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. A screening of L.A. Plays Itself was sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 2013 and another took place on December 16, 2011 at the Los Angeles art gallery Human Resources. His films have also been shown the Netherlands Film Museum and in competition at The Deauville Film Festival.
"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."
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."
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. Milton abandoned the family when Fred was three. His mother was remarried to John Knight, who raped Fred when he was 8, which he described as "a turning point in his sexual identity." 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. Halsted studied botany at Cal State LA, and subsequently worked as a gardener and was in the nursery plant business; he owned a wholesale nursery in El Monte, California. He later said he looked back on his years as a gardener as the happiest days of his life. 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". Halsted wrote autobiographical pieces about his promiscuous gay sex life.
Halsted was a good friend of Kenneth Anger, and he loved Scorpio Rising. He said that "I consider myself a pervert first and a homosexual second."<ref>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, .</ref> Also, he considered "sadism... more basic to my personality than homosexuality".
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. Halsted, 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.) 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.