Sextool (1975) — Rectums, Rituals, and the Sacred Art of Getting Fucked for Philosophy
Sextool isn’t just boundary-pushing; it obliterates boundaries with leather, cum, and cinematic abjection. This is Halsted’s fractured, filthy, and ferociously anti-narrative middle finger to heteropatriarchal cinema—a rectum made transcendent, ecstasy turned abject, desire morphed into nihilistic ritual. It’s cinema as queer Theatre of Cruelty, where dialogue and resolution are replaced by moans, urine, and spasming bodies. You don’t just watch Sextool, you submit to it. If Antonin Artaud wanted art to destroy reason, Halsted delivers—with piss, cum, and cracked film grain.
Written by Pat Suwanagul
Sextool (1975) — Rectums, Rituals, and the Sacred Art of Getting Fucked for Philosophy
Watching Fred Halsted’s Sextool is like hanging out with my unapologetic queer friends—the kind who graduated top of their class in Bangkok but chose hustling tourists on Khaosan Road and Pattaya’s red-light districts over corporate conformity. And honestly, I admired them. Fun fact: they made way more money than I did as a screenwriter and film professor. Respect.
Sextool isn’t just boundary-pushing; it obliterates boundaries with leather, cum, and cinematic abjection. This is Halsted’s fractured, filthy, and ferociously anti-narrative middle finger to heteropatriarchal cinema—a rectum made transcendent, ecstasy turned abject, desire morphed into nihilistic ritual. It’s cinema as queer Theatre of Cruelty, where dialogue and resolution are replaced by moans, urine, and spasming bodies. You don’t just watch Sextool, you submit to it. If Antonin Artaud wanted art to destroy reason, Halsted delivers—with piss, cum, and cracked film grain.
The film’s raw cinematography aggressively thrusts its loose narrative, the syuzhet roughly penetrating the fabula. Its invasive visual style says “fuck you” in the sexiest, most unapologetically queer way possible. Halsted isn’t merely provocative; he's invasive, confident, unapologetic. This film's title isn’t just cheeky—it’s literal. Halsted toys with narrative like he toys with flesh: rough, real, relentlessly confrontational.
Leo Bersani famously argued that queer sex—especially bottoming—isn’t identity affirmation but ego annihilation. Real sexual intimacy doesn't affirm the self; it dissolves it. In Sextool, Halsted positions penetration as philosophical collapse. Every scream, thrust, and violation isn't mere erotic escapism—it's subjectivity's brutal dismantling. This isn’t romance; it’s ritual annihilation. Here, the rectum truly becomes Bersani’s grave.
Halsted's nihilistic tenderness doesn’t seek arousal but destruction—tearing down boundaries between pleasure, violence, and meaning. Call this "porn" if you must, but acknowledge it’s porn with a PhD advised by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Julia Kristeva defines abjection as confrontation with what must be expelled—blood, shit, desire, corpses, the anus—to maintain social order. The abject marks humanity's sacred edges. Halsted turns directly toward the abject without flinching, refusing sanitized queer imagery. He captures what society flushes away: urination, degradation, cum. Abjection isn’t incidental in Sextool—it’s central. Halsted builds a sacred temple from waste and unwatchability, making literal the transcendence of the male rectum into cinematic form.
Laura Mulvey critiques cinema’s "male gaze," which objectifies women for male pleasure. Halsted queers, shatters, and grotesquely distorts this gaze. His camera offers no passive pleasure—it forces confrontation. Male bodies aren’t beautified—they’re brutalized, devoured, and dissected. Halsted’s eroticism is violent, ritualistic, grotesque—not a gay gaze, but an abject gaze. He doesn’t invite viewers to consume bodies; he dares them to choke on them.
Michel Foucault argues modern institutions discipline bodies through surveillance and categorization. Halsted visualizes this institutional disciplining through bondage, piss-play, and degradation—and stages libidinal rebellion. The queer body here refuses docility, breaking institutional contracts through chains, screams, and cumshots. The state disciplines queer bodies; Halsted defiantly undisciplines them, one transgressive orgasm at a time.
Letterboxd (and y’all) call this porn? Good. Call it porn, grotesque, too much, unwatchable—just don’t deny it's cinema. If cinema pushes image, form, and experience into radical new thresholds, then Sextool is cinema distilled through cum and cruelty. Halsted doesn't seek canon inclusion; he pisses on the canon, fucks it raw in the dark, and plays cum like a virtuoso.
This is what happens when queer desire refuses sanitization. This is gay nihilism in ritual cinematic time—and it’s fucking transcendent.
Halsted isn’t playing by the rules. He’s playing with cum like a piano man.
And bitch, the recital is divine.
