OLDCORN: Canada is rewarding queer pornographic films and calling it ‘art’

There is a difference between defending free expression and celebrating it with public money.Bruce LaBruce has every legal right to make the films he wants. He has the right to shock, offend, provoke, and sneer at the public if that is his artistic calling. Canadians, in turn, have every right to ask why a filmmaker known for mixing queer pornography, fetishism, and political agitation is being elevated with a Governor General’s Award and linked, repeatedly, to taxpayer-backed arts funding. That is not censorship. It is accountability.In March 2025, the Canada Council for the Arts announced LaBruce as one of the winners of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. The award comes with a $25,000 cash prize. The Canada Council says the prize recognizes “remarkable careers” and “artistic merit.” .Pornographic gay art wins Governor General’s highest honour — now it's in Regina.That would be controversial enough on its own. It becomes much worse when you look at what LaBruce himself says he makes.In one of his most recent films, The Visitor, there is no misunderstood family drama that prudes have unfairly maligned. LaBruce has described it, proudly and plainly, as a queer update of Pasolini’s Teorema. A story about a mysterious outsider entering a bourgeois family, having sex with each member, and transforming the household through those encounters. The Berlinale synopsis confirms the premise, describing an outsider who enters an upper-class home and seduces the family. Trade coverage was even more direct, calling it a film built around explicit, unsimulated sex acts.That matters because this is not a case of critics smearing an artist with loaded language. The filmmaker’s own comments make the point. In the interview, LaBruce says The Visitor was cast largely from queer nightlife and “extreme performance” circles rather than from conventional acting pools. He says the only professional porn performer in the cast is Bishop Black. .He praises an intimacy coordinator for helping create a relaxed atmosphere so the explicit sex scenes could unfold “organically.” He says the production revived his more “down and dirty” guerrilla methods. In other words, the sexual explicitness is not incidental. It is central to the project.So is the politics.LaBruce says the film uses altered slogans such as “open borders, open legs” and a crude sexual reworking of “for the many, not the few.” He says he stitched together real comments from right-wing politicians about immigration and refugees. He says the film is partly about the sexualized “other,” fear of the outsider, and bourgeois repression. None of this is hidden. It is agitprop with arthouse lighting and a pornographic core.That alone should disqualify it from public honour.A Governor General’s Award is not merely a nod from a fringe festival jury in Berlin or a midnight screening crowd in Toronto. It is a state-adjacent cultural signal. It tells Canadians, and the world, that this person represents the best of our national artistic life. .The Canada Council’s own language makes that plain. These awards exist to recognize major contributions and excellence.Can anyone say with a straight face that films known for explicit sex, neo-Nazi fetish imagery, corpse erotics, and deliberately transgressive pornography are what should stand under that banner?LaBruce’s defenders will say the point of his work is provocation. Fine. They will say art should challenge moral comfort. Also fine. They will say queer cinema has often had to push against mainstream respectability to be seen at all. That is their argument to make. It still does not answer the funding question. It does not answer the honours question either.Public funding is not a neutral act. It is an endorsement by cheque. Public awards are not neutral either. They are endorsed by prestige..The record here is not hypothetical. Publicly available sources show LaBruce has received “numerous grants” from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. One grant that can be verified directly in a Toronto Arts Council annual allocations report is for $8,000, and another $325,000 from SODEC (Société de développement des entreprises culturelles) for the feature film Gerontophilia.Add the 2025 Governor General’s Award prize of $25,000, and taxpayers are not dealing with an imaginary grievance. Public institutions have supported him before, and they are celebrating him now.That should trouble people far beyond social conservatives.Many Canadians who have no desire to censor anyone are tired of being told they must pay for cultural products that openly despise their values, mock family life, and drape ideological messaging over explicit sex. LaBruce’s own artistic persona depends on contempt for bourgeois morality, normalcy, and restraint. Yet the same establishment he claims to provoke keeps handing him public legitimacy. There is a deep absurdity in that.This is also where the usual arts bureaucracy defence falls apart. Officials often claim funding decisions are about excellence, not ideology. .Yet LaBruce’s career is built on ideology. His films are not only sexually graphic. They are self-consciously political, often crudely so. Even on The Visitor, he openly frames the film around immigration rhetoric, racial projection, family repression, and slogan-based politics. The sex is political. The politics are sexual. The provocation is the product.Again, he can make that product. Nobody is saying otherwise. The question is whether the public should be forced to subsidize it and whether the country should drape it in the Governor General’s prestige.The answer should be no.Canada’s arts institutions are free to admire boundary-pushing work. They are not obliged to put it on a public pedestal. .There are countless filmmakers, writers, and artists in this country producing serious, humane, challenging work without descending into pornographic spectacle. Many of them will never get this kind of official blessing. Many create work that enriches civic life rather than degrades it.Those are the people who should be honoured.Bruce LaBruce has built a career on transgression. Good for him. Transgression is not a public virtue. It is not a national achievement in itself. It is certainly not something taxpayers should be made to underwrite.Ottawa and the arts class may find that daring. Ordinary Canadians are allowed to find it embarrassing.They should say so.

OLDCORN: Canada is rewarding queer pornographic films and calling it ‘art’

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