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William E. Jones

Halsted Plays Himself (Semiotext(e) Native Agents) Hardcover – October 28, 2011

by William E. Jones (Author)

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The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur.

Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” 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, Halsted's 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 Halsted―to 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 time―and what it looked like when it collapsed.

Print length

200 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Semiotext(e)
Publication date

October 28, 2011
Dimensions

7 x 1.1 x 10 inches
ISBN-10

9781584351078
ISBN-13

978-1584351078
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William E. Jones
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[H]is book is so much more than I dared expect, a model of what a gay study can be. Nearly devoid of academic jargon, it's authoritative, comprehensive, and personally couched." -- John F. Karr, Karrnal Knowledge (blog)

"...one of the most intriguing and unusual cultural histories of recent years, a work that simultaneously serves as a valuable extension of Jones's own idiosyncratic oeuvre." -- Travis Jeppesen, Whitehot Magazine

"A collection of writings by and about Fred Halsted... Jones's much-needed monograph charts a course through queer cinema's outer limits." -- Thomas Beard, Frieze

About the Author

William E. Jones was born in Canton, Ohio. He received a B. A. from Yale University and an M. F. A. from California Institute of the Arts. He has made the films Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association award, the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998). His work was included in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, and he has had retrospectives at Tate Modern (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2010), and the Austrian Film Museum (2011). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two California Community Foundation Fellowships, and most recently, a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He lives in Los Angeles.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1584351071
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Semiotext(e); 1st edition (October 28, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781584351078
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1584351078
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.1 x 10 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,399,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,900 in Art of Film & Video
- #5,498 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- #8,931 in Movie History & Criticism

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William E. Jones

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William E. Jones was born in Canton, Ohio. He received a B. A. from Yale University and an M. F. A. from California Institute of the Arts. He has made the films Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997), which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association award, the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998). His work was included in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, and he has had retrospectives at Tate Modern (2005), Anthology Film Archives (2010), and the Austrian Film Museum (2011). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two California Community Foundation Fellowships, and most recently, a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He lives in Los Angeles.

Customer reviews

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4 star		11%
3 star		15%
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baldnict

Captivating

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 3, 2012

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His LA Plays Itself was the first "porn" I ever saw and found it riveting and unusual. Those streets where he filmed much of it are gone and people like himself have moved on. It's a shame he never felt his worth and we have lost something of ourselves when he took his own life.

2 people found this helpful

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John Ollom

the honesty of Halstead as an inspiration to our generation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2012

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Fred Halsted took us to a very honest perception of man to man intimacy. Though his work invokes violence and fisting, it makes us wonder about internalized homophobia and its manifestations. The suicide of Halsted is a tragedy as we would hope that he could find validation for his work in a world that only promotes financial profit more than artistic enlightenment.

4 people found this helpful

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Brian Butterick

A Gay Historical MUST!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 21, 2013

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Fred Halsted was true genius whose work should not be overlooked by young GLBTQ people today. Though his metier at the time was pornography, his transgressive style definitely has come to be viewed as art today. In his work one can see his influence on other artists such as Mapplethorpe, Wojnarowicz, and Bruce LaBruce.

3 people found this helpful

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W. Myers

Historical

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

Fascinating!!

One person found this helpful

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lauren halsted

Loved it!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 11, 2018

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Beautiful book and thoroughly researched

One person found this helpful

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BorninKentucky

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 5, 2015

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fine

One person found this helpful

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The Art Book Review

Halsted Play Himself

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 10, 2013

"Halsted's best known for his first and most artistic effort, L.A. Plays Itself, which in its opening scene, a sylvan gay sex idyll gets interrupted by a bulldozer clearing away nature for a subdivision."

--Justin Izbinski on "Halsted Plays Himself" from Semiotext(e)

Read the full review here:[...]

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Halsted Plays Himself (Semiotext(e) Native Agents) Hardcover – October 28, 2011

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