[The trailer for Otto.]
AB: That's an excellent segue into your work, which has been highly critical of the conformist, mainstream gay - I hate the word the word "community," because it's an unrealistic umbrella term. We've seen it in your previous works, but your philosophy I think gets more complicated in your most recent work, Otto; Or, Up With Dead People, because of the main character's - I don't want to give away too much about the movie, but with regard to Otto's position among the third wave of zombies, which are all gay and have elicited this huge back lash. Zombies are mindless, which I took to be your take on the mainstream uniformity -

Blab: Right.

AB: But Otto doesn't want to be mindless. He doesn't want to feast on human flesh. So, where does Otto stand - what are you trying to say here?

Blab: Well, it's interesting - you know, in my movies, I never really take a black and white stand on anything, but I joke when I say to people that if you've ever cruised a public washroom or bathhouse, you know that it's like Night Of The Living Dead.

AB: Yeah!

Blab: There are people in this trance. You get into these sexual situations that are orgies of anonymous sex and it's not too big of a stretch to apply to zombie metaphor. I think what would probably be harder for a more straight audience to understand is that it's not a total critique of it. The zombie-ness of of those situations make it hot on a certain level, so it's not just a condemnation of that. It's also a critique of - you know, in Medea’s movie, Up With Dead People, the zombie revolutionaries, Max and Fritz are leading this revolt. It's a new wave of gay activism against the new wave of new homophobia as I see it.

I think there's been a big anti-gay backlash in North America. In hop-hop and pop music, homophobia has sort of become acceptable again and allowed and cool and then there's the whole religious fundamentalism, the return of that. Max and Fritz are getting back to this idea of gay activism and gay revolt in political terms, which has sort of been lost in the assimilationist movement, but, then again, I also portray them sitting at the breakfast table - the butch one is reading the paper and the femme one is being all hysterical. They're falling into these bourgeoisie rolls of monogamy, despite the fact that they're revolutionaries.

That has always been for me the big catch in the gay movement: this drive towards acceptance and being treated like everyone else, but, in the process, the oppressed being the oppressor. You become like the people that hate you or that you're fighting against. Why are you so desperate to be accepted by and become like the people who hate you so much? For me it's a failure of the imagination. Can't you come up with other models of social and political options?

AB: That's certainly an increasingly valid point, but, at the same time, with regard to the Queercore movement, which you founded, and the rejection of those bourgeoisie values, I think - as with any movement, people stop really considering the impetus behind the movement, so I think the argument can be made that a lot of queer punks or queer core kids today are just as assimilationist as someone who's on the Human Rights Campaign, but they just happen to have different qualifications and markers.

Blab: Right. That's why I make the critique more broad in the movie. Medea's not critiquing gay culture in particular, but the broader culture. She's critiquing a culture which has bred conformity. She's against this consumerism and this materialism and this idea of an industrial, technological culture that's producing these disaffected kids who are neutral and who are disassociated from their surroundings. They are a kind of zombie. For her, it's a critique of the whole culture, not just of gay culture. And I see that a lot, too.

One of the reasons I made the film was because I was running into a lot of young kids who - not only gay ones - who said that they felt dead inside or they were spending so much time in front of screen that they felt like they had become brainwashed. There is a feeling of helplessness and corporate control of the media. That kind of thing is so locked in - corporations controlling evidence - it's so overwhelming that there's a hopelessness or helplessness to fight against it. Everyone has become a player. A lot of kids, they just seem more than willing to give in and try to work within these corporate structures and I'm really skeptical of that. I think it is breeding a generation of conformists.

AB: What's it also is - you're saying that you're encountering these people in real life, they're standing in front of you and saying these things to you, but the expansion of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook has created this parallel reality. People are coming up with - you create your online persona. That's how you want to be perceived, but then you step out of that and back into reality and you can't be yourself. The amount of time that you spend in reality versus the amount of time you spend in front of a screen is imbalanced. It worries me. I'm really glad that I'm one of the last generation - I'm 26-year old, so I was born before internet was in everyone's home and I'm thankful for that. It's a worrisome development.

Blab: Yeah, it is in a way. I think that's why the Internet is so mean, too. It's so cruel and it's so nasty. People write comments about you or your work that - there's a real snarkiness and a real jaded quality to a lot of the comments and it even becomes racist, sexist and homophobic and all that. People think they can get away with it. They're much more liable to do it on the Internet because they're not facing a real person. They would never say that to someone's face. They think the anonymity gives them license to be incredibly cruel or nasty and I think it's quite cowardly, actually.

AB: Technological moral disengagement.

Blab: So, there's that aspect of it, but I don't think there's anything wrong with creating a persona, that's exactly what I did with JD's and with my early films. I created this Bruce LaBruce persona and sort of put it out in the media, fed it and made a little myth about it. But it depends on what the persona is and what it represents. You have realize that it still is part of you and representing your beliefs. You have to really have control it and have it be your mouthpiece. I think some people get disconnected from their own persona and they're not careful enough about what they're trying to say with it. We're definitely going into that direction.

The whole irony is that Otto - like in 2001, how Hal the computer is the most human character in the film. He's more emotional and heartbreaking than any of the human characters, who all sort of act like machines. It's the same with Otto. He's the dead one in the movie, but he's obviously quite sensitive and there's something in there. He has made this shell and this armor to distance him from the outer world because it is so nasty and it is so dangerous. He's withdrawn.