I’ve been a fan of Bruce LaBruce since I saw The Raspberry Reich, the title of which tells you that LaBruce has his tongue firmly planted in cheek, even if he plays his movies deadly serious. All of LaBruce’s work post-Reich comes with a dry wit even if it is rarely laugh out loud hilarious. But, I hadn’t seen Hustler White until this week.
Unlike the dry wit LaBruce usually has, Hustler White is hysterical, intentionally so. The end product of Hustler White seems like the product of a collaboration of 1970s John Waters and Doris Wishman making a movie about gay prostitution and S&M that also tore apart the “ideals” of Sunset Blvd. If the idea of tearing apart the ideals of Sunset Blvd isn’t hilarious, then this movie isn’t funny.
Like Sunset Blvd, Hustler White opens with an image of a dead body floating face down in a pool, as a voice over tells us that it all started when he crossed paths with a writer. Cut to Jurgen Anger (Bruce LaBruce), no relation to Kenneth Anger, who is being courted by a university to do an anthropological study of hustling in West Hollywood. Jurgen is a stuck up self-centered writer, who shuns his driver’s attempts at conversation until his driver tells him to fuck off.
Jurgen becomes obsessed with Montgomery Ward (Tony Ward) after seeing Ward do an impromptu workout outside a park, though Jurgen spends the first 2 acts trying to track down Ward. But, Hustler White is really about the life of the hustler, including the S&M hustlers. LaBruce and co-writer and co-director Rick Castro go through a whole litany of homosexual taboos from interracial gangbangs to being a fluffer on an S&M porn shoot (“He failed to live up to his contract”) to transvestism to amputee fetishism to cutting to to to. It almost seems that they had a list of perversions to check off.
Hustler White‘s main political point is the collection of erotic perversions that the hustlers experience. To be a prostitute, you deal with a lot of perversions, and everybody of every type has a variety of them. Lose your leg? There’s probably a rich john who would pay you for it. An octogenarian “famous” actor on a daytime soap wants you to tie him up? If you’re not into it, you probably know a guy that is. The sexual fetishes are presented as normal, everyday, experiences to the prostitute. This, in turn, normalizes the wide range of sexualities that exist in the world.
As mentioned, Hustler White had followed the relative desexualization of homosexual cinema, providing an knee-jerk reaction to the vanilla face that homosexuality had put on. Hustler White was also released in 1996, the year after the heterosexual erotic thriller was officially murdered with the death of Showgirls. LaBruce’s depictions of the range of homosexual carnality does border pornography, despite no actual genital penetration being shown. Hustler White‘s graphic nature goes past that of Showgirls and most other mainstream hetero cinema. But, it also felt like a statement about acceptance, even as LaBruce refuses to suffer fools (including himself).
If you’re looking to get into the works of LaBruce, Hustler White is probably the best place to start. It’s light, fluffy, sarcastic, cynical, and is a general lark. Yet, it’s also political without being overt, and it is unabashedly perverse without being completely hardcore. LaBruce’s later works would get more serious and cynical, and also would skew increasingly more hardcore.
