“Why is male desire flagged as mature, but women getting raped is a genre?”

—a question cinema still can’t answer

LA Plays Itself (1972) — Fred Halsted’s Cum-Stained Manifesto of Queer Revolt and Cinematic Disobedience

Cinema is a lie—unless someone’s getting fisted.
And LA Plays Itself is truth in its rawest, reddest form.

Excuse me, but this is the manifesto of a queer hybrid bitch—and I am pissed. How is Fred Halsted’s 1972 masterpiece flagged as “Mature Content,” shoved behind algorithmic panic doors, while male directors get standing ovations for filming women being raped, murdered, and dismembered in 4K? Letterboxd? Google? MPAA? Show me the receipts.Why is queer eroticism marked as biohazard while heterosexual violence is a genre film festival?

My fury is theory. My disgust is method. My queer body is text.

This isn’t hypocrisy—it’s systemic censorship dressed in tasteful fonts. Halsted’s LA Plays Itself isn’t just porn. It’s a flesh-bloody, cum-soaked scream clawing its way out of queer cinematic history. Too erotic for the canon. Too poetic for the porno bin. Too radical for the rainbow-washed algorithms that prefer “heartwarming” gay stories where everyone dies politely.

Halsted didn’t make porn. He made parametric poetry with lube.

While Marian Dora’s mutilations circulate under the label “extreme art,” and I Spit on Your Grave gets rebooted every decade with new actresses to brutalize, Halsted’s slow, brutal, tender men—touching, fucking, dying, loving—get flagged, shadowbanned, and shoved out of frame. It’s not about content. It’s about control. Male-male desire threatens the symbolic order because it dares to feel too much, bleed too honestly, fuck too beautifully.

And don’t get me started on narrative.
Bordwell’s film formalism dismissed non-narrative cinema as marginal, too stylized to matter. But Halsted’s parametric cinema—where style is the message and sensation is the plot—bleeds with meaning. He doesn’t hide from abjection; he films it in soft focus and lets it drip.

Mainstream liberal humanism wants its art to be redemptive. Halsted offers no redemption. He offers rupture, jouissance, and flesh. This isn’t a “story.” This is a psycho-sexual map of Los Angeles drawn in blood, spit, and leather. The city doesn’t appear in skyline shots. It pulses through tension. The drone of traffic. The breath before a kiss that tastes like risk.

And for those who call it exploitation?
Let me drag you by the eyelids into the theory:

• Andrea Dworkin and MacKinnon’s anti-porn panic erased the possibility of consensual radical erotics.

• Lacanian purists twitch at the collapse of the symbolic—Halsted doesn’t just collapse it, he fist-fucks it.

• Bersani? Saint Leo knew. He didn’t ask “Is the Rectum a Grave?” to find an answer. He asked it because Halsted had already written the eulogy in cum.

Halsted’s bodies—vulnerable, exposed, raw—aren’t just sexual. They’re philosophical positions.

Nguyen Tan Hoang said bottoming is a radical political orientation. Halsted turns that into cinematic form. Muñoz’s “disidentification”? Halsted is disidentification. He doesn’t perform queerness to be seen—he performs it to dissolve the gaze entirely.

This isn’t art for applause. It’s cinema that crawls inside you and fucks your ideology until it sobs.

Scorsese once said great cinema expresses heightened humanity—stays with us long after. So tell me: what’s more universally human than raw, naked, shivering desire?Halsted doesn’t depict reality. He drills into it. He peels the skin off Los Angeles and makes you lick the wound.

If Tarkovsky is transcendence, Halsted is transgression with teeth.
He’s Bresson on poppers. Caravaggio through the asshole.

And still—still—critics praise Blue Is the Warmest Color for its male-gaze sapphic porn but gag at Halsted’s reverent worship of queer male bodies. Because this isn’t just about who gets fucked—it’s about who gets to be cinema.

Halsted’s camera doesn’t observe. It worships.
He captures the ritual of abjection—turning sex into structure.
Desire is the narrative. The body is the plot. The pacing is its moan.

To call LA Plays Itself obscene is to confess your cowardice.
To hide it is to betray cinema.
To ignore it is to prove that what we call “taste” is just colonial, patriarchal fear in an A24 hoodie.

This film doesn’t want your approval. It wants your surrender.
So don’t call it porn. Don’t call it mature content.
Call it what it is: a revolt. A revolution. A cinematic cumshot against the tyranny of moral order.

Because if I Spit on Your Grave is “cinema,”
Then LA Plays Itself is cinema’s haunted mirror, its gaping wound, its radical truth.
It’s not less cinema—it’s more.

And if you dismiss Fred Halsted,
You’re not just dismissing a filmmaker.
You’re dismissing cinema’s last honest erection.