Overview
Fred Halstedās L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay pornās first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador DalĆ repeatedly muttering ānew information for me.ā Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film 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, Halstedās star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halstedāto zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in timeāand what it looked like when it collapsed.
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The revised and expanded edition of Halsted Plays Himself includes material that came to light since the bookās first publication, including details about the restoration of Halstedās films by the Museum of Modern Art, the true identities of several key figures in his life, new testimony from family members, and the rediscovery of his feature film Truck It (1973), previously considered lost.
This book title, Halsted Plays Himself, expanded edition, ISBN: 9781635901764, by William E. Jones, published by MIT Press (September 13, 2022) is available in hardcover. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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