Bruce LaBruce | No Skin Off My Ass / 1991

 playing roles

by Douglas Messerli

Bruce LaBruce (screenwriter and director) No Skin Off My Ass / 1991

 

With $14,000 and using himself and his then lover Klaus von Brücker as the major actors, now famed queer film director Bruce LaBruce created his first film, No Skin Off My Ass, which has since become a cult favorite and is recognized as an innovative, punk film, which Alexander Cavluzzo describes as “the voice of hardcore, tongue-in-cheek dissent with porn-packed political allegories.”

     It begins with LaBruce, described throughout as The Hairdresser, encountering for the second time in a day, what he believes to be a neo-Nazi skinhead (von Brücker), sitting a shiver at a local play yard bench.

     He offers him a room for the night, takes him home and provides him with a hot bath, while he explains that although he has a large clientele, and is successful businessman, he has grown less and less interested in his work as he has increasingly become obsessed by skinheads.

     Through this film, LaBruce gives us a close analysis of skinhead behavior, desires, differences, and purposes. What he doesn’t know is that actually this “skinhead” is not really a skinhead, but a young man who, as his sister Jonesy (G. B. Jones) reveals, often goes into his “bit,” in which for days at a time he grows mute, frustrating family and friends.

     LaBruce, not at all comprehending the strange boy his has picked up, despite his sexual desires, puts him into the guest room and retires for the night into his own room.

     The next morning the young “skinhead” escapes to visit his lesbian sister, Jonesy, who with her friends is making a documentary around the Symbionese Liberation Army.

     Von Brücker would also like to be in her film, for which she forces him to strip and seduce the lesbian women, all to utterly no success.

      Later, the “skinhead” has a dream about an S&M sexual situation involving The Hairdresser, who cuffs him and demands the young man roil around the bathroom stool. He returns to his so-called savior and again spends a sexless night, this happening for a period, before finally Jonesy makes a visit to the place, while The Hairdresser is entertaining a neighborhood or family child at the same play yard we saw earlier.

     He returns to encounter Jonesy berating her brother in his living room, she insisting that her brother is really gay and obviously is attracted to The Hairdresser, arguing they should simply admit that they are both gay, settle down and have sex.

      Some of LaBruce’s and von Brücker private sexual tapes follow, which in 1991 were considered pornography, but which today seem rather sexual tame. Yet, at least the two are finally a true couple, as the former Skinhead gets a moccasin hairdo while a punk band shouts out repeatedly, “Be a fag.”

     The two are finally a true couple, as the former Skinhead gets a moccasin hairdo while a punk band shouts out repeatedly, “Be a fag.” Indeed, the score throughout is utterly fascinating.              

     Jonesy admits that her film as never made because there was no financial backing, and she is now in trouble with the police for her graffiti works. She will probably have to leave town, she reports.

    According to LaBruce the film is "a queer retelling of Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park (1969). Altman’s film is based on the novel by Peter Miles. As LaBruce describes it, “Altman de-queered it, so I decided to re-queer it... When I showed the film for the first time in Los Angeles in 1991, somebody brought Miles to my screening and he said my no-budget Super-8 movie was better than the Altman version! He gave me an autographed copy of his novel inscribed: ‘You got it right.’"

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).