Fred Halsted

Fred Halsted (July 17, 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."

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.

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