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Fisting at the End of the World

The defiant pornography of Fred Halsted

Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones. Semiotext(e), 200 pages.

Picture me, if you will, sitting at a desk in a lavish but poorly decorated bachelor pad on Park Avenue. My cousin, an up-and-coming beltway accountant, is visiting town, dog-sitting for a coworker, and here I am, alone while she and the golden retriever are out walking, splayed upon his Texas A&M throw pillow, peering furtively at my laptop as the sun goes down on a blue, mid-winter New York. The window in front of me is angled slightly, tilted outwards, giving me the feeling that I am hovering directly above the avenue, on top of the intersection and all the pedestrians bundled in down and leather and fur. Can all of them tell that I am watching porn? Can all of them tell, that despite my location, I am floating westward, all the way to sunny, verdant Malibu, where two young men are fucking on top of a moss-covered rock? Tickled by the idea, yet suddenly red in the face, I pause the film and shut my laptop.

The film in question, entitled LA Plays Itself, is notorious for its final scene, in which its director, a brawny stud named Fred Halsted, sends his fist up the asshole of a bound, gagged, and eager twink (played, until the moment of actual penetration, by Halsted’s real-life lover and business partner, Joey Yale). Released in 1972, when the boundary between pornography and art-house cinema was refreshingly permeable, LA Plays Itself made Halsted—self-taught, working class, and void of any representation or notable contacts—an overnight celebrity while also kick-starting (alongside Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat) the short-lived “porno chic” era. Aware of the film’s unique crossover potential, Halsted’s then-publicist Stuart Byron worked tirelessly to get it attention and distribution, and attention it received. As the print advertisements proudly proclaimed, Salvador Dalí left an early screening muttering, “new information for me.” Other, more straightforward, endorsements came from William S. Burroughs and Jonas Mekas.

From there the lore metastasizes, becoming increasingly far-fetched, especially from our present vantage point, where pornography is plentiful, banal, more crass than shocking, too ubiquitous to be all that profitable (except for the vaunted few). As William E. Jones notes in his beefed-up, recently re-released Semiotext(e) biography of Halsted—fittingly titled Halsted Plays Himself—a young Chantal Akerman skimmed a total of $4,000 while working the 55th Street Playhouse box office during the premiere engagement of L.A. Plays Itself, netting more money during this period than Halsted. The very fact that Akerman used this windfall to fund Hotel Monterey, her debut feature, would have ensured Halsted’s place in the cinematic canon (or at least its endnotes), but that would be underselling him. In 1974, the Museum of Modern Art invited Halsted to screen his work as part of their wonderfully named Cineprobe series and later acquired prints of LA Plays Itself, as well as those of the equally notorious Sex Garage (billed as “the first trisexual film” since it included hetero- and homosexual sex as well as the penetration of an exhaust pipe) and Sextool (Halsted’s expensive and wildly ambitious 1975 follow-up to LA Plays Itself, which was likely the first pornographic film shot on 35mm).

The “porno chic” era was over almost as soon as it began.

A certain “what if”-ness hangs over this moment in Halsted’s career, when he was suddenly more of an auteur than a “tool,” when the conception of an entirely new film genre seemed not only possible but imminent. In his 1972 Village Voice review of Sex Garage and LA Plays Itself (which surely helped Halsted garner the support of the art world establishment), Jonas Mekas mentions sitting with a few friends after the screening and recalls one of them saying “something to the effect that, of course these movies are only the beginning of a movement of the porno cinema as art . . . of course, soon there will be others who will do it better than Halsted.” Mekas, however, was not so readily convinced, wondering whether the “very first works” of a given genre “are the most dynamic and original and exciting,” even when regarding the “treatment of nudity and sex in movies.” To our culture’s detriment he seems to have been right: Sextool, which was to be Halsted’s victory lap, languished in obscurity after its initial release, largely ignored by the art house cinemas that had the proper technology to show it (very few gay porn theaters were equipped with 35mm projectors at the time). The “porno chic” era was over almost as soon as it began.

Even if Jones is not quite capable of capturing the uncanny magic that makes Halsted’s films “dynamic and original and exciting,” his skill as a biographer has made it possible for contemporary viewers to make their own impression of Halsted’s work, which had more or less disappeared in the decades following his suicide in 1989. Initially published in 2011, Halsted Plays Himself has incited a modest but critical wave of attention, culminating in MoMA’s 2020 premiere of restored versions of Halsted’s “big three”: LA Plays Itself, Sex Garage, and Sextool. Now, 4K scans of all three are available for rental on Vimeo, affording more modest viewers, such as myself, the opportunity to watch them from the privacy of their homes (or those in which they are dog-sitting).

Perhaps it is sacrilegious to have watched LA Plays Itself alone, on my near-broken laptop, but then again, what else was I to do? In his Village Voice review, Jonas Mekas recalls having “never watched a movie in a more smoke-filled theater,” adding that, “I could barely see the screen through the smoke. The only explanation for this was that everybody was very very nervous.” And yes, I will admit it, I was nervous too. I tend to go limp at the sight of blood, I do not typically review pornography, and I am not, as it were, a gay man, despite the alternating taunts, advances, and insinuations of countless members of the male species (the “f-slur,” which Halsted himself used freely and proudly, lives rent-free in my head). Wanting to ease myself into this assignment, to work myself up to it, I read Jones’s biography twice before pressing play, learning of Halsted’s coterie of boyfriends (all of them jealous of each other), of his mother’s upbringing amid the obscure Doukhobors (a sect of pacifist Christians who emigrated from Russia to the Canadian prairie), of his eponymous short-lived Silver Lake “stand-up fuck club,” of his penchant for wearing leather, and of his perverse attraction to authority figures, especially cops, who he seemed to see as logical cruising targets in their very obsession with what Jones calls “fag-baiting.”

But how does it feel to be “inside” these films? This is the sensation, after all, that Jones is chasing, or so he claims. “The first time I saw the scene between Fred Halsted and Joey Yale in LA Plays Itself, I was astonished,” he writes in the preface. “I consider it one of the greatest in gay porn, if not all of cinema.” But why, exactly? LA Plays Itself was made up of two reels, two “halves,” which were often shown out of order in theaters, meaning that the film’s culminating fisting scene—Jones’s “greatest” scene in “all of cinema”—appeared at about the midway point. But in the restored 4K version available today, everything has been put back into place, the film opening with a lush, verdant, positively Thoreauvian fantasy: to the accompaniment of Haydn’s Symphony no. 98 in B Flat Major, we look on as two lithe boys bathe in a Malibu stream, knead each other’s skin like dough, and playfully guzzle the jisming drip of a waterfall. Amid scenes of tantric, Zen-like fucking—interspersed with shots of flowers, nipples held between fingers, and double exposures of flowers and fucking—the camera zooms in on the more elfin of the two boys, who is sitting upon the riverbank, contentedly watching the wriggling of a small minnow. This was the point at which my nerves began to dissipate.

Fred Halsted on the set of Sextool (1975). | Hustler Video, courtesy Semiotext(e)

But then I witnessed something curious: the texture of the film changed, as if its true engine was shuddering and turning on. Suddenly the boys were humping in the middle of a construction site, the double exposure bringing us out of the Malibu canyons and back toward Los Angeles proper. It was time, I thought, for the city to truly “play itself.” After shots of bulldozers careening over a hillside, the camera cuts to Halsted—shaggy, swaggering, his shoulder muscles nearly bursting out of his T-shirt, his tapered sideburns slicing across his chiseled jaw like switchblades—walking down a lonely alleyway before firing up his red Ranchero to the tune of “Cybernaut” by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. Hovering alongside him, as if in the passenger’s seat, we glide down Selma Avenue, where all the hustlers used to turn their tricks, before turning onto the Sunset Strip, passing a billboard emblazoned with a youthful Mick Jagger’s sneering pout, passing the porn theater playing  

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Suddenly, we are face to face with a young man—Joey Yale—dressed in all black, his blond hair coiffed, his steely eyes threatening to bore a hole in the very camera pointed his way. After gazing unhurriedly at Yale for a while, the camera cuts away, as if startled, training itself on a rotating bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken: “So Tender, So Tasty” the massive, towering advertisement reads. Inside a Hollywood squat house, Joey Yale is undressing, undressing quickly. He is crawling up a dingy staircase, crawling toward Halsted, who ties a belt around his neck and forces him downwards. The slave is licking the master’s boots; the master’s boot is kicking the slave’s rosy, pink ass.

Here it is, I thought to myself, watching this sequence unfold, the “greatest” scene in “all of cinema,” at least according to William E. Jones, himself an experimental filmmaker “whose practice involves appropriating and recontextualizing imagery from archival material,” as per his own artist biography. But even though Jones gestures at the context of this scene, noting Hollywood’s history of vice, he fails to properly evoke the archival brilliance of Halsted’s second reel, fails to mention that it is the unsettling footage of a long-gone, gritty Los Angeles that gives his favorite scene its sinister momentum. It is the raw imagery of this sequence—not necessarily the fisting it leads up to—that nearly launched an entirely new genre of film, after all. For despite its lustful charms, despite its inclusion of sex scenes both idyllic and brutal, LA Plays Itself thumbs its nose at one of pornography’s essential facets, not giving a single shit if it gets you, the viewer, off.

LA Plays Itself constitutes an epic act of defiance.

This tenacious refusal to cater to an audience is what makes Halsted’s film so inimitable and so strange, what makes it so “dynamic and original and exciting,” as Mekas put it. Even when I finally “got there,” even as I watched Halsted lazily stroke himself off in front of a tied-up Joey Yale, even as I watched him lather his muscular forearm up with Crisco, ready to send it deep, deep into history, I found myself thinking of the preceding scenes in Griffith Park of Halsted wandering aimlessly through a crowd of shirtless, joyful, jean-clad men. Even amid squalor—inside the darkening squat house we can make out a newspaper headline reading “NEW WEIRD CULT . . . Link to Tate Murder”—there is beauty, innocence, a glimmer of sunlight on a denim-covered ass. Though the two reels that make up LA Plays Itself seem to possess a binaristic duality, their qualities bleed into each another: in between shots of Halsted’s boot roughing up Yale’s rear end, we are treated to the decidedly non-sadist sequence in Griffith Park, a sequence that would quickly become dated by the oncoming AIDS epidemic.

Just as our culture has missed out on the unmet potential of the ever-brief “porno chic” era, opting instead for the monotonous vulgarity of contemporary pornography, we also routinely miss out on suitably complex discussions about imperfect artworks, shying away from paradox and contradiction. Throughout Halsted Plays Himself, Jones includes conversations with Halsted’s friends and lovers, each of whom tries to lay claim to his creative output. As one former boyfriend puts it, LA Plays Itself “was made from random footage that we took. There was no plan to it . . . he had the genius, I suppose, of being able to sort it all out and put it together into some sort of sequence.” Jones, for his part, seems eager to overcompensate, doggedly insisting that Halsted was a true auteur, a “genius” in every sense, leaving little room for nuanced assessment. And of course, this is his role as a biographer, his hyperboles having prompted the renewed interest in Halsted’s work.

But now that this work has been made available to us, we owe it our honesty as well as our full attention. Perhaps Halsted’s archival editorial style, his process of culling down and reordering, can be enough for us in the present moment, in that it produced a work as enigmatic and thrilling as LA Plays Itself. In the days after I viewed this film, I carried it with me, carried it in my head as I made my way around a freezing, dark-blue New York. In my mind I saw the deep greens of Malibu, the ashen alleyways of Hollywood, the trembling crowd of torsos in Griffith Park. I knew that what I had witnessed was not a perfect film, and yet that endeared me to it, made me think about it even more. By resisting its own instrumentalization, by rebuking pornography’s typical contract, by forestalling and even rejecting the very notion of the viewer’s orgasm, Halsted’s film constitutes an epic act of defiance, one that contemporary filmmakers would do well to remember today.