The Wonder Twins: J
ake Jaxson, Bruce LaBruce Join Forces

LOS ANGELES—Long before he collaborated with auteur Bruce LaBruce for a series of short stories that debuted in October, CockyBoys filmmaker Jake Jaxson first became aware of the filmmaker through his interest in model/actor Tony Ward. “That’s my way to Bruce originally, because I saw Hustler White. I was right out of college, and I couldn’t believe it,” Jaxson recalls of the 1996 film, which LaBruce starred in (and co-wrote/directed with Rick Castro). “And when I say I couldn’t believe it, it’s because I grew up in a very religious, conservative, white environment in the South. It doesn’t even matter if you’re gay; you’re a product of your environment.” Jaxson describes the experience as exotic and strange, and decidedly different from what he was surrounded by as a kid in school. “By the time I got to college, I realized I was gay and I started seeking out things to try to get me to understand what I was feeling, and somehow I had gotten a hold of Hustler White. When you’re young and gay in Louisiana, you don’t just walk into a porn store and buy a porn—you have to find other ways to figure it out…so while I was in college, Tony Ward sort of led me to Bruce, just like Joe Dallesandro led me to Andy Warhol in the early Trash movies.” Jaxson was immediately drawn to the material. “They were subversive, they were so wrong that they were right…the same thing with John Waters and Pink Flamingos. I kept coming to these very guerrilla, just ‘out-there’ movies because it was everything I was not,” Jaxson says. “These are all key movies for me in my sort of ‘new beginning’ as a gay man.” When he later saw Raspberry Reich at a film festival, he was able to connect the dots to LaBruce. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?!’” he laughs. “In some cases, people would even say it was bad, just like early Warhol or early John Waters’ movies. But it was tickling me in a way of, ‘These are the kinds of films I want to make.’ But you have to understand, I was literally a college republican Boy Scout who is going, ‘I wanna make guerrilla movies!’” Jaxson also encountered L.A. Zombie when he was getting into the industry as a DVD distributor: “I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is insane! So fucked up on so many levels,” he laughs. “But it’s so smart! You know when you like something from someone else when you’re jealous of it? That’s kind of where I was at.” The two finally met a few years ago at a LaBruce retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time, Jaxson had become “Jake Jaxson” and was making his own movies at the increasingly successful CockyBoys. “We had had some interactions on social media, and had talked back and forth. I went up and I introduced myself. Ironically, he was not what I expected,” Jaxson laughs. “When I first met him, he was very shy…there was not this demeanor of this kind of guy who was like, ‘Fuck the world!’ His work represented him. We had a really nice conversation—and I am just as shy, if not more. So everything I was saying probably sounded ridiculous and stupid. But I was so glad that I met him.” At the same time when he was becoming a pornographer, Jaxson was outed by the national media because of his connection to Glenn Greenwald. Little did LaBruce know how helpful he would be to Jaxson during the difficult time. “I was trying to figure out, how do I salvage anything good out of this? Because for pornographers, most of us will stay hidden. And I really thought, ‘Well, this is it. My life is over. I’m never going to be able to work in mainstream movies again,’” Jaxson says. “I had done ‘real’ things—and this is a stupid person thinking ‘real’ things versus ‘porn’ things—and I was still in that dynamic of thinking I was going to have this great big career, and now it was all over because I was exposed. I had lost my relationship with my family, and it was at that point that I did some soul searching.” Jaxson had an epiphany. “I thought, why not just start making the movies I’ve always wanted to make? I have all these ideas I’ve pitched to everybody and I’ve tried to make them…why not make them? And at that moment, that’s where I thought, ‘Well, Bruce LaBruce has done this. He has found a way.’ I couldn’t say for sure that (his career) was the career that he even wanted, but I just knew that this wasn’t the end of the world. And to that point, he was kind of a light for me. And I haven’t tried to ‘be’ Bruce; I’ve done my thing. Even still, my movies and Bruce’s movies are completely different. I still feel like that dorky college republican white boy from Louisiana next to Bruce, who’s this super cool dude. To that degree, he was a profound influence.” It seems like destiny, then, that the two found a way to collaborate. LaBruce hadn’t made a hardcore porn feature since L.A. Zombie seven years ago, but has made four feature films since then: Pierrot Lunaire, Gerontophilia, The Misandrists and Ulrike's Brain. “That has kept me pretty busy. I'm also trying to make more ambitious features lately, which takes a lot of time and effort. I made a hardcore porn short for Erika Lust last year called Refugee's Welcome, and I really enjoyed the experience, so that's why I approached CockyBoys to make four short hardcore films with interrelated themes to be released as a feature, with both softcore and hardcore versions.” The four films will begin to unroll in October with Diablo in Madrid, followed by Uber Menschen, The Purple Army Faction and Fleapit, all filmed in Madrid and Berlin. “I've always had a bit of an ambivalent relationship to porn, but that's just because sometimes sex seems so abstract to me,” LaBruce says. “I love ’70s gay porn when it was very narrative and had characters and cool aesthetics, with avant-garde directors like Wakefield Poole, Peter de Rome and Fred Halsted. But I have made hardcore porn feature films now for five different porn companies—Cazzo, Wurstfilm, Dark Alley, Erika Lust and now Cockyboys—so I definitely identify as a pornographer as well as an artist/filmmaker. But I consider all pornographers artists! Many of them are bad artists, but you can say the same of artists in the art world. I'm also very amused that I won Best EU director at the Hustlaball Awards for L.A. Zombie in 2011. It's my favorite award that I've won!” LaBruce has witnessed many industry changes over the years, and notes that the advent of digital represented a kind of revolution in porn—but not always for the better. “Back in the ’70s, gay porn was made on 16mm film, and straight porn on 35mm film, so it had to be made by professional filmmakers with access to equipment and who were professional filmmakers. It was also much more expensive to shoot and edit. More accessible digital technology democratized porn, allowing anyone to do it. So porn companies could churn out a lot more product, but it also ushered in an era of amateur porn. And of course the internet allowed people to distribute it on a much larger scale and at a bigger volume. This resulted in a demand for more product, so narrative porn—which is also more expensive to make—became vestigial, and just marketing sex scenes became the default. But there is also much more choice for the consumer—all different kinds and genres of porn, and a greater expression of the average person's sexuality in the form of porn.” That freedom and opportunity gave the collaboration more lifeblood—at a time when it’s more necessary than ever. “Initially, when we started pitching these, I saw it as sort of an anthology of short films that I think are needed right now—this year—after the election,” Jaxson says. “I have felt for years now that porn has a purpose—and that’s not me trying to make peace with what I do, or to sugarcoat it or make it something that it’s not. I really do believe it, because it basically helped me learn how to have sex and realize that I wasn’t a freak or crazy when I was actually able to see two other men doing it. And more and more, I hear people say, ‘This is how I figured out sex, because no one’s teaching it to me.’ “Then after the election, I felt more and more that what we do is kind of part of a resistance, because we start to see more religious moralizers stepping into positions of power who are complete total hypocrites. It sort of affected me that way; I felt like more than ever, we have a responsibility for what we produce and how we produce it, and it has a purpose.” Who better to join Jaxson on his mission than LaBruce? “His work has always been part of the resistance. We need Bruce’s voice back. With gay culture, we’ve made huge strides, but the sexual side of our gay culture now—and this is my personal opinion—has almost been ghettoized in our attempt to assimilate, to not rock the boat in some of these instances. And this puts us sort of back front and center in a conversation that, like I said, it’s ‘so wrong it’s right,’” Jaxson says. “He has since really found a voice within independent cinema—not just underground counter-culture movies. He’s making beautiful films, and he’s a true filmmaker—he wants to always be shooting. That’s what I get from Bruce—he’s like a shark that way. He’s always in the water and thinking, ‘What’s next?’ I get the sense that he always wants to be creating. That’s how he breathes, and that’s not me…I like to tinker, so I was energized by this.” LaBruce was also energized by the project, and is currently shopping around another title—with four more film scripts brewing in his head. He also has a big solo photo show in London starting October 27th (The Haus of Bruce LaBruce), and notes that he would love to film a straight porn at some point. “I jerk off to porn regularly. I just put in key words like ‘monster Latin cock’ or ‘hung dom master,’ and there I go!” LaBruce admits unashamedly. “Porn is a very good tool for masturbation. Masturbation is not counter-revolutionary!”