Death is the New Pornography!

Gay Zombies in Queer Horror and Bruce LaBruces

Otto; or, Up With Dead People (CA/GE 2008)
Darren Elliott, Royal Holloway, University of London

While there have been countless variations on the vampire-as-homosexual metaphor on film,
representations of the homosexual undead in the form of the gay zombie are few, the fact is that
the vampire remains a clear top to the zombies bottom. In this paper I want to consider
contemporary representations of the gay male zombie figure - as an erotically objectified monster,
his cannibalistic nature considering Diana Fusss conclusion that gay sex has always been
cannibal murder1 and the figures implicit fusion with fascist and more importantly, punk
aesthetics. The isolated gay zombie figures nihilistic and suicidal drive toward death places him
in a tension between wanting to exclude himself from the communal and from life itself; yet his
insatiable desire to consume the flesh of the living, whom he also eroticises, is a desire for the
communal. This paper focuses mainly upon Bruce LaBruces self titled melancholic existential
gay porno-zombie movie, Otto; or, Up With Dead People (LaBruce, CA/GE 2008). LaBruces film
takes on the politicised zombie metaphor and re-works it into the themes typical for the filmmaker:
that of the objectified individual by reactionary revolutionaries, the fetishism of fascism, Marxist
anti-capitalist rants and the marginalised subject, in Otto the queer skin type (a recurring one in
LaBruces oeuvre) is collapsed into the gay zombie.

LaBruces film, by no means, is the only film to feature the gay male zombie yet the majority of
feature length titles and shorts that do present the homosexual undead - prize comedy horror
over a purist horror aesthetic. Other examples include: Flaming Gay Zombies, (Sadya Lashua
and Aaron Mace, US 2007) which concerns itself with a closeted homosexual who, after finding a
fabulous pair of sunglasses, finds that his bite turns his dates into gay zombies and quickly
amasses a harem of gay zombies who he indulges in regular zombie-sex and whom he pimps out
to passers by. Gay Zombies! (FronkandDego Films (FND Films) 2007) another YouTube! short,
is a broad gay panic comic narrative based around two heterosexual teenage boys discovery
1

Fuss, Diana Oral Incorporations in Identification Papers. (1995) p. 84

that their neighbourhood is being taken over by homosexual zombies whose defining
characteristic is not their drive to consume living male flesh, but their excessive display of
stereotypically effeminate behaviour and dress which instils more fear in the victims than actually
being eaten. Gay Zombie (by gay filmmaker Michael Simon, US 2007) features a young gay
zombie (Miles) whom, after being reanimated and seeking therapy, outs himself on the West
Hollywood dating scene. His new-found living friends performing makeovers on him using make
up to fill in his rotting wounds and redesigning his wardrobe. Attempting to assimilate into
conservative homo cultures the eventual repression of his desire for human flesh and anger at
not being accepted gets the better of him, killing and eating a member of his boyfriends yoga
class. Lastly Creatures from the Pink Lagoon (by gay filmmaker Chris Diani, US 2006)) is a
bigger budget DVD release, in the style of an American 50s creature-feature pastiche and filmed
in black and white it centres around a group of gay friends on holiday who are terrorized by
homosexual zombies.

Such narratives centre on hysteria or anxiety around fears of ageing, of the oppressiveness of
monogamy, of being infected with homosexuality/effeminacy. Moreover, their reliance on comedy
over horror limits their representations of zombies to comic pastiche. Otto or Up With Dead
People on the other hand is a film that defies generic categorisation: featuring: melodrama, music
video, fictional documentary, gore-saturated horror, satirical comedy and gay pornography, in its
generic patchwork quilt. Bruce LaBruce is a queer writer, photographer and filmmaker who
began his career producing and writing for radical homo-punk fanzines such as JDs. LaBruce
he is often acclaimed with having been instrumental in the creation of the HomoCore or
QueerCore movement, yet and the queer label are movements he has made pains to distance
himself from. LaBruce has often alienated and marginalised himself from gay or queer
communities. Simply put, LaBruce is a nonconformist political director who via his films critiques
and satirises homosexual culture as much as he attacks heterosexual capitalism.

LaBruces self-reflexive presentation of fake gay zombies and his characters ambiguous
performances highlight the figure as another excuse for parody and pastiche. In performing gay

skinhead zombie masculinity the LaBruces characters comically homoeroticise fascist

iconography, in a deeply satirical manner. The comic aesthetic of these aforementioned shorts is
still present in Bruce LaBruces Otto; or, Up With Dead Peoplem yet its satirical, gross out
humour is combined with political activism and an investigation of homophobia. More importantly,
LaBruces narrative offers a critique of the banality of gay male subcultures, particularly those of
the homogenous club-scene in Berlin as being effectively dead.

Otto; or, Up With Dead People (US, 2008) develops the political and sexual themes that LaBruce
is concerned with. LaBruces preoccupation with the marginalised individual, trying in vain to fit
in and connect with others, only to find himself rejected, takes its cinematic cues from Romeros
development of the sympathetic zombie Bub from Day of the Dead (1985) the zombie with a
soul 2. More importantly LaBruce references Romeros teen-vampire film Martin (1977 )which
portrays the vampire as mundane and ordinary with a deliberate disavowing of cinematic vampire
lore, the spectator begins to question the very notion of vampire against any traditionalist sense.
Ottos status as zombie is equally ambiguous.

Otto causes the spectator to question the actual existence of zombies by portraying the central
undead figure as a suicidal metaphor for gay disenfranchised youth, while never offering or
discounting either a supernatural or rational conclusion. The films conceit of a film-within-a-film
world includes not one, but two films being made within the overarching narrative. Hence the
films undecided title, Otto; or Up With Dead People. Throughout we are unsure of which film we
are watching, as the indicators of black and white (the Medeas fictional art-film on the rising up of
a horde of gay zombie insurgents titled Up with Dead People) and colour (Medeas documentary
film on a troubled adolescent who is convinced he is a zombie, entitled Otto) eventually become
interchangeable in LaBruces overarching narrative. The film is presented as a both pseudodocumentary about Otto, a young, wiry somnambulant and sexually objectified zombie who
travels to Berlin, following the smell of human density and a the fictional Up With Dead People, a
2

Russell, Jamie, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (FAB Press 2008)

p. 147

pretentious political porno-zombie movie directed by the films radical feminist filmmaker, Medea
Yarns (as anagram of Maya Deren) is introduced at various points.

There is an ambiguity surrounding the authenticity of the zombies Otto meets on his journey
through Berlin, the majority of gay zombies in the film are represented as actors or fake
zombies. Medeas zombies are shown effecting an uprising in the oppressed masses, via her
fictional gay zombie uprising on film in which her revolutionary leader of the undead insurgent
sissies, Fritz, recruits homosexuals into the fold, fucking them into immortality in scenes of, at
times explicit pornography3. LaBruces new wave of zombies are inherently gay (and male) and,
naturally, have an insatiable desire to eat and convert male human flesh into their cohort. Here
both living and human are reconfigured to symbolise not heterosexuality but conformist
homosexuality. Ottos function as a tabula rasa is explicitly referenced with the film - for Medea
and for LaBruce. Fritz the Che Guevara of gay zombies from Up With Dead People, is
interviewed in Otto discussing his rival zombie lead stating,
He was the Hollow Man, the empty signifier, upon which she could project her political
agenda

Unlike her fake zombies, Medea states of Otto - that there was something different about Otto,
something more authentic. Developing Romeros zombie with soul, Otto is described at various
points in the film as a zombie with an identity crisis, or a zombie with a disorder of the soul.
Ottos identity crisis is presented initially as a case of memory loss (an amnesiac, suffering only
brief flashbacks to what he considers to be the time before) and his attempts to reconnect to
other people and to discover his true self, in order to determine what brought him to this point, all
fail.

Ottos authenticity, which we could understand as authentic homosexuality, can also be read in
terms of his difference. But whether he is just more skilled than Medeas other actors, really a
3

Gay-zombie-sex, is not something that LaBruce can be charged with having first visualised and
is arguably featured first in Vidkid Timos gay porn Night of the Living Dead pastiche, At Twilight
Come the Flesh Eaters (Timo, US 1998) which also features a film-within-a-film structure and
juxtaposes low budget black and white porn parody with behind the scenes sex.

zombie or a psychotic who believes he is a zombie is never revealed, however his homosexuality
is inherently part of his character from the outset. However it is the type of homosexuality, a nonconformist gay-ness and its place within hetero and homo-normative communities that appears to
be problematic. Medea and Fritz both identify his zombie-ism as a reaction against an
oppressive, capitalist system from which they believe he is retreating into a narcoleptic state.
Ottos conviction that he is a zombie is at times pronounced as an illness. In the brief flashback of
the time before (ironically romanticised by LaBruce in scenes of comically idyllic love), Otto
eventually remembers and relocates his ex-boyfriend Rudolf and they arrange a meeting. During
this sequence there are various references to Ottos illness but LaBruce drops the volume of the
dialogue track and distorts it with non-diegetic screeching noises, which effectively acts as
interference to their conversation and the viewer's understanding of Ottos past. The spectator is
allowed to hear lines of dialogue that offer some explanation as to Ottos condition, but not
enough to allow any conclusions. Rudolf explains how their relationship ended though his own
fear of dealing with sick people and despite the audial interference what remains audible is his
references to: .the hospitalthe loony bin eating disordersmelancholia schizophrenia,
and most ominous of all Disorders of the Soul. Moreover, the term illness has obvious
connotations of the typical symptoms of AIDS. Indeed the metaphor of the AIDS patient as the
dead or living corpse has been acerbically rendered in alternate zombie film narratives from the
early 1990s4. Otto; or, Up With Dead People may implicitly references AIDS anxieties, given the
connections of homosexuality, HIV and the abject throughout horror film history (discussed at
length in chapter one) and given the visualisation of Fritzs recruitment of zombies through a
kind of viral infection. However the characters discussion of Ottos illness seems limited to
mental disorders only. Zombieism-as-AIDS-metaphor seems too simplistic for LaBruce, instead it
seems more appropriate for Ottos disorder of the soul to be grounded in the cultural anxiety and
psychological trauma caused by his temporary amnesia of the time before and his failure to fit
in. Ottos crisis is not corporeal but, as he states, radiates out from an identity crisis.
4

For example see Andrew Parkinsons I, Zombie: A Chronicle of Pain (GB 1998), in which the
central characters body continues to rot after sexual encounters, eventually reduced to
masturbating alone because of his decimated appearance, his penis eventually falls apart in his
hands.

Medea attempts to understand Ottos pathology, but never comes close to regarding him as a
real zombie. In a lengthy diatribe incorporating Herbert Marcuses One Dimensional Man5 (which
Medeas girlfriend Hella Bent is later shown reading) and LaBruces own political article A
Message from the Purple Resistance Army (PRA)6, Medea proposes Otto as a both a victim of
capitalist society and as a revolutionary subject within it,
A person who functions normally in a sick society is himself sick, while it is only the nonadjusted individual who can achieve a healthy acting out against the overly strict
restraints and demands of the dominant culture.
Clearly as a homeless vagabond who believed he was dead, Otto was conducting his
own one-man revolution against reality.
If as Medea states, a person who conforms within a sick (capitalist) society, is himself sick,
Ottos sickness then, is viewed as an illness only by conformist themselves. Ottos disorder
differentiates him from conformist homosexuality (Rudolf and Fritz) and reactionary
revolutionaries (Medeas fake zombies). But this melancholic shambling zombie is at a far remove
from the politicised gay Che Guevara that Fritz plays in Up With Dead People. Indeed, Otto is
the consummate apolitical figure. If Otto has any revolutionary potential, it is one that he is clearly
unaware of. It is in this sense that Otto seems authentic or genuine, without the pretensions of
Medeas overly stylised, political poseurs, or indeed the conservative gay actors of Up With Dead
People. Medea and her cohorts are presented as the reactionary revolutionaries of Otto, or Up
With Dead People in which the infrastructure of such radical left-wing organisations are shown to
be as autocratic and oppressive as the capitalist and fascist institutions that they long to destroy.
LaBruce at first seems to privilege Ottos apolitical indifference over that of the fake
revolutionaries, yet his apolitical subjectivity is associated with anxieties surrounding mental
illness, depression, suicide fantasies and a Punk-inspired teen nihilism. If Otto is indeed a
marginalised individual this is not his intention.

Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(1964) (Beacon Press, 1991).
6
Bruce LaBruce, A Message from the P.R.A.: Purple Resistance Army cited in International
Contemporary Art, Summer 2006. Taken from online web-source:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6371/is_90/ai_n29468328/

Otto eventually plays a zombie hiding in plain sight in Medeas movie, leaving the audience to
ascertain his true status for themselves. His attempts to pass and fit in with the fake-zombies
eventually fail. Yet it still allows LaBruce to propose the fake-zombies as a modish, homosexual
community obsessed with appearance, novelty and the frivolous assimilation of fashionable
discourses. In Otto, for the most part, zombie is a style that is assimilated or adopted by
conformist homosexuals as a kind of sado-masochistic club-wear. Here LaBruce is referencing a
fashionable trend within popular culture, which celebrates the figure of the zombie in performance
and installation art. Across the US and Europe various countries have hosted Zombie-thons and
Days of the Dead in which public participants are invited to attend events, meetings and even
pub-crawls en masse dressed as zombies in a celebration of the cultural icon. 7

The fetishising of the gay skinhead-type-as-zombie recurs throughout LaBruces films, and Otto is
no exception where stealing identity goes hand in hand with cannibalism. Fritz and his gang of
revolutionary fake zombies, adopt a fake zombie-macho masculinity and a fake cannibalism, yet
Otto as authentic zombie is ambiguously presented as an essentialist gay zombie type. So why
do these conformist zombies choose a particular aesthetic, a certain set of masculine behavioural
traits? They steal and cannibalise macho skinhead hypermasculinity albeit infused with fascist
connotations. Diana Fuss Oral Incorporations applies Freuds understanding of identification as
cannibalism to her understanding of the narrative of The Silence of The Lambs (Demme, US
1991), which for her is a film all about the horrors of identification as oral cannibalistic
incorporation.8 For Fuss, and for Freud before her, cannibalistic desire and incorporation
fantasies are paralleled with identification and, further still a collapse of identification and desire. If
this is the case, is the gay male subject identifying with/desiring and cannibalising the
hypermasculine skin? The fake gay zombie skin borrows the skinheads connotation of clonish
7

These include social website Crawl of the Dead (http://www.crawlofthedead.com) which

advertises zombie pub crawls, festivals and marches across the world including, Iowas City
Zombie March, Zombie Walk in London, Canada and the World Zombie Day held in London,
United Kingdom in October 2008. LaBruce himself recently exhibited his Untitled Hardcore
Zombie Project at the Soho Theatre in London, England and at Peres Projects Los Angeles in
2009 featuring nude IRA terrorist zombies with erections.
8

Fuss, Diana, Oral Incorporations in Identification Papers (New York, Routledge,

1995), pp 91.

white , idealised hypermasculinity, extreme right wing politics, oppressive violence (even as
ironically rendered in leftist revolutionary groups) and the iconography of fascist and Neo-Nazi
aesthetics. Yet for LaBruce, the uniform of the skinhead is not necessarily a proven indicator of
the traits which it connotes, and neither is the uniform of the gay zombie in the case of the fauxskins from Otto. In one scene a macho fake zombie/fake skin is also proven to be without power
in Ottos first love/death scene, where the queer skin is eviscerated and eaten by the wiry Otto.
Pseudo fascism, and thus, a pseudo-masculinity is de-fanged and emasculated by literal cannibal
assimilation. In effect LaBruce enacts a critique of the brain-dead, gay male club clones of Berlin,
who adopt a self-oppressive, fascist hypermasculinity instead championing Ottos unassimilated
punk as an anti-hero.

Susan Sontag notes that there is natural link between gay male sadomasochism and fascism9, in
this she implies the eroticization of fascism and especially Nazism is most prevalent within gay
male subcultures as part of a theatricalization of sexuality, whereby subjects take part in the
rehearsal of enslavement rather than its enactment.and that it is among homosexuals that the
eroticizing of Nazism is most visible. The discussion of the appeal of fascism for gay men,
revolves around several central themes, these include: the internalisation of a history of
oppression in various cultures; a sexualised projection of this in sadomasochistic (SM) practices
in the power structures offered to participants in SM sexual play; a re-masculinisation of gay male
subjectivity afforded via a valorisation of ber-masculine types; and the adoption of fascist
symbols, tropes clothing and iconography. What emerges, are strategies of identification with
codes of fascist behaviour, iconography and behaviour that paradoxically prohibit yet require and
permit homosexual behaviour.
Sontag points out recurring themes and motifs of the fascist aesthetic, such works appear to
objectify the masses and the individuals who make it up, in what she states is,
the turning of people into things, the multiplication of things and grouping people or things
around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or forceFascist art glorifies surrender, it
9

Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism, in The New York Review of Books, (Vol. 22 No. 1
February 6, 1975) taken from online source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9280

exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.10

With this in mind, then Otto; or, Up With Dead People, its characters, its themes and its
aesthetic would seem to come close to Sontags classification of a fascist text. LaBruces
narrative involves the commodification of Otto as muse, the sub-plot of Fritzs recruitment of an
army of gay zombies, the role of dominant, aggressive and charismatic leader is clearly
represented in Medea Yarns (whose status as filmmaker is perhaps suggests her as a Leni
Reifenstahl-like figure). Above all, Otto is continually at tensions to submit to the wider group
dynamic, and assimilate, to surrender to the hypnotic leader in LaBruces film, a text that
ultimately glamorizes death. While not explicitly referencing Nazism, the films fascist uniforms
come in the form of the skinhead gay zombie style that is perpetuated by Fritz and his followers.
Again I want to reiterate the fact that not all skinheads are indeed fascists or Nazis, yet LaBruces
cinematic history has often equated the skinhead look with fascism and Neo-Nazism. LaBruces
films have often featured many neo-Nazi style militaristic skinhead gangs and individuals whom
are represented as ravenously homosexual or bisexual11.But there is particular emphasis in Otto
placed upon the illusory nature of appearances, especially of gay zombies and of skinheads. The
zombie-look, in effect becomes a kind of uniform. Discussing the fetishisation of SS and Nazi
uniforms, Sontag notes:
Uniforms suggest fantasies of community, order, identity (through ranks, badges, medals,
which say who the wearer is and what he has done12

Even still in case of LaBruce, the uniform of the skinhead is not necessarily a proven indicator of
the traits which it connotes (i.e. right wing politics, straight masculinity) and neither is the uniform
of the gay zombie in the case of Otto. They simply eroticise those connotations and offer a means
by which to access a community of eroticism and a fantasy of oppression. In trying to fit in with a
sub-culture of zombie fakers Otto realises that he is alone in his predicament, refuses to be
assimilated and is ultimately alienated. La Bruce pastiches the fashionable adoption of styles in
order to pass off both a political and sexual subjectivity as authentic. Both political views and
10
11
12

Ibid.

See for example, No Skin Off My Ass, Hustler White, The Raspberry Reich and Skin Gang
Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism.

sexuality alike become modes or styles that one adopts or consumes in order to fetishise others
or oneself and, as such, they become part of an economic or sexual exchange.

LaBruce offers a satirical distance which critiques any subversive potential present in such
behaviours, but simultaneously eroticises the fascist hypermasculinity. The queer skin as a
fashion type in the wider Western culture is a parody of an authentic skinhead aesthetic, Murray
Healy13 argues that the queer skin, attempts to achieve a doubling of masculinisation yet can also
be seen to ultimately expose the supposed authenticity of masculinity as a performance in its own
affectation. James Haines disagrees suggesting that within the subcultures of authentic skins
and queer skins alike there is a stratification of authenticity between real skins and fashion
skins he points out that not every man gay or otherwise who shaves his head and puts on a
pair of bovver boots and braces will be regarded by skins (even queer skins) as a skinhead14. I
want to suggest that LaBruce draws attention to the illusory nature of this supposed authenticity
and the ambiguity of reading strategies by not disclosing Ottos true status. In Otto or Up With
Dead People, LaBruce replaces the stratification between real skins and fashion skins with real
zombies and fashion zombies real zombies (Otto) fashion zombies (skins)

In queering the skin LaBruces previous films have attempted subversion of a masculine,
oppressive stereotype, in Otto, however gay skin is fused with gay zombie and both are shown to
be illusory. The queer skin is effectively skinned. La Bruces recurring cinematic queer skins in
their mimicry of macho masculinity offer both a valorisation of erotic hypermasculinity (as a film
maker LaBruce trades in the replication of such imagery) while also offering a satirical critique of
such performative behaviour. LaBruce achieves two things in highlighting the performative nature
of hypermasculine types fascism being one alternative structure among many. Firstly he
satirises both straight hypermasculinity and fascism (real skins and the real historical fascists)
as hypocritical in suggesting their repressed homosexuality. Secondly he satirises the gay male
13
14

Healy, Murray, p 126.

James Haines, Skinning the Queer: An Internet Ethnography of the Queer Skinhead
Brotherhood presented at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference (Tampere, Finland
1998).

subjects valorising of such trends as a means of disavowing femininity as equally false and selfoppressive.

Medea states at one point that Death is the new pornography yet LaBruce suggests that it is
not sex that is the main draw, but the suggestion (or promise) of death that replaces it. Sex, too,
is used as a method or reconnecting to the communal, but is eventually proven to be a
disappointment, Ottos final scene of lovemaking with Fritz is visualised as promising redemption
but ultimately proves unsatisfying with Otto enacting a fictional suicide before leaving Berlin to
travel north. Despite his connection with Fritz and the conformist homosexuality offered to him,
Otto remains marginalised and is unable to compromise his alternative subjectivity and be
assimilated. The denouement can be understood as a musing upon the nihilism of young men
who consider suicide as a consequence of (and solution to) non-conformity and of their failure to
be accepted, or their lack of desire to be accepted into normative culture. However like the
zombie who continues to live in misery and remains disconnected, LaBruce suggests that death
is neither an end nor answer. Otto instead is cast into a limbo-like state never knowing others like
him, not being able to separate reality from fantasy, never reaching a satisfactory, jouissancefilled end or experiencing the suicidal ecstacy15 connoted in the combination of sex and death.

Ottos final journey is presented as another utopian fantasy. Given the films cynical tone and its
overt nihilism, LaBruce is perhaps suggests this too is a futile act. Read in either way: as
symbolic suicide or journey of discovery into the unknown, both will eventually prove
unsatisfying. Otto ironically states, Maybe I will find a whole new way of death following the
films reversal of the life/death binary opposition suggests Otto wishes for a whole new way of life.
He continues:
At one point I did consider ending it all, like at the end of Medeas movie. But how do you
kill yourself, if you are already dead?
In this final shot, by a rural roadside of saturated yellow fields and blue skies, a rainbow appears
behind Ottos head. Framed in this way by the most venerable of queer symbols, Ottos words
15

Bersani, Leo, Is the Rectum a Grave? in October (Issue 43 Winter 1987) p. 210

take on a new resonance taking him over the rainbow.

Bibliography
Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave, in October (Issue 43: Winter, 1987)
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality, (1905) (Penguin Edition 1991)
Diana Fuss, Oral Incorporations: Silence of the Lambs in Identification Papers (Routledge,
London/New York, 1995)
James Haines, Skinning the Queer: An Internet Ethnography of the Queer Skinhead
Brotherhood presented at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference (Tampere, Finland
1998).
Matthew Hays, The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers (Arsenal
Pulp Press, 1997)
Murray Healy, Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation (Continuum International
Publishing, 1996),
Bruce LaBruce, A Message from the P.R.A.: Purple Resistance Army exhibited by International
Contemporary Art, Summer 2006. Cited online at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6371/is_90/ai_n29468328/
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(1964) (Beacon Press, 1991).
Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (FAB Press 2008)
Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism, in The New York Review of Books, (Vol. 22 No. 1 February
6, 1975) taken from online source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/9280