LOS ANGELES – JANUARY 31, 2012 – Due to a medical emergency, the upcoming performance of CocoRosie, scheduled for Saturday, February 11 at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, will be postponed. The new date is Saturday, June 9, 2012 at 8PM.

Sierra (Rosie) Casady underwent routine surgery and will need additional time for the full healing process to complete. Original tickets will be honored for the rescheduled date.

Any get well cards or well wishes can be mailed to:

Luckman Fine Arts Complex
Attn: CocoRosie
5151 State University Drive
Los Angeles, CA
90032

The colorful and theatrical CocoRosie captivated the Music Box Wednesday night.  Sierra Casady’s operatic and Bianca’s childlike and unique vox blended into a perfect concoction that was reminiscent of their recent show at the Orpheum.  Highlight of the night was the jaw-dropping solo by beatboxer Tez.  Also strong to the family were pianist Gael Rakotondrabe and Marc Lacaille on drums/percussion. Photos by Debi Del Grande

[View with PicLens]

Download: CocoRosie “Coconuts”

(from Coconuts, Plenty Of Junk Food EP available now from CocoRosie)

CocoRosie is Bianca and Sierra Casady and any collaborators who get caught in nearby clouds. They have released a special tour-only EP this summer and Bianca speaks now about Moondog, meditation and getting misquoted in the worst possible place. This interview by Ayse Arf.

There’s a pretty intense mythology built up around you guys. It seems like people speak of you as though you travel on glitter and dragonfly wings. I was wondering if that affects your daily life at all.
Bianca Casady (vocals/percussion): Not really. I find it more with journalists who are like in a romantic dream before we get talking—not so much just regular people. And sometimes I don’t like the sort of girlishness that’s also attached to our magical world. It kind of irks me sometimes that people are twisting it, and it’s not sexualizing but feminizing it in a way—to like make it more understandable to them.
Making it cutesy?
Bianca Casady: Cute or just that type of romance.
Who would be your ideal collaborators—alive or dead—in any kind of artistic field?
Bianca Casady: Do you know a guy named Moondog? Moondog maybe. There’s a band called Aventura. There’s an Algerian band—we haven’t been able to confirm that it’s Algerian. They’re called Kamikaz and they’re like a rap group from the early ’90s. We don’t know if they still exist. We’re kind of on the search for them, and really really love them. Somebody we met in Paris when we lived in the North African district gave us a tape that was like a taped tape of a taped tape kind of tape—with nothing written on it or anything—and just told us the name. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever heard of them. Moondog is like a magical dude. I think he was even homeless—really experimental, a lot of homemade instruments. I think like Philip Glass and people like that he probably merged with a little bit, but he is a weird folk singer, and when people who’ve never heard him hear him they think he’s Brazilian or something. It’s like not American-sounding rhythms or anything. He lived in New York a lot of the time. He dressed really peculiarly with like horns and stuff. He had a totally otherworldly fashion, but it was all handmade and really weird in the context of the city. I’m sure you’ll find a lot on him really easily. .
I was really intrigued by the title of one of your shows. I was wondering what you consider to be ‘Cosmic Willingness.’
Bianca Casady: It refers a lot to the creative process and the idea that true creativity is all automatism, which is just a fancy word for doing anything automatic. Stream of consciousness writing is the most accessible way to look at that, but I take that and apply it to all creative process. So cosmic willingness is like the willingness to be available for that type of automatic creativity. It doesn’t have to include the idea that it’s coming from outside of you, but it partially agrees with the idea of being a vessel for something that’s coming from beyond you.
Do you think someone could change the way they are to become more cosmically willing?
Bianca Casady: Definitely. They definitely could change that. It’s similar to meditation, actually—how for some people it’s automatic and they know how to meditate and for other people it takes a lot of practice. It’s no different from meditation, actually, but instead of just emptying your mind or allowing it to just run on automatic and detach from it and watch it—instead of just watching it, you document it. So it manifests into some art form that is lasting. It materializes that side of your own mind. So yes, I think you can just practice.
So art then becomes sort of like a scrapbook of your meditative journeys.
Bianca Casady: Definitely. That’s the cosmic aspect of it. I think it’s really about trying to experience the soul. Trying to bring like soul life up to the same level as our material life, or above. Whereas a lot of people are just existing with the material life—it takes sort of precedence over everything else.
When you started recording La Maison, I know your sister was studying opera, but you didn’t seem to really have any ambitions to get into music. Was there any hesitation when Touch and Go was pursuing you?
Bianca Casady: Not at first because I don’t see into the future very well and I was really in the moment. So we just jumped on that rollercoaster. I did hit a point where a significant amount of time had passed and I realized this was the longest I had ever worked on one project, and it definitely freaked me out for a long time. I thought it was really dangerous. It was like if you settle in the suburbs when you’re used to nomadic life, it’s really scary. It can shake your whole constitution. But I kind of matured through that anxiety and started to spread out within this project instead of letting it be a box for me because it’s music.
What do you mean by spreading out?
Bianca Casady: Continuing my personal identity exploration and, you know—that corresponds to the writing in our music and the vocals in the music and allowing those characters to live out on stage as well instead of being segregated. That was sort of my first instinct, you know—it’s just kind of like keep everything segregated, but it’s just definitions. They can really fuck you up. Or you can disempower them just by choice. You get that a lot as a musician with people asking you to define your music and it’s not remotely inspiring. None of the definition process is inspiring for artists, I don’t think.
So why do you think there’s such an instinct to do it?
Bianca Casady: That’s a good question. People think it’s going to be, like, juicier somehow. I don’t see how it’s any juicier—just talking about media and trying to make it interesting. I think definitions are really not interesting, so I ask the same question. It’s kind of condescending for me to say that it’s because people want to understand and they’re so narrow-minded that they really need definitions to prop themselves up.
There are so many definitions of you guys and so many adjectives that people use to try to describe you. It’s just kind of entertaining.
Bianca Casady: I think the ‘freak’ thing is really surprising. Maybe I’m wrong but has there ever been a movement in painting that was defined by the words ‘freak’ or ‘weird’? Or ‘dance’? What if there was a type of modern dance that was like ‘Freak Modern’? I mean, you can’t get freakier than modern dance. It’s not going to be ‘Almost Freak.’ When did music become so conservative? Is it because there’s a commercial industry attached to it? I don’t know. I think maybe that’s it.
I think once it got to the point where it needed to be mass-marketed, people became afraid of really strongly expressive things. When you listen to old blues recordings and things like that, that’s pretty freaky, too.
Bianca Casady: It’s weird because we talk about the music industry the same way we talk about the government—like it has absolutely nothing to do with us; like it doesn’t represent us—but that’s weird because if we’re musicians or we’re a part of the music world, unlike maybe the fact that we’re really not related to the government . . . So it’s weird to talk about it like it’s something that is just the way it is and we can’t do anything about it. I get kind of annoyed with that—people thinking that you can’t be taken seriously unless you’re commercially successful with music.
I feel like that’s just because of the size of the thing. You might as well be talking about another planet when you’re talking about your label versus like Miley Cyrus’ label.
Bianca Casady: Yeah, but what about the fact that it’s really falling apart? As an artist I’ve looked at it as a big window is really opening up. Instead of thinking that our career is over or something I’m looking at completely the opposite—it’s going to be turned on its head. I mean that’s what the Internet has been doing to lots of industries. Like to TV. TV isn’t the same anymore because you don’t have to get your information on TV. I feel like every media-related industry is experiencing the same kind of upheaval right now because they all tried to either ignore the Internet as long as possible or were at a loss for what to do with it, and now they’re suffering because they have to change instead of confronting the change openly when it first started. I just think if we talk about the record industry like some kind of a monster, the fact that the monster is suffering could only benefit people, you know?
Well, lead the way.
Bianca Casady: I don’t actually believe in most of the stuff I’m saying. It’s just stuff I’m curious about. It’s all up for discussion I think. I think that live music can absolutely never die. I feel like that’s where we gotta focus, even if it’s not what we’re always up for. It feels like this timeless activity—the fact that people are paying and going to watch live music happen,I don’t know, I think it’s pretty amazing. So far, the advancement of technology hasn’t been able to take that away. The only way is the sort of, you know, synthetic music—but that’s the next discussion I guess. Like not ever having manual rhythm and not having natural voice. That’s one way, perhaps, that it could get away from actually being live. But I think it’s gotten so extreme that acoustic music and natural percussion is just going to come back really out of necessity.
That’s why people love live music—because it is a religious bodily experience.
Bianca Casady: Yep.
Wikipedia claims that you were—and I’m quoting here—‘known to attend controversially ‘ironic,’ white-held, ‘Kill Whitey’ parties in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.’
Bianca Casady: Did you say ‘white hell?’ Oh, ‘white-held,’ I get it. I thought it was ‘white hell.’ I thought that was pretty cool. So what do you want to know? It’s so stupid. I barely want to give it any intellectual airplay. The irony just keeps on going and going and going, because like, the motive for the article that generated enough talk to get it on Wikipedia is really twisted and coming from what I see as a sort of defect in a liberal arts education that particularly attacks white kids. I feel like some white people that haven’t come to terms with some white guilt and discomfort around race subjects started little militant armies to go out and try to find racism in situations that are actually really challenging racism. It’s like the fliers, the name, they were all like offensive and kind of perpetuating racism but in a very ‘on the table’ kind of way, which for me is what really needs to happen in order to really deal with racism and a lot of other things. So there are a lot of people that are so afraid—so afraid of their own racism that they want to steer clear of it. Those parties for me were actually more of a gay party—a gay party that was really ethnically diverse and, I don’t know, it just made some people uncomfortable. They didn’t feel like they could participate because they were scared that it would make them racist or something because it was really challenging these concepts of being politically correct, which doesn’t really force people to look deeper into the issues. All the people that started it are actually really close friends of mine. It wasn’t like I was just really some outsider to that scene, actually. It’s like my very close community in New York, of people that are all doing such radical stuff. It spawned like a big, ongoing thing. You can find a lot of talk about how I’m a racist. I got a lot of flak for being misquoted in The Washington Post. That’s all I got flak for. People like around the country who saw the blurb in The Washington Post and don’t actually know. They’ve never been to the club. They don’t live in New York. They don’t actually know the people that threw the party. They have no background on this queer and very colorful community. What I find weird though is just . . . I would expect this type of person with this kind of education to challenge media. I thought that was like old news, like that the newspaper is propaganda and so on. So all the articles that they wrote are just based on a quote in The Washington Post. That’s all it’s based on. These people aren’t lazy. They go out of their way to write this stuff up on their personal feminist blogs. These aren’t like real journalists, so people are going out of their way to perpetuate stuff out of the worst—like known to be one of the worst—propagating newspapers.
What do you have to say in response to all of it in one sentence?
Bianca Casady: ‘I hate you,’ which is what I ended up saying a few times. I got really out of control and wrote back on the blogs. You have to say who you are and I was like, ‘Bianca Casady. I fucking hate you.’ It’s like I went to go and try to say something intelligent and try to explain things to them and I was like, ‘I can’t. I can’t talk to these people.’ There’s something really wrong with these people. So then I just felt like embarrassing myself you know, and publicly stating that I hate them.
Was that the end of it? Did you keep track of the responses?
Bianca Casady: The one or two places I checked, no one ever responded to me. It’s as if it never happened. I wish they would have said something insulting back to me, like, ‘Whoa! She’s really stupid.’ They didn’t give me that satisfaction.

COCOROSIE WITH KATIE STELMANIS ON MON., SEPT. 21, AT THE HENRY FONDA THEATER, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8PM / $20 / ALL AGES. HENRYFONDATHEATER.COM. VISIT COCOROSIE AT COCOROSIELAND.COM OR ON MSYPACE AT MYSPACE.COM/COCOROSIE.

L.A. RECORD photographer Paul Rodriguez sends this behind-the-scenes video documenting the Bruce LaBruce photo shoot for our July 2009 issue. Read the interview here.

Bruce LaBruce is ready to leave the blood behind but not without one final splatter. A self-described “reluctant pornographer,” Bruce’s films feature as many heart-wrenchingly romantic moments as they do scenes of explicit and extreme sex. For every gut- or stump-fuck, there is a glance or a line so scathingly heartfelt I can’t help but think Bruce LaBruce’s sincerity is his most dangerous weapon. This interview by Drew Denny and video of the shoot by Paul Rodriguez here.

I just read an interview with you in Butt magazine!
Oh yeah—I’ve worked with them a lot. I photographed Ryan McGinley for the cover, and then I wrote the intro to the Butt Book, which is a big thick compilation of the first 15 issues.
I’d love to read that! But we should talk about your show—
It’s completely out of control at this point—
You still have a whole day!
It’s called Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project. It was time for me to have a solo show, and I’d been doing a lot of stuff with zombies and blood over the past—well, since 2002, I guess. I think I’m going to leave behind all the blood and gore after this, but I thought I’d go out in a big explosion. The idea was to make—as an art project—a hardcore zombie splatter porn film. Because splatter and porn—it’s been done, though I’m not sure if there’s been a gay splatter porn. This idea of intersecting the gore and splatter genre—and horror—with porn really intrigues me because of these new ‘torture porn’ movies as they call them, which aren’t really porn but they operate similarly to porn in many ways. And they’re constructed the same way in terms of these narratives which build to orgasmic moments in which people either have sex or get murdered or end up emitting large quantities of fluid. The original idea was to make an actual gay splatter porn for the opening, but we realized we wouldn’t have time to pull it off, so I decided to make it more like a work in progress, and I’m actually shooting it here in August. The star of the show is Francois Sagat, the famous porn star and model. He’s in town, and I’ve been meeting with him and he’s going to be doing a live performance tomorrow with the guy who’s doing the special effects—Joe Castro. We’re experimenting with Francois’ look so we made a prototype for canine teeth and Joe’s going to airbrush him live. I also have five or six photographs that are examples of the bloody work I’ve done over the past few years with models and in movies.
A few of your photos remind me of the Abu Ghraib images.
That was a big inspiration for a lot of people. They were such strong, horrible images. Abu Ghraib was like a horror movie come to life, and that’s what a lot of my work has been lately in terms of the horror stuff—I do these Polaroid performances in which I do an installation then make it look like it’s some sort of abduction scenario or terrorist scenario where someone’s being tortured. Especially when Al Qaeda was at it’s height in terms of visibility, you’d see these videos where they were about to decapitate someone. It was all over the news, and we got accustomed to these scenarios. So I re-enact them but in a kind of gay way. There’s always an undercurrent of homosexuality in these things—like ‘mujahadeen’ has become slang for ‘gay’ or ‘faggot’ in Iraq, and they actually had this TV show where they would find terrorists—it was like a terrorist of the week show—they’d find a terrorist and put him on TV and humiliate him. They’d call him a faggot and say he was homosexual. It’s the idea that people are so used to passively accepting these violent images, so I like to give the public a chance to participate in these kinds of set ups—like one of those violent videos. It’s very cathartic. There’s always a vibe—it surprises me—the vibe is always more therapeutic then negative.
I was definitely surprised by that—Otto is the most recent work of yours that I’ve seen, but Hustler White is still my favorite.
I just saw Tony Ward last night at Diamond Dogs—Brian Rabin’s club—and I hadn’t seen him since we toured with the film in ‘96. He looked exactly the same—he’s so beautiful.
One of the most wonderful things about Hustler White, for me, was how it blurred the line between narrative filmmaking and documentary—you used non-actors and the sex was real. Now you’re re-creating in the public world situations from the media and the war. What’s the idea behind your combination of fiction and documentary?
My films have always—even from my short experimental films that I made in the late ‘80s when I was in the punk scene—they’ve always had a documentary element to them, and I did fanzines and stuff. It was all just taking pictures of friends or Super 8 movies of friends and incorporating them into a narrative or inventing stuff that’s fictionalized. But there’s always a core concept of documenting the scene that I was in. I think I’ve kept that process. Although with Otto, it’s obviously the biggest budget that I’ve had and the most ambitious film I’ve made. I think it’s almost completely fictionalized, although I still found the actor who played Otto on Myspace, and I used Katharina who played Medea—Katharina was a friend I met in Berlin who happened to be a woman filmmaker who made a documentary about horror film. So I still base characters on people I know.
As I watched Otto, I was surprised by how different it was from your other work—until the love scene. When Otto’s remembering his lover, he says he smelled of chlorine then you cut to that shot of them falling into the pool. You do love really well! That moment recalled the sincerity and realism I appreciated in your earlier work.
I always throw in the romance, especially when dealing with a lot of extreme subject matter. Like in Hustler White there’s a lot of sexual torture—or sexual fetish and amputee sex and that kind of stuff. First of all, I think that stuff is really corny if you’re too serious about it. Secondly, I think it’s important for people to know that there are real people with normal emotions participating in a lot of these extreme sexual fetishes all the time—so they’re just really average people. Thirdly, it’s just an unexpected representation. You don’t expect to see these kinds of people in a romantic way or with romantic impulses. In Otto, part of the whole point was a reaction to this new wave of torture porn which is so brutal and non-romantic and really cynical.
I appreciate that you take what is considered ‘subversive’ or ‘extreme’—people and behaviors that are either not represented at all or are exploited to create spectacle—and depict it casually, with a certain amount of respect and even grace. Hustler White exemplifies that sort of representation for me, which is impressive because at that time in the ‘90s, there were all those filmmakers—like Tarantino and his ‘gimp’—exploiting such people and behaviors, using them as a gimmick—
Unfortunately at that time, Tarantino represented the zeitgeist—it happened some time in the ‘90s—where it became a politically incorrect posture… this kind of irony through which you could be misogynistic or you could be homophobic but you were laughing—like it’s an inside joke—but you still do it. You get away with it. It’s still nasty. Those things became acceptable again in a weird way. That’s why I think being sincere almost became politically incorrect. My films—despite the extreme subject matter—there’s always a sincerity behind them.
That’s what shocks people.
A lot of people don’t get it. They think, ‘Oh, he made a movie where one guy fucks the other guy in a hole in his stomach, so he can’t possibly have any kind of romantic ideas.’ Actually, the gut-fucking scene is in a film within the film—which is very romantic. It’s about these two rebel zombies who are on a crusade together, and they’re boyfriends. It’s very romantic.
You mentioned your involvement with the punk scene in the late ‘80s—I’ve always really enjoyed your soundtracks, and I was wondering what your relationship is with these musicians. How do you curate your soundtracks?
For the early ones, I either used music by people I knew, or I would use obscure soundtrack music from the ‘60s and ‘70s and mix it up with really obscure punk music. For my first couple of films, I don’t have a lot of music clearances which is why they’re so hard to get a hold of—people are really reluctant to release them. I’ve done that with all my films. My last two—Raspberry Reich and Otto—I got a lot of music through people I know or friends of friends. With Otto in particular—that was sort of at the height of the popularity of Myspace—I sent out word that I was looking for music for a melancholy gay zombie movie, and I got flooded with so many people saying they’d donate the music for free just in exchange for credit. I ended up with 23 hours of material, and I tried to use as much as I could. We ended up using 55 tracks by 27 different artists. Most of it was for free. I got Antony and the Johnsons and Cocorosie because of my friend Kembra Pfahler who has a cameo in the film—
Who does she play?
She’s in the dance scene. In the DVD extras, there’s a short film of Medea’s that got cut out of the film—it’s called Messy in the Afternoon… it’s a take off Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and Kembra features very prominently in that.
You mentioned Raspberry Reich, and I’d like to talk about that—it seems to be your most overtly political film. I’ve read a few interviews in which you discuss how subversive political movements become co-opted by capitalist society then turned into empty signifiers which can be filled by whatever content the market provides—Che Guevara t-shirts and the like.
That certainly came back to bite us in the ass because we got sued by the estate of Korda, the photographer who shot the famous image of Che Guevara—
Everybody else uses that image!
I know! Korda was Che’s personal photographer for ten years. He sued us for a million dollars Canadian for using the image without permission. It was a long protracted thing—we had to go to court, and the suit was launched in France. We had a lawyer in France to deal with it. We ended up having the damages reduced to eight or ten thousand but we had to pay court costs. Technically, we’re not even supposed to show the film anymore. We basically lost. But my American distributor wasn’t named in the suit so I think we’re still distributing it here. The European version had the image right on the box. But they definitely watched the whole thing. The subpoena was fifty pages long—they thought the film defiled the image. There’s so much irony involved because the film is anti-capitalist. It’s about the way capitalism exploits not only Che Guevara but radicalism and terrorism and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. You can read about it—I just posted an article I wrote about it for Black Book. That’s what the film is about—the commodification of radical imagery and the way it’s made fashionable. It’s also about left-wing idealism—how it can turn into dogmatism, and it can also quickly switch into becoming the very thing to which it stands opposed. These left-wing radical groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang start out with lofty ideals about improving the world and equality and class and fighting corporate control, but then they become completely ethically and morally bankrupt when they start killing people. Of course it’s more complicated than that because they consider themselves at war, and the rules of war are different from normal law. But one of the themes that runs through my films is the idea of the oppressed becoming the oppressor and about not practicing what you preach. When I went to university and graduate school, I had a lot of professors who spouted a lot of extreme anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist rhetoric yet they were in monogamous marriages—
Working in institutions—
And living in nice houses!
What did you study?
I was a film undergrad and then I got an MFA in basically film theory and social and political theory.
I wanted to ask you who you’re reading—in terms of philosophy—because your dialogue and those t-shirts from Raspberry Reich—
Put your Marxism where your mouth is! For Raspberry Reich, I went through all my old notes from university. I steal a lot from Marcuse, and I was always into the Frankfurt School. In Raspberry Reich I also steal from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life and the Situationists. I’m much more into that practical enterprise of dealing with realpolitik rather than the French Post-Structuralists—
I’m reading Deleuze now—
I should’ve read more of that actually. I took a course called Psychoanalysis in Feminism, and I had to read all of Lacan translated into English—that was what almost killed me.
Let’s get back to your show—if I’m picturing the image right, there’s a flag in the background of one of the photos. Since 9-11, there’s been a void in art that uses that kind of imagery for critical purposes—
Raspberry Reich was a response to what happened to the left in America after 9-11 because the left was silenced. Castrated really. It was amazing—even now people are so quick to call someone a socialist or a communist —like Obama—that’s why in Raspberry Reich people are constantly spouting leftist rhetoric, and the text is flashing across the screen. I wanted to bombard the audience with that imagery and ideology. In terms of the flag, that was from a performance piece that I did in London a few weeks ago—Ron Athey and Lee Adams curated a performance spectacle called ‘Visions of Excess.’ They curated a bunch of international performance artists and it was in the Shunt Vaults under the London Bridge—it’s like a dungeon. It’s a huge space. My piece was an IRA zombie concept—it’s the Irish flag and the British flag. An IRA zombie being tortured by British zombies—you know, the IRA coming back from the dead. It was also this idea of the war going on in Northern Ireland. It seems to have gone away but there were a couple incidents when it was coming back. The idea that war and violence become fetishized not only by the media but by the participants and the whole military aspect becoming very aesthetic and sexy—even for the participants—so there is a certain romance to it as well. There were a couple people who were shocked because it was so directly political. He’s standing in front of the Irish flag. A zombie. Covered in blood. Licking his gun. Also, he’s got a hard-on. So it’s basically terrorist porn!
When you discuss the politics of your films, how much do you concern yourself with gender politics and the politics of sexuality—the decision to work almost exclusively with male homosexuals, for example?
After my first feature—I had been politically correct in terms of my representation of sexuality. It’s partly because of my academic training. I had a couple friends who de-programmed me. They said, ‘You’re policing your imagery. It’s politically correct.’ So I started trying to deal with gender in a much looser way—in Super 8 1/2, Richard Kern, the famous photographer, was in a wig with a strap-on dildo fucking a woman—which was kind of an inside joke because people consider him misogynist. So it was kind of a mind fuck. With Hustler White, we decided to have not a single woman in the movie—partly as an expressionistic thing wherein this fantasy world of johns and hustlers, they are living in this utopian world where they don’t have to deal with women. Then I often have lesbian characters like in Super 8 1/2 and in Otto. I haven’t done as much with the transgendered as I would like. I did a photo series with a pre-op transsexual in Toronto named Nina Arsenault. I don’t know if you’ve seen the photos, but they’re quite extreme because she actually allowed me to photograph her penis which had never been photographed before. She just had one of her breast implants taken out because there was a problem, so there was a scar and just one big breast—and she was covered in blood and carrying a gun. So it was a take on gender terrorism. I’m totally into that. In terms of politics and the gay thing, I always try to carry on that tradition of the gay avant-garde which is going back to Warhol and Morrissey, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Curt McDowell, and John Waters—because I think it’s necessary and I think it’s what sets homosexuals apart—that kind of experimentation and celebration of difference. In terms of more straightforward politics, my husband is Cuban. He grew up in Cuba and didn’t leave until he was in his early 30s—so he makes fun of me for my political posturing. I’m kind of a Marxist sympathizer, and I’m anti-capitalist and anti-corporate which came from my punk training… I did grow up below the poverty line on a small farm, but compared to what was going on in Cuba or in a third world country, I was living an incredibly privileged life. He’s lived the revolution and seen how the revolution went sour, so he’s a good reality check for me.
How long have you two been together?
We’ve been together for four years, married for two years.
Considering the work that you do, isn’t it difficult to be married?
It’s not a monogamous relationship—it’s an open relationship.
Oh, much better—I was shocked!
I’m not into the institution of marriage but he’s Cuban, and I’ve sponsored him for citizenship—so it was done for those reasons. Strangely, it actually made our relationship stronger. But I never would have done it without the immigration angle.
A friend of mine shot porn for a while and says it ruined her sex life—does it affect your sex life?
I make it so rarely. I’m more like an artist who works in porn. I’ve really only made two movies for actual porn companies. Most of my films do have sexually explicit content but I certainly don’t work in the industry so it’s not-—like I know people, friends who are porn stars and directors, who make forty to fifty films a year so they’re constantly saturated with it. It’s like a fatigue—sexual fatigue. Also, it’s not glamorous shooting porn. That’s what I gathered when I made my first industry porn which is Skin Gang. It’s not glamorous—it’s very contrived. The guys are certainly hot and sexy, but they are professionals and they’re doing their job. They take their Viagra, and they have to insert the cock when they’re told to and have to hold it there and keep it hard and turn cheek towards the camera and hold in an awkward position for a long period of time. And then they’ll have anal leakage and someone has to come wipe it up. So it’s not that sexy to shoot—to make. The whole idea is to present this illusion of this seamless fantasy of sexual perfection that climaxes in a fountain of ejaculation. We all know that real sex doesn’t often happen that way.
Does that label bother you—’pornographer’? Hustler White, for me, is an art film in which the sex is real rather than simulated.
Right, but then I did actually make films for porn companies. Skin Gang was nominated for nine Gay Adult Video Awards. Also I wrote a memoir in the late ‘90s called The Reluctant Pornographer. But, yeah, I was just talking to somebody about that the other day. There is a glass ceiling for pornographers. There’s a lot of hypocrisy where people kind of look down—even if they are an avid consumer of porn—when they meet someone who works in porn. I was out with a porn star last night, and he was saying how tired he is of people coming up to him and asking him how big his cock is and taking these kinds of liberties. I experienced that after I made my first two films, and I was having sex in the film. There’s a certain line that you cross which I call the ‘corn-hole line’—once you’ve been penetrated, people look at you differently. They assume you’re immoral, amoral or unethical. I always say—you actually need a very strong moral compass to navigate the porn world because there’s a lot of exploitation that does go on, and there are a lot of damaged people and sexually abused people. So you have to be careful not to be exploitative and to be really responsible for what you’re doing.
Considering the amount of exploitation involved in mainstream filmmaking, this all seems very hypocritical.
The hypocrisy of it is really sad. That’s why I’m making this hardcore splatter zombie movie. The hypocrisy that you can show the most disgusting, over-the-top, gory torture—women being tortured and mutilated—and yet you can’t show two people having sex? If an alien came down from another planet and saw that phenomenon, they would be so disgusted.
Violence—OK. Naked people—not OK?
Right.
I’ve heard you say you incorporate all types of sex in order to depict all types of fantasies that real people have—is there a limit to what you’ll represent?
For one thing, I think porn in general is—it’s the collective unconscious. It allows people to work out their most extreme and most politically incorrect fantasies, which is what I really explored in Skin Flick—which was racially based fantasies of domination and submission and rape. It was kind of a heavy movie. I had a lot of gay black guys contact me on the internet—even though there’s a black man raped by white power skin heads—who were totally turned on by that scene. Then in Hustler White, the white character is gang banged by the black gang. I think anything is fair game. That’s what the function of art should be—to explore those kinds of things. In terms of where else there is to go? Well, I’m not really talking about my next film. I’m working on the script for a larger movie—the title is Gerontophilia—so you can draw your own conclusions.

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