“Shock
the middle class
Take it up your punk rock ass!” - Screeching
Weasel.
As I have
mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I used to write for an alternative
cinema magazine called Film Threat, and its early 90s spin off, The
Film Threat Video Guide. I discovered Film Threat in 1987 at the
long-gone Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh. The mag, one of the first indie film journals of its kind (coming after The Underground Film Bulletin from New York), was a real underground and
indie film education for me, and I used to eagerly lap up each new
issue when it came out.
In the
late 80s, I was fascinated by articles about the Cinema of
Transgression, an early-to-late-80s New York spiky, punky underground
film movement. It was a self-destructive loose film collective, where
various angsty, arty, black-clad, drug-guzzling extremists would pool
their resources and make film mocking and hating Reagan's America.
Reading about them in Film Threat, names like Nick Zedd, Richard
Kern, JG Thirlwell, Lydia Lunch, Tommy Turner, Joe Coleman, Rockets
Redglare, and more, all became legendary to me.
I really, really wanted to see their mad-sounding films. But, of course, in 80s Scotland this stuff was literally impossible to come by, having had zero distribution over here, and sending away to America for them would have been cost-prohibitive at that time to me as an impoverished teenager. I would not only have had to send to America for them, risking them being stopped by UK customs, but I would have had to have had them converted from NTSC, the stateside video format, to PAL, the UK format. It just wasn't for happening, so I continued to read and wonder about them.
In August 1988, when I was 18, my uncle Gary and I attended a horror film festival called Shock Around The Clock at the now-tragically-defunct grindhouse Scala Cinema in King's Cross. Standing in the queue outside, a guy was handing out lists of films for trade, and handed me one; he would later tell me he had mistaken me for a friend of his, or he wouldn't have even given me a swaps list in the first place.
But what a mistake that turned out to be!
I took the list back up to Scotland and shared it with my pal Scanny. He had two video recorders, copying films from his small original VHS horror films collection. We started trading illegal or uncut or rare films (or all three together) with Baron, our inadvertent London contact, and then with others from round the UK, when we got their lists in fanzines or from other contacts.
Scanny became a big Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento buff; I was much more into weird, trashy one-offs like For Your Height Only (a 2'9” Filipino midget James Bond satire), GBH (a 1983 shot-on-video gangster film starring the inimitable Renaissance Man Cliff Twemlow and a load of his pals) and Mad Foxes (Swiss-German biker sleaze, one of the funniest and stupidest and sickest films ever made) and such. My tastes in horror and exploitation really ran to stuff like Suffer, Little Children and Invitation To Hell and Cannibal Campout, 80s shot-on-video totally absurd, worthless shite. It was really fun to track down random shit round the UK, or occasionally mainland Europe or even the USA (very rare, for the reasons noted above), and occasionally attend horror film fests to cheer on each new gory death in the films shown as we got drunk out of our minds. Nekromantik was my big film back then, after seeing it at SATC 2, but that's a whole other obsessive story.
One day, probably round 1989, we found the holy grail on somebody's list, and Scanny, who had become a rabid, obsessive collector and tape trader, got me a tape with loads of Cinema of Transgression stuff in it. I was in high hog heaven, finally getting to see some of the films that had been bugging the shit out of me for the previous couple of years. They were exactly what I expected: rude, crude, experimental (playing with gender decades before the youngstars now moaning on constantly about it), sexual (often using hardcore footage), gory, nihilistic, violent, funny, disturbed, disturbing, transgressive, sick, shite...it was all there and more.
I loved it, even if the quality of the wild films varied wildly, and watching them on a grainy, blurry several-generations-down bootleg really added to the whole experience. We sat in Scanny's bedroom in Skinflats (small village outside Falkirk) and watched stuff like Fingered (an incredible, sick, funny, troubling film, often picketed by feminists at screenings – for obvious reasons, really, if you've ever seen it) and Submit To Me and Submit To Me Now, The Right Side Of My Brain, Police State and The Manhattan Love Suicides and such.
For Scotland at that time (even right now, if we're being honest; these films are still a minority interest, though far more widely known now), this was ultra-rare, and myself and a few friends (Davy, Richey, Fraser) were the only people in Falkirk into this sort of extreme music and movies and books. It was good to feel and be different from the football-and-cars-obsessed guys in this post-industrial town. Anyway, we finished watching the Cinema of Transgression tape, and Scanny turned to me, shaking his head sadly:
“Graham, I never knew you were a pervert.” (I just laughed out loud as I typed that)
Yep, that was the absolute tone and tenor of the obscure-splatter-film-loving times, breaking the law and not bowing down to the British Board of Film Classification and reading horror and weird film zines like Viscera View (mine and Scanny's own one-off photocopied magnum opus epic) and Neros and The Last Movie Zine and Samhain (which I wrote for; got a pull quote on the quad poster from my 1989 review for them of Santa Sangre by Alexandro Jodorowsky, a thrill to this day) and In The Flesh and Sludgefeast and such. I was also writing for splatter zine Deep Red, and Film Threat by this point, so was having the absolute obscure-film-writing-and-watching time of my life.
Anyway, fast forward to 1995. I had read an interview in 1994 with a gay Canadian filmmaker called Bruce LaBruce in the Film Threat Video Guide, and the monochrome film it was promoting, Super 8 ½, sounded interesting. The title was a play on 8 1/2 by Fellini, with the LaBruce film being about the dirty downfall of an underground Warhol-like filmmaker. One of the things it was satirically riffing on was the Cinema of Transgression body of work, which made it doubly appealing to me. I have never been homophobic (it's a ludicrous notion at best, and a lot of my fave art has been done by The Gays) and have an obscure, artyfarty side I normally keep (hardly) hidden, but I have always loved the gay (I am hetero) waspish vicious sense of humour (probably comes from liking Kenny Everett as a kid) and this sounded right up my angry hateful-humour alley.
I learned that the film was having a rare Scottish outing at Glasgay, some now-defunct homosexual arts festival I had never heard of before, and roped two of my friends into going to see it with me, David and Gary (the Gary here is not my uncle, and these are not their real names)(oh, alright, they are). We jumped into David's car and motorvated through to Glasgow from Falkirk. We had been drinking heavily the night before, and were all slightly under the weather, but, you know, this was happening anyway, anything for art!
We found the building the screening was in, noting that there was a chipper downstairs, which would do us after the film was finished and our slightly nauseated morning-after appetites might have come back a wee bit more. This was not a cinema, it was just a building somewhere in Glasgow city centre, as I recall. We paid at the front door and went in. There were probably round 30 or 40 people sitting in individual plastic chairs that had just been dotted round the room in rough rows, and we found three chairs together and sat down. The film was being projected by a video projector (god, remember those! It's like thinking about the Middle Ages!) onto either a white wall, or a video projector, can't quite remember, but it was functional and fine. We were probably the only straight folk there, I mused, but that was fine too.
The room darkened. The film started. It was an entertaining enough anti-epic, shot on scratchy, grainy, porny film stock, about a hardcore porn star-director and his descent into an insane asylum. I was chuckling away at the obscure film references, being the elitist obscure film swine that I was (still am, to a certain degree, but it was easy to feel cutting edge in Falkirk when you knew about this stuff), when a scene in a gym came on. There was a black guy lifting weights on a bench. LaBruce came in, pulled the guy's shorts down...
...and started sucking his dick. In graphic close-up.
I had not known this film was going to have hardcore gay sex in it! The fucking interview never mentioned that part!
I sat, confused, and watched the director guzzle the black pudding. It was not exciting. I didn't feel anything much; certainly no arousal. It was just an abstract curiosity, something I had never seen before in a film. I mean, I had seen hetero cocksucking in a film before, of course, and had my cock sucked myself, but just never seen the gay variety. Didn't bother me. Shrug. I heard a slight boaking sound from my right. Gary, who was sitting there on the aisle, clasped his hand to his mouth (I am laughing as I write this), jumped up and ran frenziedly to the toilet, disappearing from view. I guess the killer combo of gay fellatio and his hangover had gotten the best of him!
Gary gamely came back in, eventually, and we watched the rest of the film. I quite enjoyed it for what it was, and Gary's emetic reaction had added to the whole comedic surreality of the thing. I apologised for the whole thing, and, denying any fore(skin)knowledge of hardcore sexual elements, we went downstairs to the chipper where I got a smoked sausage and chomped on it as I eyed a beautiful young blonde with glasses (personal fetish at the time) in a hairdresser's next door to psychologically readjust from the whole strange and hilarious experience.
We got in the car, drove back through to Falkirk, and probably started drinking, as we were wont to do back then a lot. Nothing was ever said, and it wasn't like I was regarded as being gay or anything after that. Falkirk was a horribly homophobic town, and I do hope it's gotten better for gay people since then; certainly can't have gotten any worse. I remember once I gave a loan of the Screeching Weasel 7” Pervo-Devo EP to a pal. The cover has Bruce LaBruce pretending to give Ben Weasel, the band singer (who has a cameo in Super 8 1/2; I have LaBruce's book Ride, Queer, Ride! where he talks about this), a blowjob, and the main song I Wanna Be A Homosexual is an answer to the hilarious and excellent song I Don't Wanna Be A Homosexual by the punk band Sloppy Seconds. My pal left it behind the bar in Elliott's, a now-gone Falkirk pub down by Grahamston Station. I went to pick it up and asked the barmaid for it. “Is that the one with the disgusting cover?” she sneered, tongue dripping cold homophobic poison. I nodded and smiled, and she got it for me. Fuck was it to do with her?
Sure that set a few tongues wagging, but I didn't care back then, or even now; I was just into my own obscure shit, and always will be. Certainly beat being into football. Talk about homoerotic! 23 grown men (if you include the ref) chasing a leather bag filled with air round a pitch for 90 minutes, then showering with each other! Essence of homosexuality! I have never understood the whole “listen to or read or watch stuff by a gay artist and you're gay” idea. I mean, shit, that means if you listen to or read and see something artistic done by the opposite sex, you would change sex! Laughable. I was just into my own weird wee world back then, and always will be, without apology. Except when taking my pals to hardcore gay punk porn. Chuckling.
Anyway. That was just another wee amusing tale from the obscure cultural weirdside. I hope you enjoyed it. I have actually seen a few other Bruce LaBruce films since Super 8 ½, and can highly recommend Hustler White (sleazy street whore black comedy) and Gerontophilia (poignant generation-chasm love story), if yer that way cinematically inclined. I actually met LaBruce in Edinburgh years later, interviewing him. I got him to sign the Screeching Weasel 7”, and gifted him two books about the gay underground filmmaker Jack Smith that I had been given to review by Edinburgh listings mag The List. He was perfectly pleasant.
If anybody is interested, a few people from the Cinema of Transgression are still active. I still keep occasional tabs on them. Nick Zedd is on Facebook, and has an Instagram page, and you can buy his films from him: @nickzedd is on Instagram • 1,997 people follow their account
I recently bought Who's Your Death Hero?, a new book that Kern did with Supervert, a friend of mine who does www.realitystudio.org, the world's top William S Burroughs website. I very much enjoyed it: Who's Your Death Hero? — Richard Kern (squarespace.com)
Bruce LaBruce has a site, though he was not part of the Cinema of Transgression: BRUCE LABRUCE
And an Instagram page: Bruce LaBruce (@brucelabruce) • Instagram photos and videos
Beyond that, you're on your own, but if I could discover all this stuff pre-internet in Falkirk, decades ago...you have no damned excuse now to be lazy in your underground cultural probings. Fire on!
THE
END
🎶 Those were the gays my friend 🎶 🙂
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