The words JOIN THE NEW WORLD SEXUAL ORDER flash across a screen, which is itself flanked by two long red banners depicting Jesus on the cross — his arms splayed out, his head hung, and his torso disappearing into the image of a veiny and thick penis. This does not faze any of the 700 or so people who are seated on tiered wooden platforms in front of the film, shoulder to shoulder in a cavernous concrete auditorium, waiting for what comes next. Most people are dressed unremarkably, with the jumpers, hats, and scarves they needed to weather the London chill draped over their legs. But under all that fabric are leather chaps and harnesses, rubber body suits and frilly underwear. A ball gag is dangling from one man’s neck. In front of me, a throuple that wouldn’t look out of place in an Anthropologie catalogue starts to get handsy, the girl in the middle giving the boys on either side of her a “we’re about to …” smirk. But they’d 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 premiere–cum-sex party. The movie is The Visitor, the latest film from 61-year-old Canadian queercore director Bruce LaBruce. Over the last 35-plus years, LaBruce has made movies that toe the line between cinema and pornography, or really smash both together into something else entirely — literalizing the sexual taboos that get us off with little narrative subtlety.
Take The Visitor, for example, about a Black refugee who washes up on the shore of the River Thames and moves in with a white upper-class family only to have sex with every single one of them — sometimes one-on-one, sometimes incestuously together. It’s arguably more vulgar than LaBruce’s Raspberry Reich, his “terrorist-chic” film from 2004 that features a left-wing gang in Berlin attempting to literally fuck their way toward revolution, pausing between sucking each other off to be lectured by their queer female leader about the necessity of carnal desire in overthrowing capitalism. But not as vulgar as Skin Flick (1999), in which neo-Nazis go on a bisexual rampage of sexual assault against an interracial, wealthy gay couple, and one of the skinheads comes on a copy of Mein Kampf.
“I always said that if I hadn’t become an artist and a filmmaker that I would’ve become a psychoanalyst,” LaBruce told me earlier that day, speaking from inside the South London office of A/POLITICAL, the nonprofit funder of the film. Seated a floor above the basement where much of the raunchy sex of The Visitor was shot, LaBruce is in his signature look — all black, huge sunglasses, cropped hair, a thousand rings on his fingers, a Bloody Mary in his hand.
LaBruce’s 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. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been; I learned later that very few of his films have been protested or petitioned, though some have been banned from screening at film festivals. LaBruce points out that race play, incest, and fantasies of uniformed power are some of the most popular themes in pornography. His films, like psychoanalysis, simply take things people already desire and fear. He ultimately hopes giving cinematic space to these primal urges can convince audiences that the reason the world hates migrants and women and gay people is because we all really hate ourselves. “Sexual repression, if it’s not addressed,” LaBruce tells me, “it comes back in a monstrous form.”
I’ve seen a lot of independent gay movies, and I’ve watched as queerness has entered the mainstream thanks to Luca Guadagnino films and teen rom-coms like Heartstopper (one of Netflix’s most popular TV shows ever). Over the past year especially, I’ve become personally wary of the proliferation of queer cinema — namely, its lack of messiness. The people are often too pretty, the bodies are too perfect, the politics are too tidy, the romances aren’t complicated enough, and the sex isn’t weird. LaBruce says he’s a fan of the newer, more popular queer movies like Guadagnino’s (and Guadagnino is a fan of LaBruce). But I’m 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.
And so, when I heard that a year after its premiere at the Berlinale, LaBruce was planning on turning The Visitor’s London premiere into a sex party, I was excited. He teamed up with the popular European fetish-party promoters Klub Verboten. They found this venue — half-theater, half-dungeon — and they decided to see what would happen: How many would come for the movie, and how many would come for the sex?
Juju, a 48-year-old man in attendance wearing a kilt, a distinctively Scottish hat, and a leather harness, says he’s never seen a LaBruce film but that he’s been to six sex parties in the last year, and generally enjoys the feeling of safety he gets from being around queer people in this setting. Aisha, 25, wearing a short, black dress and standing next to her choke-collar-donning partner, says she’s never been to a sex party before, but had been meaning to go to one for a while and came to this one in particular because she liked what LaBruce said in an interview — about violence being so normalized in popular culture, while sex was still shunned. Fiyero, a 39-year-old originally from Italy, is here for the screening only, and therefore dressed in workaday clothes — jean jacket, jeans, T-shirt. 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.
“People are still struggling to come out, people are still struggling walking hand in hand, just simple things,” he notes. “We’re not asking to fuck in the streets. That was what sexual liberation was about probably in the ’70s, but today we’re just looking for basic needs.”
In an age of “kink at pride” discourse and increasing puritanicalness, LaBruce actually is asking to fuck in the streets, and everywhere else. He’s 61 years old, and he’s perceived this shift Fiyero is outlining, in which queer movements have evolved from ones concerned with sexual liberation and solidarity with other radical movements to ones concerned with mainstream institutions like marriage and the military and queer people’s inclusion in those spaces. “You lose sight of the goals you initially had,” LaBruce tells me. “You become the enemy within.”
LaBruce calls himself more punk provocateur than revolutionary, but it’s obvious in watching his films that he does have a consistent message: repression leads to aggression, and attaining individual release can result in broader societal freedom. LaBruce likes toying with Freud’s idea of family romance in particular — that, as he put it, there are all these sexual tensions within the hermetically sealed unit of the nuclear family. In The Visitor, LaBruce views the titular character (played by drag and burlesque star Bishop Black) not as a destroyer of the British family but as a revealer of all the energy suppressed by their bourgeois, western life. The Visitor (none of the characters have names in the movie) represents not just the fear of migrants in the U.K. and every other western nation, but the result of real liberation — he is neither deeply unhappy nor sexually repressed.
“You have injected into the gray, damp emptiness that was my life the virus of homosexual vigor and youth,” the Father says to the Visitor at a dinner scene late in the film, which takes place right after the Father, the Visitor, and the Father’s son have a threesome, all taking turns penetrating one another. “With your sacred sex and your erotic and oedipal interventions, you have demolished a society founded on class violence, imperialism, slavery. You’ve shaken me to the core.”
In another kind of movie, this scene — in which characters explicitly remark upon the political stakes of their situation — might elicit groans from an audience. In a LaBruce film, and as a prelude to a sex party, it was met with applause that bounced off the 100-foot-tall ceiling. Perhaps it’s harder to think critically when most of your blood is no longer in your brain, or maybe the lack of oxygen makes you realize he’s right: The world, devoid of sex and the disorder it brings, is gray and damp and empty.
The last act of The Visitor is less horny. After fucking his way through the family, The Visitor moves out, in search of more people in need of sexual awakening. In the last scene of the film, the Father stands on a rock in the middle of a waterfall, naked, flaccid, alone, and screaming, shattered with desire. Without the Visitor there to electrify him, he is unable to do it on his own. The finale might be reflective of LaBruce’s own skepticism, specifically his disdain for large-scale movements that advocate for a tidy future and his preference for the ideas of French philosopher and poet Jean Genet.
“He would find a revolution going on in the world, whether it be the Palestinians or the Black Panthers, and go and support it, but the minute it showed any sign of being co-opted or institutionalized, he would not only abandon it, but turn against it,” LaBruce said. “Once you unleash that, then you just go on to the next revolution somewhere. So, in that way, revolution is perpetual.”
The Visitor credits start appearing onscreen in the Dalston auditorium, and the audience begins making its way down several dimly lit hallways and a few flights of stairs, before slowly trickling into a multi-room basement space, also dimly lit. Everyone lines up at coat check to store any clothing they brought that does not comply with the party promoter Klub Verboten’s dress code (leather, latex, and rubber are okay; cosplay, military outfits, suits, “fancy dress,” cotton, and jeans are not okay). I’d spent £100-ish on some small leather shorts and a collar that made it hard to move my neck, both sourced from a sex shop in London’s gayborhood earlier that day. The security guards on premises wave me into the after-party, but the friend who agreed to attend the event with me is nearly denied entry until he removes his shorts and pleads for forgiveness.
Inside the club space, we tap our credit cards in exchange for a fruity, canned cocktail concoction and survey the dance floor, where about 30 people are bopping up and down to a DJ’s soft techno music. A few make out with each other. At the center of the room, three steps up, organizers have placed a large bed and an upright frame with straps that are holding someone in the position of the Vitruvian Man. On the bed, one man is straddling a woman while rapidly pushing his fingers into her vagina, while another man is receiving a vigorous blowjob. My friend and I stand and watch, our entrancement broken by a guard who comes by to remind us: If you’re not participating, you have to leave.
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. But there on the dance floor, streaming on a television above our heads, is a live feed of the room with the bed and the straps and the blowjobs. And so mostly, I watched.
The Visitor would premiere in New York City a few weeks later. LaBruce tried to find a venue where he could stage a similar premiere-night sex party, but ended up in a Brooklyn space half the size of the London auditorium. The after-party was smaller too — held at the queer bar Singers, packed to the gills, with a makeshift room in the backyard made out of plastic curtains for anyone who might want privacy. It was a frigid night, though. I don’t think anyone had sex.