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Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and

queer socialities
a

Shaka McGlotten
a

Media, Society, and the Arts Faculty, Purchase College, SUNY,

Purchase, NY, USA
Published online: 03 Nov 2014.

To cite this article: Shaka McGlotten (2014) Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities,
Porn Studies, 1:4, 360-377, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2014.957492
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Porn Studies, 2014

Vol. 1, No. 4, 360377, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2014.957492

Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities

Shaka McGlotten*

Downloaded by [Memorial University of Newfoundland] at 00:41 12 November 2014

Media, Society, and the Arts Faculty, Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, USA
(Received 15 January 2014; accepted 22 May 2014)
This essay examines two gay zombie films by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce.
I look to the ways LaBruce brings together the already intimate genres of horror
and porn to paint an ambivalent picture of contemporary gay life and what he calls
the death of gay culture. Zombies and zombie sex are deployed to level an
anarcho-punk critique at contemporary queer collusions with necropolitical power.
At the same time, explicit scenes of zombie sex gesture toward an always immanent
political potentiality lodged within necropolitics. Rather than herald only a dead or
failed future, LaBruces gay zombies express disaffected, impersonal socialities,
and especially forms of sex and politics that are deemed retrograde but that
paradoxically suggest undead presents and futures. These necropolitical socialities
are stubbornly animate, undying efforts that improvise intimate publics appropriate to contemporary precarities.
Keywords: zombies; queer; necropolitics; Bruce LaBruce; Otto; L.A Zombie

Introduction
[T]he gay movement is a zombie movement. It vaguely looks like its former self,
operating remotely like it used to, going through the motions. But theres no real life to
it, no purpose, beyond bland consumerism. (LaBruce 2011a)

A hulking silhouette rises from the ocean. It wades toward the beach like a
shipwrecked slave. Except this is Los Angeles, and the indigo figure is marked as
another kind of other, an alien zombie. The zombie hitches a ride with a cute guy in
a truck, but things go horribly wrong; there is a screeching accident. We soon learn
more about this zombies difference. He is not in Los Angeles to eat brains or as part
of a ravaging horde. Rather, as one of the promotional posters for the film,
underground filmmaker Bruce LaBruces (2010) L.A. Zombie, proclaimed: He
Came to Fuck the Dead Back to Life.
The zombie, played by porn star and model Franois Sagat, inserts his
monstrous, barbed penis into the gaping chest wound of the crash victim. After a
few moments, his black, oil-like ejaculate arcs over the mans face and body, reviving
him. Perhaps as an expression of gratitude, the reanimated trucker gives it up on the
side of the road, bottoming for his undead saviour.
I open with this graphic description of zombie sex in the spirit of LaBruces own
provocations. Gauntlet thrown, LaBruce disrupts good taste, generic conventions,
and pornographic expectations. Mixing zombies and sex, he speak[s] the wild
*Email: shaka.mcglotten@purchase.edu
2014 Taylor & Francis

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Figure 1. Promotional poster for L.A. Zombie.

language of the indeterminable (Brinkema 2007, 97). Is it art or porn? High-concept

genre mash-up or camp? Critical indictment or sneer? In L.A. Zombie and his earlier
gay zombie film, Otto; Or, Up With Dead People (LaBruce 2008), LaBruce brings
together the already intimate genres of horror and porn to paint an ambivalent

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S. McGlotten

picture of contemporary gay life and what he calls the death of gay culture (LaBruce
2011a). By this, he means the end of vital forms of queer sociality, including the
political organizing and creative array of intimate or carnal arrangements, as well as
the in-your-face anti-authoritarianism that marked earlier queer historical moments,
such as Gay Liberation, AIDS activism, and the queer punk movement he helped
foment in the 1980s. These once-living cultures, he says, are now merely going
through the motions, reduced to bland consumerism (LaBruce 2011a).
In these films, LaBruce uses zombies to level an anarcho-punk critique at
contemporary queer collusions with necropolitical power, those formal and informal
arrangements that deem some lives more valuable than others; that reduce
populations to bare life or make them liquid, disposable. Yet at the same time,
through explicit scenes of zombie sex like the one above, he gestures toward an
always immanent political potentiality lodged within necropolitics. Some kinds of
death, like bourgeois homonormativity, may be worse than others, and some are
animating or reanimating, like the radical charge produced through sex, even or
especially undead sex. Thus, rather than herald a dead or failed future, LaBruces
gay zombies express disaffected, impersonal socialities, and forms of belonging
deemed retrograde, like anonymous, public, extreme, or risky sex. In so doing,
LaBruce evokes and reworks the conflation of gay sexuality with death, an
association already prevalent before the AIDS crisis, and which anti-social queer
theorists like Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, among others, have sought,
in different ways, to recuperate. Gay zombie sex at once dead(ly) and enlivening
paradoxically suggests the undead presents and futures of queer socialities; that vast
arrangement of forms, practices, and orientations of connection and alienation
through which queers continue to stubbornly improvise intimate publics appropriate
to the precarities we daily confront. In LaBruces films, then, gay zombies appear as
double allegories. On the one hand, they incite (and often scold) queers to attend to
our imbrication with the violence of imperial and capitalist governmentalities and
the death worlds they produce. On the other, his gay zombies remind us to attend to
those still animate forms of belonging identified as dead ends, like radical sex or a
commitment to mattering participants (Chen 2012, 187) that bound, and might still
bind, gender and sexual non-conformists to anti-capitalist (as well as anti-racist or
anti-colonial) energies.
My readings of LaBruces zombie films look to the ways gay zombies and
zombie porn frame necropolitical sex and socialities, not as absolute impasses but as
animating the organizing double binds of contemporary queer politics our
collusions with death worlds and the vital potential that still nestle within them.
LaBruces zombies are not monsters to be feared but prototypical examples of
queers anticipating routes, however awkward, lost, or shambling, toward an
individual and collective ethics that includes depersonalized, asocial, but still
culpable, intimacies that are sutured, if always incompletely, by carnal infrastructures of attachment, and the real and imagined pleasures, sufferings, hopes, and fears
we glom onto belonging and sex.
The queer undead
Otto; Or, Up With Dead People tells the stories of Otto, a young amnesiac gay
zombie, and Medea Yarn, an experimental filmmaker (her name is an anagram of

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Maya Deren, the famous filmmaker and director of Divine Horseman [Deren 1985],
a still relevant documentary about voodoo and Haiti) and stand in for LaBruce, who
wants to make a documentary about him while also completing her larger politicalporno-zombie movie Up With Dead People, in which an undead gay army uses
zombie sex to foment a revolutionary uprising against the deadened living. Yarn is
looking to make a point: capitalism has made us all zombies, and, paradoxically, we
should embrace this zombification as a new form of vitality and collectively direct
our undead energies against the institutions that induce deadened living. Living
death, Yarn suggests, does not have to be a dead end if used to disrupt the system
that produced the condition in the first place. Otto, meanwhile, has more modest
aims; he is looking for an identity and for connection. Although his quest ends with
neither of these things, along the way he models forms of impersonal sociality,
extimate non-relating, and failure celebrated in some recent queer theory (Love 2007;
Bersani and Phillips 2008; Nyongo 2010; Berlant 2011; Halberstam 2011),1 thereby
offering alternatives to winner-takes-all visions of personal sovereignty or achievement. In L.A. Zombie, the titular character moves through the Los Angeles
underworld, fucking dead young men back to life, and turning the traditional
conceit of the zombie a monster that infects, kills, and transforms its victims into
zombies on its head. This zombie gives life but ends up depressed by what he finds:
victims, castaways, and clones.
Zombies have been a mainstay of US mass culture since at least the 1920s and
1930s, and while early cinematic zombies drew on the figures African origins, the
recent spate of zombie texts, which cut across media platforms, build on the modern
zombie ur-text, George Romeros Night of the Living Dead (1968). In this familiar
zombie second wave, zombies are braindead cannibals created by some apocalyptic,
supernatural, or alien force. They stupidly, but determinedly, stumble after the flesh
of the living, famously driven by their mindless, relentless hunger. LaBruces films
are situated within a larger zombie renaissance that has taken place over the last
decade (Bishop 2009). Contributions creatively rework the zombie, featuring among
other things fast zombies (28 Days Later [Boyle 2002] and its sequel 28 Weeks Later
[Fresnadillo 2007]) and zombie buddies (Shaun of the Dead [Wright 2004] and Fido
[Currie 2006]), while literary contributions re-imagine literary classics as zombie
adventure tales (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [Grahame-Smith 2009]) or present
oral histories of the zombie apocalypse to come (World War Z [Forster 2013]).
Zombie-themed proms and flash mobs abound. Colleges and government agencies
use zombies to encourage students and citizens to think about disaster preparedness.
Several years ago, Fleshlight and Fleshjack, manufacturers of popular masturbation
sleeves, released zombie editions.2
Zombies are potent figures, rich with meanings tied to race (see Moreman and
Rushton 2011), labour, consumption, and the sometimes blurry divisions that divide
categories of death and life. How can the living collectively navigate precarious,
deadening worlds of violence and unceasing work? How is something dead (like a
body, the state, or capitalism) but nonetheless animate or animating? LaBruces
intervention is novel in part for the ways he actualizes the zombies pornographic
potential.3 Steven Shaviro had already noted zombies weird attractiveness in a
discussion of Romeros zombie films: The participatory contact [zombies] promise
and exemplify is in a deep sense what we most strongly desire; or, better, we
gradually discover that it is already the hidden principle of our desire (1993, 97).

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We want to be wanted, and we want love to tear us apart even as it promises to make
us whole.4
Excepting Shaviros early theorization and a handful of screen media precursors,
zombies relationships to sex and sexuality seem otherwise overlooked. This is a
curious omission given the ways zombies, like other notable movie monsters (namely
vampires and werewolves), reproduce through violent but often highly eroticized
forms of bodily contact. Horror scholarship has, moreover, extensively noted the
generic affinities between horror and pornography, as well as the constitutive role
sex plays in many horror subgenres, notably slasher films (Clover 1992;
Halberstam 1995). LaBruces horror/porn mash-up simply makes explicit zombies
relationship to sex and the ways horror and porn share a fascination with bodies,
what goes on inside them, and what they are capable of doing or having done to
them. Turning again to Shaviro, both genres insidiously exacerbate and exasperate
[our] least socially acceptable desires (1993, 101), like cannibalism and necrophilia.
Zombies are especially useful in thinking through the vectors and politics of
reproductive socialities. The zombie horde swells through violent forms of contagion
and, in most zombie texts, groups of humans, families, or their analogues struggle to
survive the zombapocalpyse and presumably repopulate the world. Sex functions as
an anxious reprieve to a dystopian threat and as a promise that future generations of
the living will still inherit the earth. In one sense, sex tends to buttress
heteronormative fantasies: the nuclear family closes ranks and is arrayed against
an encroaching horde (of zombies, queers, immigrants). Heterosexuality is salvific,
and the world can endure, so long as gender and sexual norms are reproduced. On
the other hand, zombie procreation represents a powerful alternative to and
supersedes heterosexual breeding, which appears as a reactionary and wholly
insufficient prophylactic against post-human endtimes.
Part of the frisson zombie porn induces has to do with the ways we are made
uncomfortable by the slippage between dead bodies and sexualized ones, and
between experiences of desire and disgust that the proximity of death and sex evoke.
As Achille Mbembe, following Bataille, says: [t]he truth of sex and its deadly
attributes reside in the experience of loss of the boundaries separating reality, events,
and fantasized objects (2003, 15). Zombie porn reminds us that sexual socialities are
not necessarily lively or life-giving; they are also violent, banal, boring, dead, as the
proliferation of porn that dramatizes sexualized fantasies of control and degradation
attests. In Tim Deans (2009) important book Unlimited Intimacy, he documents the
double movement of gay male desires for unprotected sex a desire for risky or raw
sex, even for life-threatening sero-conversion (becoming HIV-positive), that simultaneously articulates a powerful sexual vitality, even a radically ethical openness to the
other.5
LaBruces zombies refract and resist these ideas, pointedly upending generic
conventions: his gay zombies are melancholic protagonists rather than braindead
cannibals, and they eschew the horde in favour of a Gothic solitude. Most
importantly, these zombies engage in gay sex, reflecting both homophobic fears
about a sexually voracious and infectious swarm, as well as the fears of progressive
or radical queers who decry the neoliberal groupthink of assimilationist politics and
the banalization of gay sex publics. The gay zombie neatly condenses ideas about
gay sex as symptom and cure for what ails gay cultures. Some zombies stand in for
the beefed-up-but-numbed-out clone, the monstrously oversexed barebacker, or the

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consummately apolitical gay consumer citizen. Others, like Otto and the L.A.
Zombie, appear as schizophrenic outcasts expressing forms of selfhood and sociality
that trouble clones and homonorms alike: they are incoherent, resolutely singular,
post human. Yet Otto and the L.A. Zombie also evoke queer publics youth, the
poor or homeless, the racially marginalized, or the mentally ill for whom slow
death (Berlant 2011, 95120) is an ordinary experience of life. LaBruces gay
zombies, like other members of queer publics lateral to mainstream LGBT movements, embody a hunger for contact or community that manifests as atypical
reproduction or as productive contamination were here, were queer, and we
recruit. For LaBruce, the circuit that promises connection even as it occludes it, the
force perhaps most responsible for the death of gay culture, is capitalism.
Zombie capitalism
Achille Mbembe offers necropolitics as a notion that can help us to understand the
ways contemporary death-worlds have turned people into the living dead (2003, 40).
Wars do this, as an expression of the sovereign right to kill. But among the writing
left (J. Dean 2009), neoliberal capitalism generative, expansive, but ultimately
deadening is often to blame insofar as it subtends and animates (through military
industrial complexes, market deregulation, and the upward redistribution of wealth,
among other things) the production of death worlds, the liquidation or wearing out
of populations.
Since Romeros (1978a) Dawn of the Dead, pop-culture zombies have increasingly been tied to the horrors of a necropolitical capitalism (for an overview of
zombies and consumerism, see Harper 2002). In the film, survivors of a zombie
apocalypse seek, and temporarily find, safety in the consumer wonderland of a
suburban mall; the survivors speculate that the zombies gather at the mall because it
is a familiar and comforting place. In Land of the Dead (Romero 2005), Romero
imagines the return of a feudal form of capitalism not so different from the one
under which we currently live, in which elites dine in high-end restaurants and enjoy
all of the benefits of a tasteful life under the protection of a security state, while the
unwashed masses live in shanty towns exposed to the zombie threat.
In these and other zombie texts, zombies evoke the image of consumption run
amok and allegorize the logical end to capitalist society in which all resources from
cognitive capital to the legal and illegal trafficking in body parts, but, above all, our
labour have to be extracted in the service of profit. While Marx famously described
capitalism with salaciously Gothic references to vampirism capital is dead labour,
that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more
labour it sucks ([1867] 1978, 362336) zombies have emerged as the preferred
metaphor for understanding contemporary capitalism and its crises.6 Critics
variously employ the zombie metaphor to describe the ways in which governments
collude to keep capital flows alive, to prevent the failure of financial systems by
injecting them with enough cash to shamble along (Giroux 2010; Harman 2010).
They point to the effects of casino capitalism on the working and middle classes, who
are joining the precariat in a struggle to stay alive in the face of the voracious
appetite of a speculative but indifferent market. And they show the effects of
corporate authoritarianism, the economic interests of the militarized and punitive
state, and the practices of cruelty and disposability such a state cultivates and

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S. McGlotten

exploits for profit. In recent years, critiques of homonormativity and homonationalism have illustrated the ways neoliberal economic and political trends increasingly
absorb sexual non-conformists through forms of sexual exceptionalism that neuter
liberatory political expression, instead capturing, channelling, and modulating queer
sexual identities through forms of productive tolerance that seek to maximize
economic output (Duggan 2003; Puar 2007; Bourcier 2013).
Importantly, the Wests imperial fantasies and fears about zombies, about hordes
of flesh-eating cannibals or otherwise voracious appetites that threaten racial and
sexual contamination, are rooted in black economic and political experiences of, and
challenges to, capitalist exploitation. As Sibylle Fischer observes in an essay about
Haiti and Agambens (1998) bare life, the figuring of Haiti as a site for a
Grotesque Otherness rife with voodoo and zombies:
goes back to the origins of the state in a slave revolution, which was perceived by
French colonists and most observers abroad not as a political event with political goals,
an event to be understood in the context of the revolutionary age, but as a matter of
bloodshed, rape, and boundless material destruction. (2007, 2)

It is no coincidence that the zombie is so strongly associated with Haiti, where the
enslaved zombies threw off their colonial chains to violent effect. The zombies
monstrous difference simultaneously identifies the mindless indifference of an
enslaving and rapacious capitalism, and the equally and necessarily mindless labour
that supports it. Yet it is also a potentially revolutionary blockage to capitalist
expropriation.
In Medea Yarns Up With Dead People, her political-porno manifesto, zombies
are likewise a racialized underclass, a group of revolutionaries united by their shared
oppression and arrayed against the capitalist powers that be and those seduced by
them, the deadened living. In a brief animated segment that provides a backdrop
for her own project, Yarn narrates:
when it was discovered that the gay undead craved the flesh of man, they were hunted
down and eliminated even more ruthlessly than previous generations. Gangs of
marauding street youths stomped on the heads of zombies and set them on fire until
they ceased to exist. (LaBruce 2008)7

In another scene, this one from her documentary about Otto, she brings him to a
garbage dump, where she crowns him Prince of the Zombies. Precariously
balancing him on the top of a trash heap, she says in a voiceover that caricaturizes
the pedantry of self-important filmmakers and anti-capitalist activists alike: The
redundant, unnecessary work upon which advanced capitalism is predicated,
characterized by a deadening or stupefying effecta kind of zombie state when
performed by the working or middle-class subject. When Yarn asks Otto whether he
understands and he fails to reply affirmatively, she tries to simplify things for him
(and perhaps for us), advising: Think of [the film] as a metaphor for the heartless
technocrats that rule the earth and youll be fine. Here, as elsewhere in the film,
Ottos own political orientation is unclear or nonexistent. He is willing to serve as a
cipher for Yarns anti-capitalist art project, thereby reflecting the apolitical stance, or
merely self-interest, of homonormativity. At the same time, his mute indifference
queerly resists the demand to get worked up, to get involved, or be productive.

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Socialities of deadened living

Capitalism appears as a defining impasse of our shared present, but it is not just a
dead end. It is generative of, among many other things, new relationships to time,
consumption, materialities (space, ecology), forms of knowing, and to human and
non-human others. Contra his alter ego who sees it as the enemy (reflecting an
inverted image of the neoliberal mantra There Is No Alternative), LaBruces
engagement with capitalism treats the affects and effects of capitalisms necropolitical thrusts more ambiguously. Otto embodies this ambivalence, and it is also
evident in the figures of Maximilian and Fritz, a gay couple who become leaders of
the undead revolution in Yarns Up With Dead People.
Early in the film, Fritz walks through the streets of Berlin, frightened by ominouslooking strangers. Upon arriving at his apartment, he discovers a note, and then his
lover Maxs body. But Maxs suicide is short-lived. His eyes open and he stumbles
back to life, biting and infecting Fritz. Maxs hunger takes on an amorous cast as he
fucks one of Fritzs new orifices, a hole in his belly. As Darren Elliott-Smith notes, in
this scene the male bodys dual oral and anal orifices have been bypassed and an
entirely new erotic entry point is ripped in Fritzs stomachdirect to the site of
digestion. At once underscoring the queer zombies particularly unnatural modes of
reproduction, the scene also shows how [c]onsumption, digestion, and assimilation
seem to be the order of the day [] (Elliott-Smith 2013, 165).
Later, the two queer zombies, new to the unlife of the living dead, sit together
drinking their morning coffee and reading the newspaper in an iconic tableau of
coupledom (Figure 2). But with open wounds and sores, they are rougher around the
edges than even the worst early risers among us, and the small-talk that would
typically accompany such a scene is replaced with growling moans. Cannibalism and
banality are linked. Gay culture is dead in part, this domestic scene suggests, because
queers have sublimated radical sex to the confines of private space, thereby accepting
the bourgeois couple form as the telos of intimacy we would rather be dead
together than alone. In this image, coupled domesticity appears as a dead or
deadening repetition compulsion.

Figure 2. An iconic scene of undead coupledom from Otto.

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S. McGlotten

However, this reading is troubled by the ways Fritz and Max later form the
nucleus of the revolutionary gay zombie army to come. They do not just stay at
home to enjoy their new unlife together. They are happier dead, and they are
engaged. But what might amount to their second honeymoon is interrupted during
one of their activist forays into the city. Street toughs in masks, echoing the
ultraviolent punks of A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971), encircle them, pull away
a struggling Fritz and then execute Max, who dies a second, final time, after being
shot in the head and set aflame.
This scene matters in the ways it highlights the ambivalent paradox, and critical
intervention, of LaBruces politics. What appears like a homonormative concession we
are here, queer, dead, and we will get used to it still manages to ignite an effort toward
social transformation. After Maxs death, Fritz goes on a recruiting spree, fucking,
killing, and partially devouring vigorous young men, not necessarily in that order.
Otto articulates a different political stance, a different sort of refusal his
asociality is not revolutionary, but modest, flatly curious, and a little indifferent. In
Darren Elliott-Smiths reading, Otto is a zombie anti-hero who represents a selfloathing, nihilistic, sexually indifferent, apolitical and dysfunctional gay male
subjectivity (2013, 156). In his stumbling search for himself he allows Medea
Yarn to make a documentary about him and agrees to participate in her
revolutionary zombie porn film. He also refuses to be drawn too far into her
group-thinking scene of aesthetes and political poseurs, or out from his, in Yarns
eyes, psychosis; he is pretty sure he is a zombie and not just a crazy homeless kid,
although the film is ultimately undecided on this point.
Otto thereby enacts a set of refusals oriented against sociality and politics,
including a seeming unresponsiveness to sex. In one scene he sits in an abandoned
playground at night. Two figures emerge from the gloom. Cruisers, zombies, or
both? He impassively watches as they make out with each other and nuzzle against
him. His impersonal asociality is nonetheless an appropriate response to the binds of
social demands made on him. To whom might Otto reasonably belong? Normal
society rejects him he is dirty and smells. People on the train mock him, and his exboyfriend, whom he discovers as his memory begins to return, explains that he had
ended things with Otto because of Ottos disorders of the soul eating disorders,
melancholia, schizophrenia. Yarn welcomes him in to her avant-garde posse but
only, ironically, to exploit him in her anti-capitalist efforts. His impersonal sociality
is not a political stance against anything per se; it is a politics the potential of which
lodges precisely in the immanence of refusal. This is not refusal as a grand gesture or
as a move toward something else in particular. He casually deflects the demand to
get involved, or to get worked up by the potential charge of a sexual scene. Ottos
subjectivity aligns with Halberstams recent re-workings of the queer anti-social
thesis in The Queer Art of Failure. Rather than reject sociality and politics altogether,
Ottos refusals are marked by vulnerability, a masochistic passivity. That is, his
decidedly non-heroic agency is enacted not with a bang, but a whimper (Halberstam
2011, 150). Or, drawing on Heather Loves (2007) analysis in Feeling Backward, we
might understand Ottos refusals as a non-instrumental dwelling in refusal, a form of
negativity that also refuses to be redeemed, to be channelled toward positive
subjective or political aims.
After he helps Medea Yarn finish her film about him at the end of which he
flames out in an act of self-immolation Otto chooses to leave Berlin rather than

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seek community among either the conformist gays or reactionary revolutionaries

represented by Medea and her (fake) zombie army (Elliott-Smith 2013). Like some
anti-capitalist activists who seek remedies to the seemingly overdetermined capture
of our crisis-prone, undead economic system, he decides to go off the grid. He
follows Frankenstein monsters path north, where he hopes to discover a whole new
way of death, a choice that resonates with Lee Edelmans (2004) admonitions in No
Future that the integrity of queerness lies in its refusal to embrace the social. Yet the
rejection of a reproductive futurism, which Edelman defines as a foundational,
sentimental, and murderous political hopefulness routed through the image of the
child writ large, is not a complete rejection of life, or even death-in-life. Indeed,
Ottos journey begins with the auspicious appearance of a rainbow, an ephemeral
and sweet image of a queer optimism that marks, at least, an immanent interest in
the present (see Snediker 2009).
Necropolitical presents and latent alternatives or refusals also feature prominently in L.A. Zombie. As in Otto, in L.A. Zombie LaBruce reworks the zombie
conceit. Rather than infect, consume, or kill those he comes into contact with, the
film follows the L.A. Zombie as he wanders through a violent Los Angeles
underworld, fucking dead young men back to life (this differs from Yarns
revolutionary zombies, who first kill and partially consume their victims before
reanimating them with sex). These men include, among others, a crash victim, a
homeless person, and a group of porn stars murdered during a drug deal gone bad.
In the films opening shots, the zombie emerges from the Pacific Ocean, an
arrival that echoes the arrival of enslaved Africans to Atlantic shores. The sea evokes
a vast elsewhere, and together with the make-up and prosthetics, including dark,
bruised skin, fangs, and his oversized and barbed penis, the zombie is marked as
alien. His racialized alterity is again underscored by the understanding that, as in
Otto, the zombie may be schizophrenic and homeless, a point visually represented in
the film by Sagats homeless chic, his shuffling gate, and most obviously in a scene
he shares with a Los Angeles street person, who graciously shares his grocery cart
with the film crew.
Unlike Otto, who is verbal if flat, the L.A. Zombie is mute; but by the end of the
film, his disappointment is palpable. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by his encounters
with death, or, more likely, he found the gays dead or alive crushingly alien. The
end of the film finds him weeping blood, digging his own grave.
In their modern incarnations, zombies hunger. In LaBruces films they do not just
hunger for the flesh of the living, but for living forms of sociality. At once inside and
outside an array of alter-publics of hipsters, activists, artists, criminals, druggies,
and sluts LaBruces gay zombies awkwardly navigate the promises of queer
sociality, of being proximate, as well as the exclusions contoured by the seductions
and violences of capitalism. In these zombie allegories, sex connects one to others,
and it does not.
Necrosexuality; or, continuity is so bourgeois
LaBruce treats zombie necrosexuality ambivalently as life-giving and redemptive,
but also as deadening or dull. This is part of the challenge these texts pose to
criticism: how does one make sense of queer zombie sex when it operates as both a
critique and a defence of gay culture and sex? In the age of zombie capitalism, what

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happens to sociality writ large, and what happens to the boundaries of queer
socialities, which have always held the potential to be indiscriminately capacious?
L.A. Zombie focuses on the exclusions produced by the assimilation of gay culture
into mainstreams that would excise the socially (read: economically) unproductive.
In the film, the socially abandoned, those positioned as the losers in capitalisms
increasingly zero-sum game, are central figures. As he notes in his production diary
and in the films bonus features, LaBruce explicitly situates L.A. Zombie in relation
to Los Angeles homeless population, the largest and most visible in the United
States. If Otto was LaBruces paean to homeless queer youth, L.A. Zombie is an
elegy for the gleaners of queer sex, those who are on the margins of society, living
off its cast off excesses.8
L.A. Zombie is structurally and narratively looser, even messy, compared with
Otto, which has neatly intersecting multiple narratives, a complex mise-en-abyme
structure common to LaBruces other films.9 L.A. Zombie is artful, but there are
some problems, especially with the continuity: Sagats clothing changes within
scenes; he likewise appears in and out of his zombie make-up; sometimes he has
fangs, but not always; and blood seeps from his mouth, although it is unclear from
whence it comes. These difficulties were in part generated by obvious practical
concerns. Given a mere week-long shooting schedule and the need to film some
scenes guerilla style without official permission, it is clear that applying the zombie
make-up was time-consuming and could not always be completed for each scene.
More notably, Sagat could not have on-screen sex with the prosthetic penis. Its scale,
which together with its dark hue evokes the spectre of a black monster cock, would
make it too large for all but the most voracious bottoms, and he seems, perhaps
more importantly, to have to hold it in place. The solutions to these difficulties result
in strange juxtapositions: Sagat in alien zombie make-up puts a condom on his
impressive but clearly human-scaled penis. And in most of the sex scenes,
stroboscopic cuts flash between Sagat as a zombie, or at least in partial zombie
make-up, and a human. The continuity and editing are disorienting. But as the film
progresses and this quality is enhanced by multiple viewings, it becomes clear that
the challenges (or failures) of the production actually contribute to, or have been
cleverly channelled into, the sense that what we are seeing is a schizoids fantasy. As
LaBruce remarked in his production diary, apropos his critique of capitalism,
continuity is so bourgeois (2009).10

Figure 3. The L.A. Zombie.

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The sometimes amateurish production values are mediated by striking visual

images, Kevin D. Hoovers melancholic score, and a macabre humour and
sentimentality that infuse the film, qualities lost on the Australian Film Classification Board when it banned the film from the Melbourne International Film Festival
in 2010. Then, of course, there is the sex itself a giant alien dick gently probes a
wound and ejaculates black semen on the startled face of a crash victim; the zombie
pulls a corpse into his lair above the L.A. River before fucking the dead body back
to life; a dumped body receives the zombies attention and reawakens to eagerly
perform fellatio. The sex, although it directly confronts and transgresses taboos of
necrophilia, manages to be hot, silly, and dull, sometimes all at once.
Like Otto, the L.A. Zombie also suffers an existential crisis. He is looking for
some living form of sociality, but in spite of his reanimating prowess his revivifying
sex seems incomplete. He can bring dead men back to life, but can he likewise
reanimate gay culture or vital forms of gay belonging? Whereas in Otto zombie
sex appears largely in Yarns film as part of the revolutionary zombies political
project infecting and fucking young men into the gay zombie army to battle with
the deadened living in the second, explicitly pornographic film, sex figures more
prominently but ambivalently. On the one hand, it is enlivening, even redemptive
after all, it brings the dead back to life. And on the other, it appears as part of what
makes gay culture dead. Here I am thinking especially of critiques of gay sex and
cruising as defined by market logics, as dehumanizing, and as profoundly repetitive,
even or especially when they fetishize hyper-masculinity or theatricalize sex in, for
example, online cruising in which stats about ones race, age, height, weight, and
cock size figure prominently in a hierarchical marketplace of desire, or in some
BDSM scenes that turn on the acquisition and display of a panoply of
commodities. Or, returning to Tim Deans discussions of bareback sex and
pornography, I am struck by the ways the valourization of genital sex and fluid
exchange reflect dominant ideas that the only good sex is penetrative sex and that the
proof of sex lies in ejaculate. Likewise, sex in L.A. Zombie appears to only provide a
death-in-life that leaves intact an underlying identity crisis or anomie. After bringing
the dead back to life through sex, the zombie leaves. In one scene, porn actor Wolf
Hudson sits on the edge of a dirty mattress, alive but having adopted the pose of a
troubled lover, pensive or guilty, head resting in his hand.
While most of the L.A. Zombies sex partners have died as the result of direct
forms of violence, mostly at the hands of others, one stands out as a victim of social
indifference. Three homeless men gather in a zone of social abandonment. The
zombie stumbles into their tableau. One lies unmoving on a couch. Two others,
played by minor celebrities and friends of LaBruce, Tony Ward and Santino Rice,
engage in some of the only dialogue in the film, improvised and exaggerated
proclamations like Rices Wheres that dollar you owe me motherfucker? Rice tries
to wake a fifth man, identifiable only by a pair of feet sticking out from a cardboard
refrigerator box. Unable to wake the man, and then realizing he is dead, Rice urges
the other men to escape, saying I got a fucking job interview on Monday, man!
Lets get the fuck out of here! The three men depart, the figure on the couch
remains motionless, and the zombie stumbles toward the box and then crawls
inside. In a clever, magical realist touch, the inside of the box is vast; art director
Steve Hall has transformed it into a cardboard palace. There is a whole world here,
suggesting that the kinds of interiority and experience that the socially abandoned

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Figure 4. The L.A. Zombie seeks to reanimate an overdose victim.

possess are more expansive than those of us on the other side of this kind of hard
precarity tend to imagine. The sex that follows, however, is uneven and does little
to undo the films schizophrenic continuity. Here, for example, rather than revive
under the life-giving alien semen, the homeless overdose victim begins to show
modest signs of life as soon as Sagat sits on his face (Figure 4). LaBruce notes in his
production diary that:
[t]he other porn actor seems a little er unpresent, so he really does seem to have a
kind of homeless quality. If were lucky people will think hes the real McCoy, someone
we just dragged off the street and put in a porno. And why not? A jobs a job,
right?. (2009)

The apparent absence of a living interiority in the actor (his eyes are pretty glazed),
along with the cardboard boxs improvised, expansive interior, illustrates part of
what is at stake in LaBruces critique. On the one hand, gay cultures in their
normative incarnations ignore the injustice of social precarity. The spills on the
ground, the gallon jug of pee, rolls of toilet paper, and a stuffed unicorn contrast
sharply with the domestic scene from Otto in which the couple sips coffee and scans
the news. On the other, socially precarious queer life contains a vast, inaccessible,
virtual space, a site for an immanent politics or at least a modest political
reawakening. Then there is the sex, which operates as elsewhere in the film as a
means to this renewed life, but which can also be read as yet another dead or
deadening cause and effect, a reading supported by LaBruces own admission:
I must confess that I always lose interest in the explicit scenes when Im shooting a
porno. I guess that probably isnt a good sign. The mechanics of porn really arent very
sexy at all, and its very difficult to shoot sex in a novel way, so it always seems like the
same thing every time you do it.11 (2009)

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Figure 5. Dead muscle clones begin to revive, thanks to the L.A. Zombie's black ejaculate.

In the end, then, it appears that the zombies powers of reanimation only go so far.
The ambivalent nature of sex in the film is it enlivening, deadening, or both?
is especially illustrated by the films final sex scene. The zombie watches from outside
a window as a group of muscle queens in bondage gear, stars of gay adult
entertainment, engage in predictable and boring (if professional) sex. Two men
arrive, clearly representing drug dealers. The deal goes bad and the muscle clones are
killed (Figure 5). The zombie enters the bloody room and masturbates onto their
bodies, bringing them back to life. Covered in gore, the revived clones return to
having sex; they get back to what they were doing, death only a temporary
interruption to their drug-fuelled sex party, their rutting a rut.12 LaBruce believes
gay sex still matters, and that it can revitalize queer lives and politics, but as this
scene illustrates, he is also sceptical toward the forms such revitalization may take.

Queer death worlds

Rather than follow Edelmans Lacanian polemic in which the ethical thrust of queer
culture would be toward an absolute refusal of politics as usual, a pure refusal that
embraces a destructive jouissance, LaBruces zombie films seem to offer a more
modestly hopeful, if much less coherent, response to the political dilemmas posed by
homonormativity and homonationalism, along with other neoliberal political
formations, which dominant lesbian, gay, and queer political/consumer cultures
have tacitly endorsed.
There are at least two sets of refusals at work. First, LaBruces films underscore
homonormative/national refusals of an earlier politics of sexual liberation and the
consequences of these refusals for contemporary queer sociality, namely the anaemic
ways of imagining queer collectivity absorption into a murderous, imperialist
military industrial complex or into the inherently conservative institution of marriage
or through increasingly hierarchized and commodified erotic marketplaces.
Throughout the films analyzed here, as well as the rest of his oeuvre, LaBruce is

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particularly concerned with the effects capitalism has on queer cultures.13 In his
zombie films, the protagonists break with these collusions in so far as they represent
a sustained engagement with the precarity that continues to define the lives of most
same-sex loving people around the world, and most people generally, alongside the
intimate and carnal improvisations queers invent to respond to capitalist death
worlds. Secondly, LaBruce offers refusals in line with Edelmans call to refuse the
social, although he also gestures toward extant and immanent alternatives: radical
sex publics, anarchist art, solitude. He embraces what Jack Halberstam (2011) has
called the queer art of failure a web of practices, styles, and attitudes that
embrace masochism and passivity; that refuse the demands of positive thinking or an
affirmative culture.14 Failure is a counterintuitive site from which to imagine social
and political transformation. It is vital precisely through its relation to refusal,
because it does not and cannot chart a particular course toward change, but rather
reminds us of immanent alternatives to winner-takes-all visions of success, social,
economic, political, sexual, or otherwise. The gay zombie is a sign of the ways queer
socialities assimilate to regimes of deadened living, but it is also an improvisation of
new forms of belonging, sexual and otherwise, that work within and laterally to
necropolitics.
LaBruce clearly laments the disappearance of the creative, empathetic, and
antagonistic forms of queer living that were once the envy of everyone else. Sex
looms large here, figured as a nostalgic pre-AIDS or pre-economic collapse social
glue, and as an ambivalent effect of sexual panics and market forces. Yet however
ambivalent the position of sex in dead politics and culture, LaBruce nonetheless
believes it has a role to play. One way to reawaken the unbound, the films hint, is
through forms of sex, including necropolitical ones, that non-heroically counter
trends toward worn out, deadened living. His zombies are thus at once melancholic
effects of this slow death, and reminders of a vital archive from which queer politics
and culture might draw to reanimate the present. Otto and the L.A. Zombie offer no
guaranteed route toward revolutionary change, however; but through their impersonal refusals, vulnerabilities, and awkward sex, they draw our attention to the
potentials that immanently lodge in the failures of deadened living the failure to
belong, to connect, or get too attached to any particular future.

Notes
1. For an extended reading of Otto and his peculiar enactment of an indifferent autonomy,
see McGlotten (2011).
2. See http://www.fleshlight-international.eu/freaks/zombie/
3. LaBruces intervention is novel, but not unique. Zombiepinups.com has been showcasing
undead vixens since 2000. Other gay zombie texts include VidKid Timos (1998) porn film
At Twilight Come the Flesheaters, which also featured a mise-en-abyme structure, like
Otto, the short film Gay Zombie (Simon 2007), Creatures from the Pink Lagoon (Diani
2006), and a range of DIY YouTube videos. There is some notorious straight zombie
hardcore, too, notably Rob Rottens (2006) Porn of the Dead. See Steve Jones (2011)
analysis.
4. What Shaviro calls zombies modes of seductive implication include suspension, the
literalization of obscenity through dismemberment and cannibalism, and the affective
incitements and deferrals of bad taste (1993, 97100).
5. See especially his discussion of the gift of the virus in the chapter Breeding Culture
(T. Dean 2009, 4896).

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6. Even in Marxs day, however, the vampire may not have been the best monster to describe
the operations of capitalism. As Steven Shaviro notes in Connected: Marx associates the
process of vampirism with capitalism, but the actual figure of the vampire is better seen as
a precapitalist throwback. Vampires are aristocratic and not bourgeois. They do not
accumulate, but expend. Their rapacity is sexually charged; it springs from passion, rather
than economic calculation (2003, 166).
7. In an email exchange with cultural critic Ernest Hardy (2010, Zombie Deep Throat),
LaBruce says his zombie films were inspired by an earlier period of independent American
horror films that were more complex, more philosophical, and more idiosyncratic,
specifically Curtis Harringtons (1961) Night Tide, Herk Harveys (1962) Carnival of Souls
and George A. Romeros (1978b) Martin. Each one is about a mythic creature that could
be either a real monster or merely a social outcast that is perceived as monstrous. See
http://ernesthardy.blogspot.com/2010/01/zombie-deep-throat.html.
8. Agns Vardas (2000) The Gleaners and I, a French documentary about gleaners, similarly
follows people who hunt and gather, looking for things and connections. LaBruce has said
it is a source of inspiration for L.A. Zombie.
9. Part of the films messiness, as well as its conceptual appeal, has to do with the projects
origins as an installation project for LaBruces gallery, Peres Projects, in Los Angeles in
2009. LaBruce noted in the press release for the exhibition that he had been dealing with
zombies and porn in his work since the early 1990s, albeit often indirectly, by featuring
characters with zombie-like qualities, including neo-Nazi skinheads and radical left
revolutionaries, among others (LaBruce n.d.).
10. In this and other ways, L.A. Zombie also operates as an unacknowledged homage to
Damon Packards (1988) Dawn of an Evil Millennium, a surreal and campy short film that
also takes place in Los Angeles about an alien/zombie conjured to earth to destroy
humans. See the well-known trailer and the film in its entirety at Packard (1988).
11. It is worth noting, too, that in the wake of Measure B, which required condom use in porn
films shot in Los Angeles, many producers threatened to leave the city, which may have
resulted in a different kind of zombapocalyptic wasteland one evacuated of the sexual
performers and cultures that have grossed the city billions in revenue.
12. Two years later, the death of one of the performers in the scene, Erik Rhodes, was widely
reported, including by the New York Times. Years of steroid and drug use to transform
him into a figure of superheroic proportions had taken their toll. Rewatching the film after
his death is a little haunting, and it adds another necrophiliac layer.
13. LaBruce himself circulates in a kind a niche marketplace, that of the indy provocateur
his films, visual and performing art, and art books have acquired and maintain a cultural
cache among academics, artists, activists, punks, and others. A commenter on LaBruces
original post about the death of gay culture drew attention to this tension. LaBruce
complained about the death of gay culture while promoting his own new art book, Bruce
(x)ploitation. The commenter dubbed the article an advertorial (advert + editorial). In
his defence, LaBruce embraces his role as provocateur: his comments about the death of
gay culture were, after all, just for fun (LaBruce 2011b).
14. Tavia Nyongo, discussing the work of artist Kalup Linzy, describes punk passivity: its
masochistic drive towards unbecoming [] is not the acceptance of social exclusion or
stigma, but a withdrawal from the constraints of an affirmative culture (2010, 75).

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