Inside Bruce LaBruces new movieThe Visitor, and the sex party that followed its premiere.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
But under all that fabric are leather chaps and harnesses, rubber body suits and frilly underwear.
A ball gag is dangling from one mans neck.
But theyd have to finish the 100-minute movie before the advertised sex party could begin.
The masses are huddled in the multilevel venue in Dalston for a movie premierecum-sex party.
The movie isThe Visitor,the latest film from 61-year-old Canadian queercore director Bruce LaBruce.
LaBruces films are ludicrously graphic, every bodily fluid imaginable pouring out onto the screen.
So I was surprised to encounter such a chaste crowd in Dalston.
His films, like psychoanalysis, simply take things people already desire and fear.
Sexual repression, if its not addressed, LaBruce tells me, it comes back in a monstrous form.
But Im glad LaBruce feels no impulse to make something palatable to the masses.
I want him to act as a bulwark against the flattening of queer sex.
I want him to be proof that even as we gain acceptance, we can still be uncanny.
He teamed up with the popular European fetish-party promoters Klub Verboten.
He tells me that this event feels like a moment of resistance in a world turned increasingly conservative.
The supposed political progress of the last several decades, he says, has been mostly overstated.
Were not asking to fuck in the streets.
You lose sight of the goals you initially had, LaBruce tells me.
You become the enemy within.
Youve shaken me to the core.
Thelast act ofThe Visitoris less horny.
Without the Visitor there to electrify him, he is unable to do it on his own.
Once you unleash that, then you just go on to the next revolution somewhere.
So, in that way, revolution is perpetual.
A few make out with each other.
And so we exit the small inner sanctum and head back to the dance floor.
I dance a bit, and look around unsuccessfully for someone to at least make out with.
And so mostly, I watched.
The Visitorwould premiere in New York City a few weeks later.
It was a frigid night, though.
I dont think anyone had sex.
