The Reluctant Pornographer

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Billed as a romp through the “twilight world of lavender sex that will
shake the very foundations of the gay establishment,” this book
features explicit photographs and subject matter that is summed up in
such headings as “A Day in the Life of a Fag,” “Get to Know Your
Bisexual Potential,” and “Rape Me, Rape My Dog.” LaBruce admits to
an early life of hustling as a male prostitute, inhabiting the gay
underworld and occasionally getting pounded upon for screening
explicitly homosexual super 8 movies. This background equipped him for
his current incarnation as a writer and editor for J.D’s (“the
original homocore fanzine”) and a self-styled spokesperson for his
“queercore movement.”

LaBruce’s life and times are told through 52 op-ed pieces, diary
entries, travelogues, and accounts of the film shoots for his three
feature films, No Skin Off My Ass, Super 8Ѕ, and Hustler White. The
individual pieces in this book are as controversial as the author’s
films—witty and gossipy, self-deprecating and trashy, shocking and
irreverent, and always compulsively readable. LaBruce spares neither
people nor places as he presents his insider’s view of the gay,
avant-garde pornographic film world he himself created and disdainfully
believes he rules.

Open-minded cineastes and readers with an interest in Canadian
alternative cinema will find The Reluctant Pornographer simultaneously
gross and engrossing. In the end, there’s nothing reluctant about this
pornographer.