could argue that nationality – and especially in relation to the comparatively anonymous bodies of pornography – has become moot and the only things that are of significance are the looks of these bodies and the acts that they perform’, she also notes that ‘national (and ethnic) stereotypes are frequently tagged on streaming sites for porn and thus become a signifier which separates one blow-job or double penetration from another’ (2015, 219). Larsson points to nationality as an element that differentiates one clip, film, or sex act from the rest in ways that are both titillating and thrilling; the same differentiation could potentially hold true for transnational creations like those of LaBruce, which would then find themselves marked at once by their queer juxtaposition of cultures and people and by the specific local contexts in which they are made. If, following Larsson, the ‘accents’ that nationality brings to the ‘anonymous bodies of pornography’ inflect our experience of pornography in meaningful and pleasurable ways, how might LaBruce’s work both nationalize these anonymous bodies while paradoxically separating them even further from their local contexts? Or, to put it more plainly: whose porn is this?

On the obscene

In some ways, LaBruce both avoids questions like those already discussed while embracing the ambivalence they create. Thoroughly locating his films in their locales and drawing on local acting talent and production services, his films often draw on a national film industry while dabbling in the cultures that may constitute national cinemas, to follow Jordan’s earlier definitions. As a case in point: in 2012, to both fanfare and public outcry, LaBruce exhibited a series of bombastic photographs in the La Fresh Gallery in Madrid. The show, titled ‘Obscenity’, featured several Spanish models and 1980s Spanish pop icons interacting with religious iconography and symbols in sexualized, perverse, and playful ways. Perhaps most famously, the series capitalized on the images of television and media personality Mario Vaquerizo and his wife Alaska, the latter a gay icon and figure of the 1980s Spanish Movida, as well as that of model and long-time Almodóvar actress Rossy de Palma. The exhibition caused an immediate and violent reaction in Spain: protests from a number of Catholic groups and the Franco Foundation, the firing of Mario Vaquerizo from his work at the conservative radio station La COPE, and two homemade incendiary devices tossed through the front window of the La Fresh Gallery, where the work was exhibited.

The work is titillating. The image of Vaquerizo and Alaska, set up so that the husband-and-wife duo form a pietà of the Virgin Mary sorrowfully cradling Jesus, places raw sexuality at the forefront. Alaska raises the sheer fabric of a nun’s habit to expose her ample decolletage, her breasts barely held back by a leather bodice, and she cradles her husband’s head erotically; her face is not sorrowful but ecstatic, somewhere lost in the orgasmic throes of pleasure. Her legs are spread open, fishnet stockings clearly visible under the delicate gauze of the habit, and Vaquerizo rests between them, his taut, tattoo-covered frame draped across the bottom half of the image. In his ‘Saint Rossy’ series, model and actress Rossy De Palma is also portrayed as a nun in erotic undress. In one of the images of the series, her lace bodice is exposed and only partially covered by a thick black veil, leaving a shock of flesh emerging out of the velvety black image. She looks at the viewer with an expression that is at once defiant and seductive, a black rosary between her teeth and laced around her fingers; in her other hand, she daintily clutches a black cross-shaped candle with a pair of wax testicles.

There are more images like this, but it is clear that Bruce LaBruce’s exhibition is charged with erotic energy, and playfully walks the line between blasphemy, humour, and religious ecstasy, when it does not transgress these borders entirely. The same spectre of blasphemy has had LaBruce defending his work in media outlets; he is quoted in El País, for example, as saying that the idea behind the exhibition was to play with idol worship on a broad level: ‘La idea fue retratar a personas en su mayoría conocidas, eso se debe a la relación que se da entre la fama y la religión. Hoy los famosos son idolatrados, por eso usé la imaginería y las escenas sagradas’ [The idea was to portray mostly well-known people, which is due to the relationship between fame and religion. Today famous people are idolized, that's why I used sacred imagery and settings] (Morales 2012).² The framing here is typical of LaBruce, in that it is a slippery statement that attempts to sidestep the more provocative elements at play in his work – namely, the references to sexuality and Catholicism in a country that is still profoundly culturally Catholic.

It may thus be argued that LaBruce’s Spanish works explicitly capitalize on Spanish obscenities, which are at once those that can be imagined broadly (pornography, for instance) and those that may chiefly be considered obscene in a country with long-rooted ties to Catholicism. Taking his photography exhibit as a prime example, we see work that has the potential to be disruptive on very real terms, resulting in firebombs and firings alike for the participants. ‘Obscenity’ utilizes figures tied to the Movida, the anti-establishment culture of the post-dictatorial transition to democracy in Spain, in a manner that invokes and parodies celebrity cultures; simultaneously, the erotic portrayal, Catholic imagery, and state of undress very pointedly reference and subvert the repressive Catholic dictatorship of Spain’s past. Later, in the films discussed in the following, we see works that depict sex in purportedly sacred spaces, the ideation of suicide, misandry, and polyamory. While not uniquely provocative to a Spanish audience, such ‘sins’ may be especially provocative to one; as such, the films seen in this article are both intimately tied to a loose sense of Spanish religiosity while also clearly marked as transnational products.

In an article in the LGBTQ multimedia outlet Xtra, LaBruce shows surprise at the reaction in Spain for his work, musing: ‘For me the works are totally toned down. Normally my work is much more pornographic’ (Beneteau 2012). These statements seem to be an attempt to placate or cajole a shocked viewer by referencing high art and canonical imagery, a way to express an artistic aesthetic and sincerity towards the medium. In other comments, however, LaBruce drops the pretence:

Generally in my movies I like to include something to offend everyone. I’m often surprised that there is an audience for my work at all. The art world often ignores me because they think I’m too pornographic, while the porn world resents me for being too arty or intellectual and interfering with their precious, pornographically pure project. I’m an interloper, a common adventuress. (Huffman 2011)

Although recent statements from LaBruce find him embracing the title of ‘pornographer’ with more gusto (no doubt due to his continued and growing collaborations with production companies like Dark Alley Media, Cazzo Films, CockyBoys, and Lust Films), it is clear that he still feels a difference from the ‘pornographically pure projects’ that characterize gay pornography of the present. For LaBruce, as the interloper that he sees himself to be, this tampering with genre and type is a form of obscenity that violates the pornographic pureness of the object. Such obscenity, then, is not just the defamation of the sacred with the profane but a purposeful attack on the established boundaries, hard limits, or fixed borders that constitute the genre.

The devil’s work

This obscene border-crossing is particularly apparent in LaBruce’s trio of Spanish pornographic films: Diablo in Madrid (LaBruce, dir. 2008), Über Menschen (LaBruce, dir. 2008), and Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina (LaBruce, dir. 2008). Of these, the first two were filmed and packaged as part of a four-movie series produced by American gay porn studio CockyBoys. In the readings of these films in the following, I argue that the intentional prolongation or denial of spectatorial pleasure subverts and delays the common motive of porn: to get off. The films are further characterized by the centralization of non-sexualized forms of affect: malevolence or anger, sadness or suicidal ideation, and more. Together with the uniquely Spanish elements of each film, I see a series of intentionally transnational products that are nonetheless fully tied to the local contexts and cultures of Spain.

Titled ‘It is Not the Pornographer who is Perverse … ’, LaBruce’s CockyBoys series references the German camp classic It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives by filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (1971). By paying homage to von Praunheim’s film, LaBruce’s series looks to reference international queer cinemas, their histories of activism and political efforts, and their cultures of camp all at once. The specific rehashing of von Praunheim’s film title also offers a hint to the elliptical absence of ‘It is Not the Pornographer who is Perverse … ’, which can logically be concluded in the same fashion: ‘ … but the society in which he lives’. Bracketed as it is by this series title and its phantasmal conclusion, Diablo in Madrid purposefully suggests a compelling but playful perspective on obscenity in Spanish culture, even as it pushes the limits of what (Spanish) pornography is. If we can bastardize von Praunheim even further, perhaps we can imagine that LaBruce’s Spanish series of pornography offers up its own ghostly subtitle: it is not the pornography that is perverse, but Spain itself.

Diablo in Madrid opens with a squawk of a raven and a seemingly empty, open tomb, its yawing mouth pitch black. A single hand rises up out of the blackness, and a lithe and muscular figure begins to climb out: the titular Diablo, played by Spanish gay porn actor Allen King. Wearing a red muscle t-shirt and black baseball cap with little red horns, Diablo makes his way out of the tomb, taking stock of the cemetery before setting off. The remainder of the film sees Diablo wreaking havoc in ways that are shocking, sexy, profane, and at times seemingly out of place for porn. In the next scene, for example, he delivers flowers to a grave, pausing to spit on it and then urinate at its base. Of course, neither of these actions are particularly novel in porn, and in other contexts may in fact be part of a sexual act themselves; here, however, they are decontextualized from sex and framed with an almost pedestrian malevolence, an example of Diablo’s chaotic nature and a way for the character to thumb his nose at the sanctity and solemn reverence ascribed to religious sites like cemeteries. The fact that he urinates on an actual grave is an obscene act (in its most general of definitions) that gives a true sense of the character’s maleficence while, perhaps, creating an uneasy tension between a spectator’s expectations and desires and the film they are viewing.

In the next sequence, a grieving widow (played by art curator and public figure Topacio Fresh, the owner of La Fresh Gallery in Madrid) and her son (Spanish artist and filmmaker Alejandría Cinque) are disturbed by Diablo, who stands on a grave smoking with his leg propped up suggestively. The mother and son are decked in mourning black, Fresh’s character in the traditional mantilla and peineta used for special occasions in Spain. Cinque’s character surreptitiously begins to watch as Diablo flashes him lewdly, and slowly moves closer to Diablo. Comically pulling out her rosary and shaking it at Diablo, the mother begins a brief tug of war with Diablo over the son. She eventually triumphs, pulling her son away from his devilish seductor and leaving the cemetery in a rush. In these first few minutes, we have seen the possibility of sex foiled in a few ways that may frustrate a viewer who is actively looking for it, with LaBruce actively turning the standard script of porn on its head by keeping more explicit acts at arm’s length (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Diablo (Allen King) propositions a young man (Alejandría Cinque), unbeknownst to his mother (Topacio Fresh).

The film cuts to Diablo stalking off through the graveyard with a red prop pitchfork in hand, looking for easy prey. He ultimately finds it in adult film actor Colby Keller, whose character is reading a book by philosopher Guy Debord. After a few brief moments of temptation, Diablo eventually lures Keller’s character into an empty burial niche, which magically opens up into a cavernous black space with only a single light shining on the two.³ In the open darkness of this grave, the pair shares the film’s first sex scene, about a third of the way through the film (six minutes into the 22-minute runtime). Although not as extensive a delay as some of the other films analyzed here, this wait is significant, both teasing and limiting the gratification of the spectator in favour of a longer opening sequence that establishes King’s character, his desires, and his Spanish referents. For LaBruce, it seems that delay is the point; that is, the playful, impish mischief of LaBruce’s characters juts up against the knowledge of their desires and those of the audience. If most adult scenes or clips only utilize narrative to set up the ensuing sexual action, the story of Diablo in Madrid recurs to an older era of pornography, in which the story is given more equal weight. The pornographic desire for explicit sex is thus ultimately sated, but only after being repeatedly and uncomfortably thwarted, a teasing that is tantamount to LaBruce’s pornographic work.

Richard Dyer has famously asserted that:

the goal of the pornographic narrative is coming; in filmic terms, the goal is ejaculation, that is, visible coming. If the goal of the pornographic protagonist (the actor or “character”) is to come, the goal of the spectator is to see him come (and, more often than not, probably, to come at the same time as him). (1985)

Refusing to fully acquiesce to the formula that Dyer elucidates, LaBruce keeps his spectator from being fully sated by the action; both Diablo and Keller’s character remain at least partially clothed throughout, giving this oral scene the feel of a perfunctory quickie. The sex concludes after a quick minute and a half of action (Figure 2).

Figure 2. LaBruce’s wide shot of the action between Diablo (Allen King) and the professor (Colby Keller) contributes to spectatorial distance and delay of pleasure.

Returning to the surface, Diablo continues his tour of the cemetery. He finds and seduces a grieving widower (Spanish porn actor Lucas Costa) who is crying over the tomb of his lover. After another abbreviated fellatio scene, the camera quickly cuts again to Diablo’s patrol through the cemetery, searching for another soul to corrupt. The jump from the pursuit of sexual satisfaction to the endless searching of the next conquest is a clear metaphor for the types of furtive encounters that have long characterized gay male relations as well as the viewing habits of porn: always looking for the next best scene. Larsson notes that such screening practices are indicative of ‘the way consumers watch porn today, in clips ranging from a few minutes to half an hour … abandoning narratives in favour of sex scenes focusing on the sex act itself’ (2015, 224). However, the quick cuts here may also undercut a viewers’ desire for clips with a natural build to a satisfying climax; instead, Diablo has quick, furtive encounters that end as quickly as they come about, and which may not provide the same sort of visual or narrative release the spectator desires.

In his final attempt to corrupt a soul, Diablo encounters Angel (American adult film actor Sean Ford), who has been surreptitiously following him around the cemetery throughout the film. Upon encountering each other, they begin to wrestle roughly – kissing, punching, and dry humping each other across a number of locations and sequences in a brief tourist itinerary of Madrid. The two eventually take their encounter to a well-furnished apartment, wherein Angel eventually gives in to his desires as they tousle on a sofa. Lasting around six minutes, the sex scene between Angel and Diablo is the longest and is the only anal scene in the film. Diablo continues his dominant streak, slapping Angel lightly and eventually penetrating him with fervour. As they continue, a poster of Almodóvar (another patron saint of the Spanish obscene) watches over them. In an interview, LaBruce has explained that this was a fortuitous coincidence and that the poster was already in the space that they were filming the scene, although he also notes that the decision to offer it such a place of prominence in the final scene was ‘a little tip of the hat to the master’ (Turner 2018). After their sexual encounter – and when both have been satisfied – Diablo and Angel kiss passionately (LaBruce 2018a) (Figure 3).

Figure 3. A placid Almodóvar watches over the final scene between Diablo (Allen King) and Angel (Sean Ford).

Diablo in Madrid leans fairly heavily on the star persona of Allen King, perhaps one of Spain’s most recognizable gay porn stars of the moment. King has used his adult film career to make a name for himself on social media in Spain, particularly through a YouTube channel in which he posts advice videos, stories about his life, music videos from a burgeoning singing career, and his wide-ranging thoughts on anything from his favourite sauna in Madrid to his best and worst porn scene partners. Two of his videos in particular have become notorious: one in which he describes an incident in a nightclub with a waiter, who he derogatorily references as an effeminate, ugly Chinese man; another, in which he likens self-described bottoms to women.⁴ These videos (and others) have earned him somewhat of a ‘bad boy’ reputation, particularly in Spanish gay media outlets.⁵ Writing of his inflammatory social media presence, the Spanish gay magazine Shangay notes that ‘es indiscutible: cada vez que Allen King habla, sube el pan’ [It’s indisputable: every time that Allen King speaks, it gets worse] (Shangay 2020). This reputation adds an interesting layer to his performance as the impish Diablo, which would surely be read by Spanish audiences as playing to an already infamous online presence and persona. This is perhaps unlike his sexual proclivities, for which King is most well known as being a self-professed bottom in his personal life and in most of his adult films. Flipping his sexual role in Diablo in Madrid, LaBruce has King’s character pursue and dominate his conquests throughout the film, culminating in his topping performance with Ford. With this, LaBruce accesses the public persona and perception of King as a Spanish cultural figure while subverting some of the expectations of his work as a performer, fiddling with audience desire and engagement (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Mariano (Colby Keller), a suicidal professor on sabbatical, reads philosophy and ponders his existence.

Über Menschen, LaBruce’s second film in the CockyBoys series, takes place in a Madrid that is similarly overlaid by a thin veneer of sex. The film opens with the philosophy professor from Diablo in Madrid (Colby Keller) as he reads Guy DeBord’s Contre le cinema [Against Cinema]. He is seated in an outdoor café, sighing heavily and peering morosely into his glass of beer. Two teardrops fall into it, making loud splashes as they break the surface. The character is eventually picked up by a taxi driver (American adult film actor Calvin Banks). Arturo (Banks) confirms that he is taking Mariano (Keller)⁶ to the Segovia Viaduct, an early-nineteenth century construction and tourist attraction in the city. Mariano stares out the rear window, and the camera shows the passing scenery of Madrid. As Arturo attempts to make small talk, Mariano closes his eyes in an effort to swallow back tears and states that he is here on sabbatical from Buenos Aires. Arturo eventually asks the other man if he knows what the viaduct used to be known for. ‘Of course’, answers Keller’s slightly exasperated Mariano:

It was built towards the end of the eighteenth century⁷ to facilitate access between the town and the royal palace of Madrid … The viaduct was damaged significantly by artillery in the siege of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War due to its proximity to the front lines, so it was restored to its original specifications and reopened in 1942. (LaBruce 2018d)

It is difficult to imagine Mariano’s Wikipedia-lite rundown of the viaduct’s history as particularly sexually compelling for the viewers of this film, although it seems clear that LaBruce again looks to challenge the boundaries of porn in the delay of its pornographic material. After listening to Mariano’s brief history lesson of the Segovia viaduct, Arturo chuckles and responds that instead he was referring to its darker history: ‘What I meant was, it was a suicide bridge where suffering lovers used to leap to their deaths when they couldn’t fix their broken hearts.’ He further explains that the city has since put up a plexiglass barrier to discourage the frequent suicides. Mariano’s interest now piqued, he asks Arturo whether there is a way around the barrier; Arturo tentatively responds in the affirmative. ‘That’s encouraging’, says Mariano. The rest of this dialogue more firmly establishes Mariano’s clear suicidal intent and, coupled with the initial sequence and the description of the bridge, intimates that his ‘broken heart’ has led him here.

It is a near certainty that no casual CockyBoys viewer began watching this film expecting to find the tale of a depressed philosophy professor on his way to commit suicide. Still, Über Menschen is perhaps most interesting at this moment, as it deeply positions itself in Madrid by way of a lengthy drive through the city punctuated by careful filming of its neighbourhoods and detailed descriptions of the viaduct and its history. Both the camera shots and the narrative emphasis in the city and the viaduct, even when these stray towards the encyclopaedic, show a deep interest in place and space as something more than just a passing, cursory setting. That is, and as will be the case with Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina (and only to a slightly lesser extent Diablo in Madrid), the film tells a story that is centred in its locale in Spain, with characters that have opinions about and relationships to their environment. These relationships are further coloured with a desire towards disrupting the status quo of the Spanish state, be it spiritually (Diablo’s assault on cultures of religion and the sacred), civilly (Mariano’s attempt to commit suicide in a public place), or politically (as will be seen in the Catalan freedom fighting of Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina). In Diablo in Madrid and Über Menschen, these disruptions are thwarted neutrally with the main character’s transformation by a lover; in Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina, the act of group sex and polyamory underwrite their rebellious, anti-establishment desires (Figure 5).

Figure 5. To the left, Mariano (Colby Keller) attempts to clamber over the plexiglass of the Segovia Viaduct.

Of course, Mariano is eventually thwarted in his suicide attempt. As he unsuccessfully tries to climb the plexiglass barrier of the bridge, Arturo runs up, distracting the other man with more history: ‘Did you know that el viaducto is in a lot of movies? Like, Almodóvar movies.’ Mariano, panting from his attempts to climb the partition, mentions High Heels/Tacones lejanos (Almodóvar 1991), and Arturo chimes in that the viaduct is featured in Matador (Almodóvar 1986) as well. With this interjection, Arturo lures Mariano away from the bridge’s ledge by promising a tour of his favourite places in the city. After another brief drive through the city, cameras alternating between the passing streets of Madrid and the couple in the taxi, the two arrive at their destination: a dark, wooded area with the city lights dimly in the distance. The music fades away and the sounds of crickets fill the car as Arturo finally asks whether Mariano was going to jump. The professor hesitates for a moment before saying no, that this was research for the book he is writing, which is about suicide. ‘You know’, says Mariano, ‘one of my favorite philosophers committed suicide … his name was Guy DeBord’. Looking at him intently, Arturo flatly says ‘I’ve never heard of him.’ The two kiss as sensual piano music swells and here, over halfway through the film’s run time, they finally emerge from the car and have sex in front of the headlights.

The passing references to DeBord are certainly not casual in a film like this. The filmmaker and philosopher’s most famous work, The Society of the Spectacle, fiercely critiques contemporary Western cultures’ abandonment of what was ‘directly lived’ into representation (DeBord 2013, 2); that is, DeBord perceived the influence of the image in our social relations, along with the commodification of those same relationships, as heavily transforming the way we live. As DeBord writes, ‘the spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity’ (2013, 16). It is not difficult to imagine pornography as part of DeBord’s critique of the increasing commodification of social life, particularly the readily available clips available on popular sites like Pornhub. While arguable, this is to say that the representative models that emerge from large-studio porn dominate sexual landscapes and serve up a uniform standard of physique as pleasurable. This idea, implicitly referenced in Über Menschen, is more explicitly pronounced by LaBruce in earlier comments. Prompted to respond to a quote in which he claims pornography is innately fascistic, LaBruce explains that it is ‘so univocal, so relentless’ (Hays 2005, 24). He continues:

In terms of gay porn, I think it’s fascist in that it has the same iconography as the Third Reich: the idea of the perfect body. It’s body fascism. They’re often fucking like pistons, it’s very mechanical. It’s that kind of fascism, like Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. (Hays 2005, 24)

Of course, it is here that Über Menschen gets its title, as reference to and critique of the necessarily sculpted bodies of adult film actors like Keller and Banks (Figure 6).

Figure 6. The titular Über Menschen: the bodies of Colby Keller and Calvin Banks on display in tribute to and deconstruction of commodity pornography.

LaBruce’s attempts to undo this type of fascism form the crux of his Spanish work, and indeed colour all of his most recent pornographic films with CockyBoys and Lust Films, which are united by the obscene encroach of forms of affect that are explicitly non-sexualized. This is to say that the disgust, anger, or malevolence in Diablo in Madrid go hand in hand with the depression and suicidal ideation found in Über Menschen. Of course, these non-sexualized manifestations of bad affect must be jettisoned by the ends of the films in order for their commodified depictions of sex to actually be marketable – that is, Diablo must be tamed by his Angel, and the suicidal philosophy professor must find a way to fuck his sadness away.

Freedom fighters

In underscoring the thoughtful philosophies that characterize his Spanish pornography, some of what might be lost here is the playful mischief of LaBruce’s work. In his 2018 collaboration with Lust Films, Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina, LaBruce works with the Barcelona-based studio to craft a tongue-in-cheek addition to his Spanish oeuvre. As the film’s description reads:

Icon Bruce LaBruce tells us the polyamorous fairytale of a retired independence fighter in the dystopian Republic of Catalunya. It’s 2022, the third great world war has come to an end and emperor Donald Trump has taken over the world. In the middle of all this global chaos, Catalina and her two lovers Valentin and Pierre are still fighting for independence of a different kind. Together they overcome social norms and find that there is no such thing as a standardized relationship model that guarantees happiness for everyone and that for them, true love knows no gender. (‘Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina’ n.d.)

Recalling the contemporary set of global politics that has seen a serious movement for independence from the autonomous community of Catalonia alongside the seeming omnipresence of former US President Donald Trump, LaBruce creates a near-realistic window dressing of politics that is at once satirical and playful. Its references to ‘Catalunya’ (the Catalan name of the region), Catalan independence fighters, and an emperor Trump speak to the inordinately painful recent past that has nevertheless produced at least some good, at least in the film: the region’s independence from a global dictator-emperor. This is, naturally, quite an auspicious start for a 27-minute pornographic short film, to which filmmaker Erika Lust cheerily comments: ‘politics have never been more sexy!’ (‘Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina’ n.d.).

But as seen earlier, LaBruce’s politics are often explicitly sexy – and sexually explicit. As with some of his earlier pornographic films, LaBruce casts this film with the social and political elements of the present, deploying a progressive vision of independent Barcelona. This is quite unlike the reality, where the Spanish government forcefully took control of Catalonia, ‘dissolved its parliament and announced new elections after secessionist Catalan MPs voted to establish an independent republic, pushing the country’s worst political crisis in 40 years to new and dangerous heights’ (Jones, Burgen, and Graham-Harrison 2017). In LaBruce’s fantasy, this painful struggle for political freedom becomes the catalyst for independence, and as such the film is in some ways a dark but optimistic reimagining of the present (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Catalina (Nat Portnoy) is dramatically introduced against the backdrop of the Catalan flag.

That said, and belying its description, Valentin, Pierre, and Catalina is dystopian in premise only. Instead, the film’s first few minutes portray its titular characters enjoying coffees on comfortable outdoor café patios and taking sunny walks through the tourist areas of Barcelona. A voiceover provides context for the images:

It was 2022, just after the short Great World War. Emperor Trump now ruled the entire world with his henchman Kim Jong-un at his side owing to a bloodless, nuclear-free takeover engineered entirely through social media. Catalonia was, of course, its own independent state. Many foreigners came to seek refuge here, a new, somewhat isolated country that was considered neutral; a hotter, sexier, Switzerland, and self-sufficient and with enough resources to withstand the global recession and the continuing plague of global warming. Valentin and Pierre had made it in just before the borders closed, and they shared an apartment together in the Barri Gòtic. Catalina, who had proudly renamed herself after her country, had lived there all her life. (LaBruce 2018e)

The story elements are heavy, and the voiceover continues by describing Pierre and Valentin, including how they met, their first sexual experiences with women, and their mutual attraction to Catalina. As the voiceover continues, the trio are seen enjoying a meal together in an outdoor café, strolling through the ramblas of Barcelona, enjoying the gondola lift in Montjuïc, and taking a detour through the Montjuïc Cemetery. As with Diablo in Madrid – but in a decidedly less malevolent fashion – the trio’s antics in the cemetery find them posing dramatically in front of angel statues, making out with graveyard sculptures, and standing atop tombs; like Über Menschen, the city of Barcelona becomes a backdrop for the story of how the protagonists will be brought even closer together.

The remainder of the film explores the ‘confessional’ kink providing the crux of the film, which is to see the two male leads having sex with each other. The bedroom set where Catalina (Nat Portnoy) convinces Pierre (Bishop Black) and Valentin (Valentin Braun) to eventually give in to their curiosities is decorated with throw pillows of the Estelada, the flag flown by supporters of the region’s independence. The wall, in turn, is plastered with posters of Enriqueta Martí i Ripollés, the ‘Vampire of Barcelona’: a serial killer of children, witch, sex worker, and brothel owner who lived in Barcelona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁸ Other than her (decidedly darker) connections to sex work, it is not entirely clear what Martí i Ripollés is doing in this scene, her stern and watchful eyes hanging over the trio as they fuck their way towards freedom. Still, one does not even need to dismiss the most gruesome aspects of Martí i Ripollés to see her affinities to a range of LaBruce’s characters, who can range from rapist neo-Nazi skinheads (No Skin off My Ass) to necrophiliacs (Otto; or Up with Dead People) and militant far-left terrorists (Raspberry Reich) (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Surrounded by Catalan independence tchotchkes, posters of Martí i Ripollés, and the phallic Torre Glòries through the window, Catalina (Nat Portnoy) proposes sexual liberation to Valentin (Valentin Braun) and Pierre (Bishop Black).

A generous reading of Martí i Ripollés sees her as strong, dominant, and sexually liberated in a time when women were rarely allowed such roles, which is precisely Catalina’s narrative thread throughout the film.⁹ In fact, the film describes Catalina as having been ‘drummed out of the #yotambién [#metoo] movement in Barcelona for sleeping too much with the enemy’ and as someone who ‘had lesbian affairs before, but now only had a taste for male pussy’ (LaBruce 2018e). Her sexual proclivities having been made obvious, Catalina becomes the dominant driver of the film’s plot and is cast as Pierre and Valentin’s sexual liberator. Before the film’s climactic three-way, in fact, she delivers a teasing monologue that frames the sex as a game of proving their love for her. With that, she offers the following question to the two men, who are seated on the bed while she paces slowly in front of them:

So the contest is: which one of you is willing to get fucked by the other while I watch? I mean, I can only really love a man – I mean, really, truly, deeply, utterly, completely love a man – who is not only willing to have sex with another man but who is also willing to get fucked in the ass by another man as well. (LaBruce 2018e)

The two men jump at the chance to prove their love to Catalina, and to show how willing they are to be penetrated by the other. They begin to kiss and strip each other as Catalina touches herself in the background. As they begin to fellate each other, she finally joins in. After a range of sexual positions – and when the trio is fully spent – Catalina reveals that the game has been a ruse to get the two men to finally have sex and reveal their feelings for each other. The final voiceover cheerfully concludes that the three ‘lived polyamorously ever after’ (LaBruce 2018e).

Conclusion

Through this study of LaBruce’s Spanish work, I hope to have underscored some of the complex discourses surrounding the director’s place-based obscenity-making. That is, and as I argue, LaBruce’s work acknowledges, references, and ultimately disturbs the political, social, and civil rules of sex in Spain, which is what makes this trio of films so interesting. What might this mean for similar explorations of national identity in transnational pornography? And how does LaBruce’s trio of films disturb the rules that govern mainstream gay and queer pornography?

These questions are not simply rhetorical. Clearly, the pornography that we engage with informs and governs cultural desires, viewing habits, and the types of sex that we seek out. In examining the connective ties that LaBruce’s films make between Spain and sex, I see a potential interference with spectatorial desires and habits in a way that can crack open sex itself – a provocation, a mischievous way of turning viewers on their heads. As evidenced here, such provocation is carried out in any number of ways: through guerrilla filmmaking, through the inclusion of women in gay porn, through the addition of uneasy forms of affect (sadness, anger, misandry) that we often consider to be parasexual, or through transcultural narratives that uproot the viewer from the known and the familiar.

Such work requires a spectator to experience porn in often unfamiliar and potentially uncomfortable ways, even if the product itself ultimately still delivers on the promise of a good time. The films discussed do this work while also having something to say about Spain and its sexualities in the present day, which is to say that they are Spanish in the same way that they are both pornography and something more – not as an either/or, but as a ‘yes, and … ’; not as a lack, but as a titillating and exciting promise of more, more, more.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Shaka McGlotten’s ‘Zombie Porn: Necropolitics, Sex, and Queer Socialities’ (2014) for an incisive analysis of LaBruce’s space-based work in Los Angeles.

2 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

3 The setting here is quite possibly an intentional homage to famed gay porn director Wakefield Poole’s (1972) Bijou, the majority of which is set inside the darkness of an adult cinema. With this reference to a classic of gay pornography, LaBruce both pays homage to an artistic predecessor and invites knowing audiences to think more about his own artistic differences and breaks from the genre. Many thanks to the astute eye of John Paul Stadler for this suggestion.

4 For the curious, both incidents are recounted (and defended by King) in ‘Allen King habla de sus polémicas, incluida la de “Cómo ser un buen pasivo”’ (Carrasco de Juanas 2018).

5 This is, of course, not unlike King’s scene partner Colby Keller, who has received waves of negative publicity in gay media outlets for voting for Donald Trump in 2016. Although a cursory search will no doubt suffice, see his 2017 commentary in The Advocate for more on his decision and his response to the backlash (Keller 2017).

6 There is much more to say about the casting decisions of these LaBruce films. Although I have intimated some of this here, a future study might consider the casting of King, Banks, and Keller, particularly when the latter two are not Spanish. That said, it should be noted that King and Banks are CockyBoys ‘exclusives’, which is to say that they have a contractual deal to only star in films from that production company, and Keller is a frequent actor with CockyBoys. It is at least clear that LaBruce chose from the CockyBoys ‘roster’ in the process of selecting his lead actors.

7 Construction began on the Segovia viaduct in 1872, and the bridge was completed and inaugurated on 13 October 1874. The mistake here in Mariano’s history lesson seems to be unintentional.

8 For more on the incredible life and times of Martí i Ripollés, the Vampire of Barcelona, see Costa (2018).

9 The inclusion of Martí i Ripollés also underscores Catalina’s lead role in the film, and indeed highlights the increasing role that women have played in LaBruce’s pornography, starting with the softcore heterosexual pairing in Raspberry Reich and continuing to the queerer inclusion of women in Flea Pit (LaBruce, dir. 2018b), Scotch Egg (LaBruce, dir. 2018c), and The Affairs of Lidia (LaBruce, dir. 2022). In a move that is likely influenced by his perception of gay porn’s conservatism, LaBruce’s more recent pornography clearly looks to break boundaries between what has been steadfastly considered queer, gay, or straight pornography. Casting actors that have primarily worked in one industry (gay, for example) to participate in bisexual or pansexual porn, showing women receiving sexual pleasure by watching men have sex, or swapping traditional sexual roles by having women penetrate men are all ways in which LaBruce has shaken up the sexual mores and boundaries of ‘gay’ pornography.