A man in a leather jacket emerges from a dark void and approaches the camera. His movements are unsteady, but his gaze – aimed straight down the lens – is unflinching. He walks in a semicircle, like a predator sizing up its prey, as daylight begins to scatter across the walls behind him. When he reaches the mouth of the cave, he finds a gate left ajar and stumbles backward into it, enclosing us with him. He advances toward the audience, shattered beer bottle in hand, his silhouette engulfing our view as a title card cuts through a swirling electronic soundtrack: SEXTOOL.
Equal parts primer and provocation, this opening salvo has little bearing on what scant plot there is in the twisted S&M reverie that follows, which first challenged and baffled viewers 50 years ago. The leather-clad bruiser shown squaring off with his camera is played by Fred Halsted, who also wrote, produced, directed, and edited Sextool. An innovative filmmaker and popular porn star in his own right, Halsted spent a brief but prolific career expressing and interrogating his infamous on-screen persona through the creative stamp he cultivated behind the camera.
His 1972 feature debut, LA Plays Itself, was a certifiable hit in both arthouses and grindhouses. It also whipped up a pearl-clutching frenzy among queers of a certain age and temperament, who viewed its sadomasochistic content as counterproductive to gay liberation. After this intertwined success and controversy earned him a spot in the limelight, Halsted doubled down on the scuzzy textures and sinister symbolism for his follow-up three years later. Where the earlier film portrayed the corruption and subjugation of a country rube (Joey Yale) by a brooding local (Halsted), who personified a larger municipal rot, Sextool formed a spiritual flip side in depicting the introduction of a seemingly straight man to LA’s sordid underworld, ferried along by his trans lover: “You never know who you might meet, or what they might make you do,” she cackles.
While their frameworks of initiation are mirrored, Sextool’s confrontational documentation of physical and sexual punishment adds up to something decidedly more ambiguous than the moral predations that animate LA Plays Itself.
The film’s diverse compendium of bondage and gangbangs contains images of nipples clamped and pierced, boots licked clean of urine and semen, and in an especially shocking scene, police nightsticks wielded as sodomizing extensions of phallic state power. Pleasure and discomfort are continually aligned, and the orgasms the characters (only sometimes) reach don’t seem to offer much of a release. When our central figure finally finds himself in bed with another man, the sex is comparatively vanilla and conventionally satisfying. This new lover shirks him the next morning, leaving the young man adrift in a world of false climaxes and empty liberations.
The sequence preceding this serves as a troubling contrast. Halsted and his long term partner in life, art, and business Joseph Yanoska (credited in his movies as “Joey Yale”) appear together, first as a snazzy couple at a Hollywood swingers party, and second as a boxer and submissive cornerman. In the latter sequence, Halsted essentially beats up Yanoska, repeatedly kicking him and throwing him to the ground. Yanoska crouches with his face against a mirror as Halsted pees on both the actor and his reflection. The scene ends with a slo-mo shot of Yanoska’s mirror image shattering.
This couple’s tumultuous relationship is described at length through various second-hand sources in William E. Jones’ biography ‘Halsted Plays Himself’. Jones makes a convincing case that Joseph – eight years Fred’s junior – may have invariably been the masochistic sub both on and offscreen, but outside the bedroom he was a deeply controlling, possessive, and (as multiple sources claim) manipulative partner to Fred, who was described as a warm and jovial person in his day-to-day life. These alleged contradictions are impossible to prove, but they are just as tough to shake.
For a director and performer whose craft was so glaringly personal, it’s hard not to let the facts of his life inform his imagery. Halsted was sexually abused as a child by his stepfather, an event he would describe as a turning point in his sexual identity. Is it reductive, then, to draw a parallel between this harrowing fact and the currents of violence, authority, and control that run through his early films? How do Halsted’s accounts of hookups with older men at a young age square with his portrayal as a potentially grooming elder figure in various sexual formations?
These are questions without answers, but LA Plays Itself and Sextool reflect not only the enigmatic psyche of the man who made and starred in them, but the darker shades of queer life in the 1970s writ large. These films configure the experience of queer awakening in an era of widespread disillusion and newfound visibility as something imposed by an external force, with characters thrown off the deep end and left to sink, swim, or perpetually tread water in a new age where anything goes.
All that said, it would be a mistake to reduce Halsted’s career to his most visceral works. Tim Kincaid’s playful road-movie El Paso Wrecking Corp (1977) sees the actor shed his hardened exterior shell to portray a more genial and flexible dom, Gene, who drifts between dive bars, auto shops, and glory holes with driving mate Hank (Richard Locke) as they cruise their way through the American southwest. The opening sequence finds Gene in the basement of a gay bar, where a heterosexual couple have come to fulfill a deviant fantasy; the woman wants to watch her husband have sex with a man, and Gene is happy to oblige.
Though the voyeuristic scenario would usually entail the total emasculation of a straight man, the sequence plays as forceful rather than aggressive as the men take turns submitting and dominating. In Wrecking Corp, Halsted’s fluid and ageless performance straddles the line between the young, impressionable stud up to no good (Hank chastises him like an older brother for the trouble he often follows his dick toward) and the denim daddy who both corrupts and comforts the adventurous twinks they encounter.
This strain of gentle dominance continues in one of Halsted’s lesser-known directing credits, Pieces of Eight, an omnibus of sorts that follows the relentlessly horny Dan Pace (playing himself) as he gets amped up for a live demonstration of his prowess and virility. He ogles various magazines and we watch the photographs come to life. Halsted acts in one of these segments opposite Melchior Diaz. “I bet he’ll show that kid what’s what,” growls Pace as he strokes it to their photos, but his dirty talk is humorously drowned out by a Hippie torch song; the sex scene is surprisingly tender, contrasting Pace’s projected image and gently contesting perceptions of Halsted’s penchant for sadism.
Aside from his film studio Cosco Productions, Halsted was something of an entrepreneur; he edited and published the magazine Package (where he chronicled his carnal ventures in detail), and also ran a sex club called “Halsted’s.” Before the short-lived venue shuttered its doors, he shot the 1982 film A Night at Halsted’s, in which he functions as both tour guide and audience stand-in while the club’s various attendees go about their business. Having gradually receded from the acting spotlight since the late ’70s, Halsted now takes on the role of purveyor and overseer, wandering the halls of his makeshift kingdom in search of an elusive young man, who eventually grovels and submits to him in the final scene.
Though he made three movies after it, A Night at Halsted’s is an endearingly self-aware last hurrah for a figure whose stardom had faded. The 1980s were rough on everyone, and Halsted was no exception. Yanoska succumbed to AIDS in 1986, and on his deathbed apparently blamed his devastated lover for the disease. Fred took to drinking and drugs, both numbing and exacerbating the decay of his body and spirit as he aged. When he overdosed on sleeping pills in 1989, Halsted left behind a thorny and pioneering cinematic legacy, along with a note that read: “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.”
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