Fred Charles Halsted’s career is the stretch of gay porn that moved from the back room into art houses. He was born on 20 July 1941 in Long Beach, California. His father, Milton William Halsted, worked construction. His mother, Lillian, née Samoyloff, was a Doukhobor and did agricultural work. The father left when Fred was three. At eight, his stepfather John Knight sexually assaulted him. Halsted later called that a turning point in his sexual identity. He went to high school in Bakersfield and San Jose, failed his classes, and styled himself a student politician. He studied botany at Cal State LA, worked as a gardener, and ran a wholesale nursery in El Monte. He later called those years the happiest of his life. He never held a regular job and never had a Social Security number. His long-term partner was Joseph Yanoska, who appears in the films as Joe Yale. They were called sadomasochism’s heaviest couple. Halsted said, “I consider myself a pervert first and a homosexual second.” Sadism, he said, sat closer to his personality than homosexuality did.
He was not interested in the ordinary finish. He treated sex as something close to a sacrament, and he said it already contained violence and violation. Sex, he explained, is not “coming.” That is superficial sex. What he shot was personal cinema, aimed at getting his head and his emotions off. In the best scenes he had, he himself did not come. That idea peaks in the 1972 feature L.A. Plays Itself. The film opens on a Los Angeles city-limits sign, population 2,535,700, with someone nearby saying Los Angeles stinks. Halsted plays an older sadist torturing a young cowboy hustler just in from Texas, played by Yale. Bulldozers, mist in the Malibu canyons, and cruising shots in Griffith Park cut through the sex. The climax is an on-camera fisting, with a close-up of a can of Crisco, the lubricant people used then. Halsted claimed it was the first time fisting appeared on screen. Yale refused to be fisted. A double was used. At the end the young man is bound and helpless in a closet. Halsted said the point was to drag S&M, and the perversions next to it, out of the hidden back room and onto a public screen. The New York opening at the Museum of Modern Art was a sensation. Many viewers and critics were lost. William Burroughs and others praised it. Sex Garage and L.A. Plays Itself are the only gay porn films in MoMA’s permanent collection. MoMA screened them to a full house on 23 April 1974. MoMA restored L.A. Plays Itself in 2020.
Sex Garage, also 1972, was the short made to sit beside L.A. Plays Itself. It is set in an auto garage and follows a long-haired mechanic, a customer who has brought a car in, and a biker. The biker fucks the customer, who has been put in panties, while the mechanic’s head is pushed into a toilet. The score weaves Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” with The Emotions’ “When Tomorrow Comes.” MoMA restored the black-and-white short in 2020. It was included in the DVD and Blu-ray set Altered Innocence released in 2021. In 1974 Halsted narrated Erotikus: A History of the Gay Movie, directed by Tom DeSimone. He sits in a director’s chair, clothed, then naked, then masturbating. A double supplied a more spectacular cum shot. Halsted never forgave DeSimone. The double penis was used to dock his pay, and a Los Angeles Times headline was reused so that gay S&M was tied to the Manson murders, a link Halsted’s own film had not made. He denounced the picture. The person who said that, frame for frame, it was packed with more sex than any gay film yet released was Al Goldstein.
Sextool, 1975, was his try at an art-house crossover. He produced, wrote, directed, edited, shot, and starred. A relatively innocent married young man hits a party in a fantasy Los Angeles and meets policemen, boxers, leathermen, and a sailor, among others. The plot includes two cops raping someone in a police station. That is a story event in the film, not a method. Halsted called the topic “sexual politics.” It was shot on expensive 35 mm. Theater managers did not know what to do with it, few gay porn houses had 35 mm projectors, and thin transitional footage left the story choppy, so distribution stayed limited. MoMA acquired it anyway. He also published a magazine called Package, and he acted in Joe Gage’s El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1977). He later said that film macho-ed up gay America, and he thought that was a good thing.
Off screen, Halsted, Yale, and David Webb opened a sex club called Halsted’s at 2453 Glendale Blvd in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. He described it as a naked, industrial “stand-up fuck club”: glory-hole booths, bunk beds, a sling, and four truck trailers parked in the yard, echoing the meatpacking district in New York. Halsted admitted Los Angeles “did not have enough perverts.” The club lasted about a year. Before it closed, in 1982, he shot A Night at Halsted’s. It is not a documentary. It is almost pure sex, with a very short intro and outro. The box called it his crowning achievement and promised glory holes, mirrors, and video stars.
In the late 1970s his life slid. Drugs, drink, and the end of the hits left him depressed. In 1986 Joseph Yanoska died of AIDS. Before he died he told Fred, “You did this to me.” Halsted briefly advertised as an escort. On 9 May 1989 he killed himself with an intentional overdose of sleeping pills. The note said: “I had a good life. I’ve had looks, a body, money, success and artistic triumphs. I’ve had the love of my life. I see no reason to go on.”
What he left is hardcore S&M, fisting, and leather brought into art-house light. His company Cosco distributed about twenty-four gay porn features between 1973 and 1985, including Coverboy, directed by Yale. The restored L.A. Plays Itself, Sex Garage, and Sextool are the practical place to start. He put a can of Crisco on a museum wall, and he died still sure that the best scenes were the ones where he never came.
