Review of the book "Porn Diaries: How to make it in hardcore without even setting out to do so"

Abstract

This review examines Porn Diaries: How to Succeed in Hardcore Without Even Trying, a compendium of autobiographical texts, shooting chronicles and artistic reflections by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, a key figure in the queer punk movement. Through a confessional, ironic and provocative style, LaBruce reconstructs two decades of aesthetic, political and sexual experimentation on the margins of popular culture, particularly on the margins of gay porn cinema. Divided into chapters that alternate between memoirs, film diaries and curatorial texts, the book offers a radical look at the performativity of desire, the violence of normative codes, the commodification of the body and the political dimension of sexually explicit art.

The publication is not only an invaluable queer archive of creative practices and processes, but also an irreverent manifesto against the established order of commercial porn, assimilationist activism and sanitised representations of LGBTIQ+. This journey is traversed by iconic figures such as Peter Berlin, François Sagat, Kembra Pfahler or LaBruce himself, in a sort of sentimental archive of the audiovisual counterculture. Through its seventeen chapters, Porn Diaries offers an incarnated, lucid and visceral testimony of how it is possible to succeed in hardcore without setting out to do so... or precisely for not setting out to do so.