I’m baaaack! But don’t worry — it’s only for one column. When EYE WEEKLY asked me to write about my “career” in support of my upcoming retrospective at the Royal, the first thing I had to ask myself was, “Why do I still feel the need to put the word career in quotation marks?” Is it some sort of Canadian modesty or, more to the point, inferiority complex? Is it to distance myself from the notion of “careerism,” a decidedly un-Canadian trait?

The author Dennis Cooper wrote after the succèss d’estime of my first feature film No Skin Off My Ass that I had of late been “careering with a Jayne Mansfieldian blatancy.” I should have taken it as a compliment, but somehow it hurt a little bit. It hurt because you don’t scrimp and save your measly tips from waiting tables in order to finance your own film projects which may take several years to complete because you keep running out of money and having to deal with film labs calling the police because they think you’re trying to make “gay pornography” merely for the sake of “careering.” You have to be passionate and driven about what you’re doing — and what you have a burning need to express — in order to put yourself through that kind of torment. A “career” sounded like a faraway country with a strange sounding name.

Dennis and I patched things up long ago, but I suppose I could measure my “career” by the quality of the various feuds I’ve had with queers of the highest order over the years: Gary Indiana, Kenneth Anger, Boy George, Rick Castro, G.B. Jones, Marc Almond, the list goes on. Mr. Anger in particular was incensed by what he regarded as a disrespectful reference to him in my movie Hustler White, in which I played a character named Jürgen Anger, a composite of the avant-garde film legend himself and my long-time German producer, Jürgen Brüning.



After seeing the film, Anger told a mutual acquaintance that he wanted to drive me out to the desert, throw me on one of those cactuses whose quills expand when they penetrate your skin so it’s impossible to extract yourself, leave me there blistering in the hot sun for three days, then come back and shoot me. I considered it one of my best reviews. Let’s face it: if you want to make a “career” omelet, you have to break a few eggs. I’m just glad I’m married to a Santeria priest who can help me ward off all the spells and hexes that have been forwarded my way over the years by the likes of dainty Satanists like Mr. Anger (for whom, incidentally, I still have the utmost respect).

Speaking of good reviews, I’ve had some doozies. For my first feature, No Skin Off My Ass, one critic opined that it looked like it was “shot in a snowstorm and recorded in a tin can,” while another ventured, “despite its cutting edge posturing, disappointingly dull.”

After the release of Hustler White in Britain, a reviewer in the Daily Mirror suggested that I “should seek psychiatric help,” while Boy George famously stormed out of a preview screening and wrote in his newspaper column the next day that it was “sad pornography dressed up as art.” (I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that, the previous evening at our opening party at Popstarz, Mr. George’s advances toward the film’s star, Tony Ward, ex-consort of Madonna, had been summarily snubbed.)

A few years later, picketers marched outside the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to protest my neo-Nazi art-porn film Skin Flick, brandishing copies of the left wing paper The Voice, whose cover headline screamed “Sick Gang-Bang Fantasy.” Now that’s a good review. (Skin Flick is conspicuously absent from the Royal’s retrospective — I guess they don’t want the police and B’nai Brith to try to shut things down like the time Pleasure Dome showed it.)

But if, in my topsy-turvy world, I consider these to be good reviews, let me share a bad one with you, from Amy Taubin of the Village Voice (back when it mattered) upon the New York release of No Skin: “Sweeter than Warhol, subtler than Kuchar, more sexually explicit than Van Sant, No Skin Off My Ass has antecedents to spare but a style all its own.” I remember lying in a bedroom in the East Village with a killer hangover when my host burst in with the review and a cup of coffee and read it to me. Along with Manohla Dargis’ review of the film in the same paper (“manages not only to have butch style and femme wit, it’s smart too!”), my “career” was officially launched.

My latest movie, Otto; or, Up with Dead People has been getting decidedly mixed reviews, particularly in America (I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the anti-capitalist, anti-American content of the film), although a nice one in The New York Times helped me lick my wounds. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned at this point in this “career” of mine, it’s to pay the critics little mind. (Except for the constructive ones, who are increasingly few and far between.) I recently received a couple of messages on Facebook from friends informing me that they had been at Edward Albee’s loft in New York the previous evening and that over dinner he had talked at length about a movie that he had just seen and loved: Otto. Coming from one of my heroes and all-time favourite playwrights, that’s the kind of review that makes you want to continue making movies.

“Only slightly less daunting was the process of becoming a known homosexual, which, while not exactly a walk in the park, at least has occasionally been a fuck in the park.” — on growing up a defender of Jerry Lewis, April 26, 2001

“One of my dear homosexual compadres and I immediately started to fantasize about how we might have belonged in high school to the Velvet Trenchcoat Mafia.... Instead of shooting the jocks, we would run up to them, plant big, sloppy Bugs Bunny kisses on their pursed lips, then slap them across the face three times with a white glove whilst camping, ‘You mad, impetuous boy!’ But then again, it isn’t the ’40s any more.” — on the Columbine Massacre, May 13, 1999

“Those infrared shots of the strike on Yugoslavia they keep showing us on television — the abstract indistinguishable targets exploding like images in a video game — can’t compare to, say, that oh-so-celebrated first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan, wherein some poor grunt runs around holding his own severed limb. That’s the kind of entertainment we’ve come to expect from a war, and we won’t settle for less.” — April 29, 1999.

“I’m always very eager to tell my American or European friends about the FLQ — because I think it’s glamorous that Canada once had its very own terrorist organization, even if it was one that was trying to dismantle Canada (which actually makes it more glamorous).” — May 11, 2000

“Sucking on a Muslim’s dick, as the [hate-mail] writer so charmingly and graphically puts it (and I’m supposed to be the pervert?), may not be a prerequisite for understanding the Islamic perspective, but it doesn’t hurt.” — Nov 8, 2001

“The one criticism I have of Queer as Folk is that it makes gay life seem way more exciting and glamorous than it actually is in real life. Pride Week, I’m afraid, generally has the opposite effect.” — June 22, 2000

“Kids today make the kids of Clark’s 1995 movie Kids look like the kids in a pre-Kubrickian Steven Spielberg film, but somehow Clark always manages to keep up with the perversions of modern youth.” — on Larry Clark’s Bully, Aug 2, 2001