Last Saturday I had the pleasure of co-presenting two Fred Halsted films – “The Sex Garage” and “LA Plays Itself” – at a midnight screening at the Music Box. The event sold out and we were able to add a second screening on April 15th. Sadly I can’t be there to give a live intro that night so I’m sharing the notes from my talk here so that the next attendees can approximate the experience. Also hopefully it’s of interest to more people — maybe this will convince you to check out these amazing films either at the upcoming screening or on your own.

I wrote out this speech in full sentences trying to approximate casual speaking dialogue but I ended up paraphrasing so it sounded more casual. Next time I’ll probably write out bullet points instead, but this version has the benefit of being more readable for you lol.

Welcome! I’m very excited to help present the 4k restorations of The Sex Garage and LA Plays Itself both by Fred Halsted. 

Thank you so much to Brian for inviting me to co-host this screening, thanks to the Music Box for having us, and thank you to Altered Innocence for licensing us the prints. These are really gorgeous, fascinating, sexy films but I think they can be a bit challenging to just dive right into so I’m going to give about a five minute talk with some background and context that hopefully enhances your viewing experience tonight. Most of what I’m going to say I’ve learned from the Blu Ray release, which has a wealth of amazing bonus features produced by Elizabeth Purchell, who is an awesome queer film historian and archivist and has done a tremendous amount of work to bring these films to wider audiences.

So to start off I’d like to talk a little bit about Fred Halsted himself. In his own words he was “a pervert first and a homosexual second.” He was a weird guy and kind of a complicated figure. While his contemporaries saw pornography as a profitable but ultimately shameful endeavor, Halsted strove to push the limits of what a sex film could be and demanded that his work be treated as fine art. Conventional gay pornography and avant-garde gay film had always been shown side-by-side out of necessity, but Halsted was the first to truly collapse this distinction into a single work – which we’ll be seeing tonight. His films eventually became the first, and to this day the only, hardcore gay pornography in MoMA’s permanent collection. 

Halsted described himself at various times as a fascist, an anarchist, and a libertarian. In my own words, I’d call him an edgelord. We also know he was enmeshed in the gay liberation movement, frequently contributing to bail funds and various community projects of the sort. He clashed with certain elements of the gay lib movement – not because of the fascism as you might expect, but because of the kind of respectability discourse that’s painfully familiar to most queers today. Some activists believed his films did not portray homosexuality in ways they considered politically correct. Some of their qualms – and these are also gonna serve as tonight’s content warnings –  included the portrayal of improper fisting technique, portrayal of S&M sex without negotiation of consent nor aftercare, and excluding the point of view of the masochist in S&M scenes (though I will say that Halsted himself was a sadist making a film from his own POV and that the masochist in the scene was his real-life lover who went on to date him for the rest of his life, so I’m pretty sure he had a good time on set). In fact, the one time that Halsted’s films were subject to state censorship was because gay liberation activists called the cops on a screening of his. So I guess in-fighting is as time-honored a queer tradition as fisting. 

To say a little about each of the films: Sex Garage is 35 minutes long. It was shot in just one day and intended to be a companion piece to LA Plays Itself. Halsted describes it as “tri-sexual” though never elaborates on what that means. We know that Halsted was very inspired by Kenneth Anger and I think this film in particular is a very clear homage to Scorpio Rising – but truly taken to the next level of sexual deviance. 

LA Plays Itself is 55 minutes long, and it’s comprised of two very different chapters with totally different scenarios, atmospheres, and even performers. This was Halsted’s first film. He had never even expressed interest in making movies up to this point but in the year leading up to the production he had given up on his career as a botanist, gone to Japan to find himself, and then decided that he wanted to make a hardcore pornographic art film that represented Yin and Yang. So that’s one way to read the film.

So anyway the first half is this soft, sensual scene featuring Jim Frost as “motorcycle hiker” and Rick Coates as “elf in stream” as they’re credited in the film. They’re having sex in this totally idyllic — dare I say, edenic — canyon in Malibu but – pause, I’m gonna say what happens in the movie but, like, it’s an experimental film and the concept of spoilers doesn’t apply – the whole sequence culminates in a disruptive montage of bulldozers clearing the area. The shooting location was purposefully chosen because at the time of production it was slated to become a shopping center by a real estate development company, which it later did. 

In the second half of the film, we see a man — played by Halsted himself — driving through Los Angeles and picking up a younger man – played by his real-life lover Joseph Yale, as I mentioned earlier. The first few minutes of this sequence are essentially an ethnographic tour of all of the cruising hotspots of Los Angeles at the time. The intersection of Selma Avenue and Las Palmas was the most notorious hustler site and it appeared in a lot of other gay movies and writings around the same time. We also see the Las Palmas theater and the porn films that were really on the playbill at the time. We drive down Hollywood Boulevard and Santa Monica passing newsstands, gay bars, and the Book Circus which later became the infamous Circus of Books. In parallel to the earlier bulldozing of the beautiful Malibu canyon, these gay landmarks would also, for the most part, come to be destroyed in following years due to police crackdowns and the rising conservatism of the Reagan era.

As the film continues, Halsted brings the young man back to his house for some heavy S&M play culminating in the film’s infamous climax which is said to have brought the act of fisting to wider audiences than ever before. No pun intended. A disembodied dialogue – banter between an innocent newcomer from Texas and an older man offering to “show him the ropes” – floats in and out over the film. This was an audio recording of Fred Halsted and his friend Wesley Hayes, whose image never appeared in the movie. While certainly thematically linked to the on-screen action, the conversation is never presented in any sort of direct relationship to it. 

The guiding principle of the film seems to be intuition rather than logic, in both the loose correlation between the first and second halves of the movie and the loose correlation between the action and the dialogue. It’s a film that often gets called “dreamy” which I think is fitting. There are certainly a lot of rich themes to untangle but I’d caution you against looking for a single narrative. Instead, I’d encourage you to get swept up in the cinematography, the editing, the score, and the dialogue. You could exhaust yourself puzzling over the film’s many meanings, but you could also just sit back and let it pleasure you. 

Thanks for reading!! You can buy tickets to the April 15th screening here. If you can’t make the screening, you can buy or rent the films from Altered Innocence here.