Hervé Joseph Lebrun

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Hervé Joseph Lebrun
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Born (1963-07-24) July 24, 1963 (age 62)
France
NationalityFrench
Known forMondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the '70s

Hervé Joseph Lebrun (born 1963.[1]) is a French photographer, filmmaker, and historian of queer cinema, best known for documenting the golden age of French homo pornographic cinema (1975–1983). He is the director and final editor of the feature documentary Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the '70s (2014)[2][3], which has become a key reference in the preservation and reassessment of this period of cinematic history. Lebrun's archival and curatorial work has been instrumental in restoring visibility to queer cinematic heritage, both in France and abroad.

Biography

Hervé Joseph Lebrun was born in 1963 in France. He studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Toulouse and graduated as a government-certified architect (Diplômé par le Gouvernement, DPLG) in 1992. Actively engaged in the deconstructivist shift within French architecture, he worked in 1988 and 1989 with Odile Decq and Benoît Cornette, leading figures of the French avant-garde, during a formative period of experimentation. His visual language was already deeply shaped by Bauhaus photography, whose formalism and abstraction marked his earliest works in both photography and experimental film.

From the late 1990s onward, Lebrun focused on documenting the memory of queer persecution, working with Holocaust survivor Pierre Seel and German photographer and production designer Albrecht Becker[4], a former prisoner under Paragraph 175 of Nazi law. With Seel, he co-authored the book and film project De Pierre et de Seel[5]. With Becker, he collaborated from 1998 to 2002 on a series of photographs, exhibitions, and interviews, many of which have since become reference materials in queer archival studies.

His photographic work has been shown in exhibitions in Paris[6], Villeurbanne[7], Lyon, Brussels[8], Zagreb[9], and Berlin[10], often exploring themes of eroticism, trauma and bodily memory. He was also associated with radical queer figures such as Élizabeth Herrgott and Guillaume Dustan[11].

From 2010 to 2017, Lebrun served as Executive Director of Chéries-Chéris[12], the Paris-based LGBTQIA+ film festival, where he introduced screenings of vintage French homo pornographic films, starting with Le Beau Mec in 2012[13]. In parallel, he has conducted long-term archival work focused on the films of François About, Norbert Terry, Jacques Scandelari[14] and Anne-Marie Tensi[15].

Photography

Lebrun’s photographic work, developed primarily between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s, explores queer embodiment, erotic tension, and symbolic construction of meaning through black-and-white analog techniques. His most iconic series, Mon beau galet[16], was a photographic project shown in three successive exhibitions — in 1997, in 1998 alongside Albrecht Becker, and in 2000 with Guillaume Dustan[17] — consisting of four large-format photographs titled Mon, Bea, Uga, and Let, forming a punning scansion on possession, beauty, abstraction and ugliness. Exhibited in Paris and later in Berlin[10], the work reflects Lebrun’s interest in visual detachment[18] and the subversion of aesthetic codes, drawing on André Breton, László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus, Jean Cocteau and the legacy of Symbolism.

Beginning in 1997, he produced a series of male nude portfolios published primarily in Australia, notably in Blue Magazine, which established the context for his collaborations with Albrecht Becker and Guillaume Dustan. His nude photography combined stylized staging, homoerotic charge, and documentary sensibility, positioning the male body as both subject and conceptual locus. His early work articulated his visual principle posited as Surreality of Objective Vision[19] shaped by post-porn[20] aesthetics and abolishing the boundary between physical presence, eroticism, and symbolic projection.

His visual projects include Et Eros, U-Robinet, and Sue Version, shown in various queer art spaces in Paris. His collaboration with Albrecht Becker culminated in three landmark exhibitions: Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker (Paris, 1999), widely covered by the national press, including Libération[6], a piece by Guillaume Dustan[21], a televised feature[22]; Becker by Lebrun (Villeurbanne, 1999–2000)[7][23]; and Body Limits (Lyon, 2002)[23], a retrospective that included both Becker and Dustan. Selections from his Becker collection were later shown in Cologne[24] and Kerpen[25], as well as at the Independent Art Fair (New York, 2019)[26][27], where he contributed both photographs and archival material.

By 2005, Lebrun had created a commissioned photographic series for the Queer Zagreb festival, addressing the question of heteronormativity under the title Heteronormativity of Childhood (Heteronormativnost djetinjstva)[9].

Filmography

Lebrun began making short films in the early 2000s, blending queer theory, erotic expression, and experimental form. Early works include Le Lait Nestlé (2002)[28], a no-logo Super 8 allegory of paternal milk and queer deprivation, starring Cyril X, and A Feast of Friends (2003), a thanato-documentary tribute to a lost friend. His co-directed workshop film Montre ton corps, baise-moi (2004), made with Philippe Donadini at the UEEH (Universités d’été euroméditerranéennes des homosexualités) summer gatherings in Marseille, is considered an early example of post-porn political cinema in France.

He later pursued formal transgression and poetic abstraction in films such as Kanbrik or Allah's Outcast (2005)[29], repeatedly broadcast on Pink TV, The Heartscrewer (Le Nicœur, 2005), and Possession (2007), an adaptation of a short story by Didier Giroud shot in 16 mm black and white. His short film Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker (2004)[30], produced in collaboration with Becker, has been screened in academic and festival contexts.

He also co-supervised two segment-based feature films for the collective Queer Factory: Queer Factory Tales (Les Contes de Queer Factory, 2004, 69 min)[31][32], for which he directed the short film Âme-Âme (2004, 6 min) with Jérôme Marichy and Érik Rémès — premiered at the FFGLP on 21 November 2004 and later selected for the Torino GLBT Film Festival (2005) — and Queer Factory Tales 2 (Les Nouveaux Contes de Queer Factory, 2005, 75 min), for which he directed the short Flag (2005, 6 min), premiered at the FFGLP on 10 October 2005.

His feature documentary Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the ’70s (2014)[3], co-written with Jérôme Marichy, premiered at Frameline[2] in San Francisco and was later screened internationally, including in Montréal, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Guadalajara, Athens, Geneva and Lausanne. The film documents a fleeting — and now scarcely conceivable — moment in French film history, when 75 homo pornographic films, most of them licensed by the CNC (Centre national du cinéma), were granted theatrical release and shown in specialized gay porn cinemas across France, such as La Marotte and Le Dragon[33], both in Paris, owned respectively by Anne-Marie Tensi and Norbert Terry. Combining archival material and interviews with key figures of the era, including François About, Piotr Stanislas, Jean-Michel Sénécal, Philippe Vallois, Jean Estienne, Carmelo Petix, Benoît Archenoul and Claude Loir, the film offers an unprecedented glimpse into an erotic golden age now lost to censorship, AIDS, and the dismantling of a unique network of cultural structures.

In November 2023, Lebrun took part in a roundtable discussion at the Symposium Queer and Trans Testimonies: From the Holocaust to 2023[34][35], held at the University of Cambridge, where his short films De Pierre et de Seel[36] and Albrecht Becker: I Like This Pain[37] were also premiered.

He also directed François About Talks About Le Beau Mec (2024)[38], a 17-minute interview bonus produced for the American Blu-ray release of Wallace Potts’s Le Beau Mec (1979), restored in 4K by Gerald Herman and distributed by Altered Innocence. His documentary About François (2025, in post-production), produced by Ferfilm, is a portrait of cinematographer and director François About.

Curatorial and archival work

In parallel with his filmmaking, Lebrun has played a key role in the rediscovery and preservation of vintage French homo cinema from the 1970s and 1980s. He is considered one of the main researchers and custodians of the works of directors and producers such as François About, Norbert Terry, Anne-Marie Tensi, Benoît Archenoul and Wallace Potts. His private archives include rare film prints, photographs, and distribution materials that have supported numerous restorations and retrospectives in France and internationally. A significant portion of his collection has been deposited at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse[39]

Lebrun was a historical advisor for Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez, 2018)[40][41], a feature inspired by that cinematic era. He has contributed to the restoration or circulation of films such as Equation to an Unknown (Francis Savel, 1980)[42], Le Beau Mec (Wallace Potts, 1979), D’hommes à hommes (Gérard Grégory, 1977)[43], and New York City Inferno (Jacques Scandelari, 1978).

In 2024, he curated the carte blanche When French Gay Porn Was Making Its Way to the Cinema[44] at the Everybody’s Perfect festival in Geneva, which included five screenings and a public conference co-hosted with Robin Corminboeuf. That same year, he also served as a jury member for the LGBTIQ+ Memory Award[45] of the City of Geneva, which honors films preserving and transmitting queer histories, struggles, and legacies against erasure and marginalization.

He has presented archival programs in Paris, Brussels[46], Guadalajara, Lyon[47], London[48], and New York, notably at Anthology Film Archives[49], as well as in Los Angeles as part of the Outfest lineup.

Publications

Lebrun is the co-author, with Pierre Seel, of De Pierre et de Seel[5], a dialogue-based project combining testimony and photography, shot and recorded in 2000 and published in 2008. It remains one of the few visual and literary works created in direct collaboration with a French homosexual survivor of Nazi persecution.

He has also contributed photographic and critical texts to queer and cultural magazines such as Blue (Australia), Quasimodo (France)[50], and Les Inrockuptibles (France)[11] and has portrayed major queer literary figures such as Guillaume Dustan and Élizabeth Herrgott in a photographic body of work that has been exhibited and partly published in the cultural press.

In 2011, he contributed to the Dictionnaire des films français érotiques et pornographiques en 16 et 35 mm[51], published under the direction of Christophe Bier by Serious Publishing, with comprehensive coverage of all theatrically released French homo pornographic films. His writing explores the intersections of sexuality, memory, and political visibility.

In 2025, he was featured in a 30-page interview alongside François About in issue no. 1 of the multilingual art magazine L’Idiot utile, published in English, French and Korean.[52]

References

  1. ↑ "Hervé Joseph Lebrun". Bibliothèque nationale de France (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the '70s". Frameline. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Mondo Homo: A Study of French Gay Porn in the '70s (2014) – IMDb". IMDb. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  4. ↑ Albrecht Becker, body artist, est mort, Libération, 9 May 2002. Accessed 28 July 2025.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "De Pierre et de Seel". Bibliothèque nationale de France (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Tatous et tabous, Hélène Hazera, Libération, 29 January 1999.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Photo: Hervé Joseph Lebrun explores the self-mutilated body of a nonagenarian". Le Temps (in français). 6 December 2019. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  8. ↑ Dynamic City (group exhibition), CIVA, Brussels, 23 June–15 October 2000. Skira, 2000. ISBN 978-8881187713.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Heteronormativity of Childhood (Queer Zagreb, 2005), Hervé Joseph Lebrun". Internet Archive (in Croatian). Retrieved 30 July 2025. Photographic series commissioned by curator Zvonimir Dobrović for the Queer Zagreb festival in 2005.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Oh là là! Aktphotographie aus Frankreich". Schwules Museum (in Deutsch). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Debré, Constance (16 February 2021). "Guillaume Dustan, un bordel monstre partout". Les Inrockuptibles (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  12. ↑ Couston, Jérémie (27 November 2014). "Festival du film LGBT : J'veux du queer !". Télérama (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  13. ↑ "Le Beau Mec – Wallace Potts". Chéries-Chéris (in français). 13 October 2012. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  14. ↑ "New York City Inferno". Fifigrot (in français). 19 August 2015. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  15. ↑ Joudet, Murielle (28 June 2018). "Anne-Marie Tensi, le fantôme du cinéma pornographique gay". Le Monde (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  16. ↑ Mon beau galet (My Beautiful Pebble), exhibition (1997).
  17. ↑ Mon beau gars l'est (My Beautiful Guy Is In), exhibition (2000), Illico, 30 March 2000: “Dustan expose sa bite”, Gwen Fauchois.
  18. ↑ Visual detachment refers to the perceptual attitude akin to the phenomenological reduction (or epoché) described by Edmund Husserl — a suspension of immediate responses or judgments, allowing forms to emerge in their own presence.
  19. ↑ Surreality of Objective Vision is a visual principle developed by Lebrun in the early 2000s, uniting perceptual suspension and radical material presence. A key example is a large anatomical photograph shown in 2003 at Queer Factory, revealing anal dilation rarely seen outside clinical contexts.
  20. ↑ Post-porn emerged in the 1990s, embodied by Annie Sprinkle, as a radical queer artistic movement using pornographic imagery not to arouse, but to subvert, provoke, and redefine sexuality and representation.
  21. ↑ Dustan, Guillaume. “Becker by Lebrun.” e-m@le, no. 62, January 21, 1999.
  22. ↑ Frédéric Taddeï, Albrecht Becker : Hervé Joseph Lebrun Photographies – Paris Dernière (1999), broadcast on Paris Première on 13 February 1999.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Curated by Marie-Claire Cordat, prominent queer performer in France during the 1990s and 2000s, also collaborated with Lebrun on the photographic series Rose Bud aime si (Rosebud MC). See: Induration, Marie-Claire Cordat, Eclectic Lab, 2007 (accessed 31 July 2025).
  24. ↑ "Delmes & Zander Gallery – Albrecht Becker". Delmes & Zander. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  25. ↑ "When We Were Monsters". Haus Mödrath – Räume für Kunst. Retrieved 28 July 2025. Exhibition curated by James Richards, featuring works by Albrecht Becker (Courtesy Hervé Joseph Lebrun).
  26. ↑ Selvin, Claire (5 March 2019). "At Independent New York, Two Exhibitors Will Foreground Survivors of Nazi Regime". ARTnews. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  27. ↑ Geyer, Tim (21 February 2019). "Albrecht Becker Survived WWII to Become a Pioneering Photographer". VICE. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  28. ↑ "Le Lait Nestlé (2002)". IMDb. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  29. ↑ "Kanbrik or Allah's Outcast (2005)". MUBI. Retrieved 28 July 2025. — a 16 mm film.
  30. ↑ "Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker". Unifrance. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  31. ↑ Queer Factory Tales, co-supervised with Laurence Chanfro. Presentation of the film on the dedicated Queer Factory website (accessed 31 July 2025).
  32. ↑ Nick Rees-Roberts, French Queer Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Google Books. Queer Factory Tales is referenced as part of the history of collective queer video practices in France.
  33. ↑ Gallay, Arnaud (19 September 2014). "La parenthèse enchantée du porno gay made in France". 360° (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  34. ↑ "Queer Cultures Colloquium". Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  35. ↑ See "Event Description – "Queer and Trans Testimonies: from the Holocaust to 2023"". and "Speaker Biographies – "Queer and Trans Testimonies: from the Holocaust to 2023"". Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  36. ↑ "De Pierre et de Seel". MUBI. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  37. ↑ "Albrecht Becker: I Like This Pain". IMDb. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  38. ↑ "Le Beau Mec". Altered Innocence. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  39. ↑ "Invités – Extrême Cinéma 2024". La Cinémathèque de Toulouse (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  40. ↑ "Knife + Heart – Cannes Film Festival – Official Selection 2018". Cannes Film Festival. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  41. ↑ "Un couteau dans le cœur – Dossier de presse" (PDF). Unifrance (in français). Unifrance. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  42. ↑ "Équation à un inconnu (1980) – IMDb". IMDb. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  43. ↑ "D'hommes à hommes – Gérard Grégory". Pink Screens. Genres d’à côté. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  44. ↑ "Conversation: When French Gay Porn Was Making Its Way to the Cinema". Everybody’s Perfect 2024. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  45. ↑ "Prix Mémoires LGBTIQ+ – Lauréats 2024". Ville de Genève (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  46. ↑ "Le Beau Mec – Pink Screens 2024". Pink Screens. Genres d’à côté. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  47. ↑ "Écrans Mixtes 2024 Festival Booklet" (PDF). Écrans Mixtes (in français). pp. 60–61. Retrieved 28 July 2025. Double screening Cruising in New York City Inferno Night, held at Écrans Mixtes (Lyon) on 9 March 2024, featuring the films Cruising and New York City Inferno.
  48. ↑ James, Alastair (16 March 2023). "Five films to see at BFI Flare". Attitude. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  49. ↑ Burke, Kimberly (24 April 2023). "Restored Le Beau Mec Screening at Anthology". Green Room New York. Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  50. ↑ Chanay, Prune; Hervé Joseph Lebrun (2003). "Becker, le marqué – Becker der Gezeichnete" (PDF). Quasimodo. Quasimodo n°7 – Modifications corporelles (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  51. ↑ Bier, Christophe (4 June 2011). "4 questions à... Christophe Bier, auteur du Dictionnaire des films français pornographiques et érotiques (Dictionary of French Erotic and Pornographic Films in 16 and 35 mm)". Allociné (in français). Retrieved 28 July 2025.
  52. ↑ "François About & Hervé Joseph Lebrun, conversation with Alexis Etienne & Hubert Crabières". L'Idiot utile, no. 1. ces éditions. February 2025. Retrieved 28 July 2025.

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