Halsted Plays Himself

Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexuallyexplicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalirepeatedly muttering "new information for me." Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot thefilm over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy.Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted'sstar waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the deathfrom AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halstedcommitted suicide in 1989.In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jonesdocuments his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted--to zero in on anidentity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle andan extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundarybetween experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexualliberation looked like at a volatile point in time--and what it looked like when itcollapsed.

William E. Jones is an artist and filmmaker who teaches film history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has made two feature length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many video installations. His films and videos were the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He has worked in the adult video industry under the name Hudson Wilcox.