from www.southfloridagaynews.com – Once upon a time, gay porn films attracted the likes of Groucho Marx and Salvador Dali, were collected by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and were reviewed in the Village Voice, Daily Variety and the New York Post.

That pre-AIDS era is chronicled with a kinky combination of serious research and sexual relish in Jones’ narrative of the life and times of legendary porn performer and filmmaker Fred Halsted, whose films, from 1972’s L.A. Plays Itself to his final film – they were films then, not videos – 1981’s A Night at Halsted’s, stand as exemplar’s of the intersection of experimental film and hot sex.

The art-book-sized study is stuffed with movie stills that, in today’s vernacular, are definitely NSFW, along with what few photos of Halsted’s boyhood and pre-porn days the author found in the course of interviewing his subject’s peers. Jones’ slender but authoritative biography is fleshed out with reprints of film reviews, interviews, a smattering of dialogue from the L.A. Plays Itself and – another side of the man – samplings of his erotic prose.