Fred Charles Halsted (July 20, 1941 – May 9, 1989) was an American gay pornographic film director, actor, escort, publisher, and sex club owner. His films Sex Garage and L.A. Plays Itself are the only gay pornographic movies in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where they were screened before a capacity audience on April 23, 1974."Sound Recordings of Museum-Related Events in The Museum of Modern Art" , consulted 11/21/1974.William E. Jones, Halsted Plays Himself, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e) (distributed by The MIT Press), 2011, , pp. 13 & 55. An interview of Jones in which the book is referred to may be found at Bradford Nordeel, "William E. Jones on Finished", Slant Magazine, February 22, 2011, http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/william-e-jones-on-finished , retrieved July 20, 2015. A screening of L.A. Plays Itself was sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 2013, , retrieved 11/21/2014. and another took place on December 16, 2011, at the Los Angeles art gallery Human Resources.Megal Sallabedra, L.A. Weekly, December 16, 2011, "Fred Halsted's Experimental Porn L.A. Plays Itself: Even Dalí Thought It Was Freaky" , consulted 1/6/2015. His films have also been shown the Netherlands Film Museum and in competition at The Deauville Film Festival.Statement on the box cover of Pieces of Eight, reproduced in Jones, p. 102.
"Halsted more or less created the world of gay sexual art and experimentation. He then watched it, and himself, be destroyed by AIDS, a sanitizing of gay sexual tastes and the power of addiction."Patrick Moore, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality, Beacon Press, 2004, , p. 58.
Halsted was a sex radical. He believed that the erotic is transgressive and sacramental, that it is inherently violent and involves acts of violation. "Sex is not 'coming,' that is superficial sex," he once explained. "Mine is personal cinema. I don't fuck to get my rocks off. In the best scenes I've ever had, I haven't come. I am not interesting in coming. … I am interested in getting my head off, my emotions off."Jeffrey Escoffier, review of William A. Jones, Halsted Plays Himself, Lambdaliterary, December 18, 2011, http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/12/18/halsted-plays-himself-by-william-e-jones/#sthash.6IgzHTxu.dpuf , retrieved 1/20/2015.
Early life and career Halsted was born in Long Beach, California, in 1941. His father, Milton William Halsted, worked in construction, and his mother, Lillian Halsted (née Samoyloff), was a Doukhobor and did agricultural work.Jones, pp. 61-64. Milton abandoned the family when Fred was three.Jones, p. 64. His mother was remarried to John Knight,Jones, p. 64 who raped Fred when he was 8, which he described as "a turning point in his sexual identity."Jones, p. 88."Fred Halsted Looks to the Boards," The Advocate, no. 263, March 22, 1979, pp. 31-32, 43, reproduced in Jones, pp. 162–165, at p. 165. He attended high school in Bakersfield, California, and San Jose, California, and he described himself as a student politician, which led to his failing all his classes.Autobiographical statement by Halsted, reproduced in Jones, pp. 52-53. Halsted studied botany at Cal State LA, , consulted 1/6/2015. and subsequently worked as a gardenerJones, p. 23. and was in the nursery plant business;Rosa von Praunheim, Army of Lovers, London, Gay Men's Press, 1980, , pp. 91-96, reproduced in Jones, pp. 166–169, quote on p. 167. he owned a wholesale nursery in El Monte, California."Fred Halsted Looks to the Boards," The Advocate, no. 263, March 22, 1979, pp. 31-32, 43, reproduced in Jones, pp. 162-165.Moore, p. 59. He later said he looked back on his years as a gardener as the happiest days of his life.Jones, p. 90. He never held a regular job nor had a Social Security number. His long-term lover (though with interruptions) was Joseph Yanoska, who appears in his movies under the name "Joe Yale"; they were called "sadomasochism's heaviest couple".Jones, p. 73. Halsted wrote autobiographical pieces about his promiscuous gay sex life."Personal Training", Package, Nos. 4, 5, and 6, reproduced in Jones, pp. 186–191, 194–196, and 198-199.
Halsted was a good friend of Kenneth Anger, and he loved Scorpio Rising.Jones, p. 86. He said that "I consider myself a pervert first and a homosexual second."Quoted in Siebenand, The Beginnings of Gay Cinema in Los Angeles, Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1975, p. 213, quoted by Jeffrey Escoffier, "Beefcake to Hardcore: Gay Pornography and the Sexual Revolution", in Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer, Duke University Press, 2014, . Also, he considered "sadism... more basic to my personality than homosexuality".Siebenand, p. 218, quoted in Jeffrey Escoffier, Bigger than Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore, Philadelphia, Running Press, 2009, , p. 77.
L.A. Plays Itself (1972)
The movie begins with a shot of a sign at the city limits of Los Angeles, giving its population at the time (2,535,700). An overheard conversation contains the words "Los Angeles stinks." Mists over the canyons of Malibu are seen. A hiker, taking a walk in the forest, sees a naked blond, who offers to give him head. Their sexual encounter is interrupted by shots of approaching bulldozers. (Halsted was concerned about development destroying the wild areas of the Santa Monica Mountains.) In the second part of the movie, an older man (Halsted) tortures a young innocent (Halsted's lover Joseph Yale). A voiceover states that the youth is a cowboy hustler just arrived from Texas. The youth is bound, beaten, and kicked. At the climax, he is fisted, with a closeup of a can of Crisco, usual lubricant for fisting at that time. (Yale refused to be fisted and a double was used.Jones, p. 83.)
According to Halsted, this was the first time fisting was shown on screen. At the end, he is bound and left helpless in a closet. The action is not one continuous scene; it is punctuated by Halsted driving through Griffith Park, a gay cruising spot also featured in John Rechy's City of Night. In the park unidentified men appear, the camera focusing on their dirty pants, especially crotches ("baskets," in gay slang) and asses. There are also interspersed newspaper headlines about weird cults and the Manson murders, ads pushing "101 varieties of meat", shots of hustlers, bums, vagrants, porn theaters. The film ends on shots of newspapers saying that a young man was found dead after being tortured.
According to the film's cinematographer "Tom", there was no screenplay. Random footage was shot, which Halsted was capable of sorting out and putting in a sequence. Halsted described it thus: "It was okay to be openly gay, but to get into S&M was another trip. One of the purposes of L.A. Plays Itself was to get S&M and allied perversions out on the screen where people could look at them, think about them, analyze them, let it affect them, whatever they wanted, but not have it hidden anymore, and leave it open where people can deal with it easily." He has been quoted as saying that the film was highly autobiographical.
L.A. Plays Itself was a huge sensation when it opened in New York.Jeffrey Escoffier, Bigger than Life, p. 77. The movie was praised by Fernando Arrabal, William Burroughs, and Al Goldstein, but was misunderstood by most homosexuals and film critics.Review, "Brothers Under the Skinflick", The Village Voice, July 20, 1972 (reproduced in Jones pp. 119–123). After seeing it, Burroughs sought out Halsted to discuss a collaboration (Terry Southern was also involved) to film Burroughs' The Wild Boys as a hard-core porn film. The project was abandoned as financially unviable.Jones, pp. 84-85.
A 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, takes its title from Halsted's movie.
The film was restored by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2020 and released on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD by Altered Innocence on December 28, 2021
Sex Garage (1972) Sex Garage was a 35-minute black-and-white short. It was produced after L.A. Plays Itself was completed, but before its release; it was intended to accompany the longer movie. It takes place in an auto repair facility (garage). As it begins a woman takes her car to the garage for service, and performs fellatio on her long-haired mechanic boyfriend. A male arrives with a car for service, scaring off the woman, who has just reached her climax. He starts servicing the mechanic, and is forced to put on the woman's discarded panties. A long-haired, bearded biker arrives, wearing a dirty jockstrap. He fucks the man wearing the panties; the mechanic thrusts his head into a toilet. The biker ejaculates onto the motorcycle seat. Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, performed on a piano, is background music, as is "When Tomorrow Comes" by The Emotions. There are many atmosphere shots of vehicles, of the Hollywood Freeway, and of billboards on Sunset Strip.Jones, pp. 31-32.
The film was restored by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2020 and released on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD by Altered Innocence on December 28, 2021
Erotikus: A History of the Gay Movie (1974) Erotikus is a history of the gay pornographic movie, directed by Tom DeSimone. It is narrated by Halsted, seated in a director's chair, at first fully clothed, then naked, then masturbating. A double was used in the latter part, not out of modesty but to have a bigger penis and a more impressive ejaculation. He reaches a climax during a montage of cum shots set to Ravel's Boléro.Jones, p. 34. According to the box cover of the Bijou Video release, Halsted, "dick in hand, narrates this survey of gay pornography, starting with the Apollo Physique magazines, which eventually evolved into 8mm loops and eventually into hard-core full-length movies." It contains excerpts from Boys in the Sand, Dust unto Dust, L.A. Plays Itself, Confessions of a Male Groupie, Tarzan the Fearless, Classified Capers, The Collection, Assault, One (the first orgasm shown in a gay movie), and Yes (1969, the first explicit sex shown in theatres). , retrieved 12/5/2014.The comments on One and Yes are taken for an advertisement for excerpts from the film, reproduced by Jones, p. 191. The climactic fisting scene from L.A. Plays Itself was first included but deleted in later versions.Jones, p. 39.
Halsted never forgave DeSimone for reducing his compensation because a "double penis" had been used. Also, DeSimone reused the shot of the Los Angeles Times headline "New Weird Cult, Link to Tate Murder" from L.A. Plays Itself but suggests, as L.A. Plays Itself did not, that there was a link between gay BDSM and the Manson murders. This was offensive to Halsted, who denounced the film in conversation and in print.Jones, p. 39
According to Al Goldstein, publisher of the pornographic tabloid Screw, "frame for frame, it contains more sex than any gay film ever released".Quoted in an advertisement for the movie, reproduced by Jones, p. 35.
Sextool (1975)