Lisa: What was the selection process like when choosing excerpts and photographs to be featured in this project?
Bruce: I tried to focus a lot on portraiture, which is an aspect of photography I really enjoy. When I worked for magazines like Honcho, Playguy, and Inches in New York for about a five year period starting in 1998, it really was all about taking sexy portraits of men with hard-ons. These were often 3/4 portraits, and I often tried to conceive the – in terms of framing and style – almost like portraiture in classical painting. Although I’ve concentrated mostly on male subjects for this selection, I’ve also included some female and transgender subjects. And then, of course, the film production stills and behind-the-scenes photographs have a completely different quality, more spontaneous and free-wheeling.

Lisa: Do you still have the same creative drive that you did when you first started out and how do you think people’s perceptions of yourself and your work have changed throughout this time?
Bruce: Well, I’m not sure how countercultural gay culture is these days! It’s more about assimilation. But even back in the eighties, my work was often as much about going against the gay orthodox and the gay mainstream as about challenging the status quo of the dominant, straight culture. The thing is, I just keep on making the same kind of work that I’ve always done, about characters and subjects on the margins – the misfits, the maladapted, the criminal element, the revolutionaries, etc. I’ve never presented homosexual characters or photographic subjects that have been particularly welcomed by the gay mainstream, although after having been at it for so long, awareness of my work has become somewhat broader. But my films and photographs also appeal to non-gay audiences. Quite often I present characters in my movies who have homosexual sex but who aren’t gay-identified – hustlers, neo-Nazi skinheads, extreme left-wing radicals. I’ve always been into presenting fetishes and fetishists as romantic outsider characters, which often transcends fixed sexual identities. Now that we seem to be going through an era of sexual conservatism, I think my work is more relevant than ever, so my creative drive remains strong.

Pierre Coupey, White Chair, 2007 $POA

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