SEX GARAGE
Sex Garage defied genre conventions - as embryonic as they were in the gay porn of 1972 - but did so in ways different from L. A. Plays Itself. Sex Garage, at a running time of 38 minutes and in black and white, begins with an image of a woman; she performs enthusiastic fellatio on a longhaired boyfriend who, as it turns out, is the garage's mechanic, and who later finds another kind of action. The straight sex between hippie kids, often shown in macroscopic detail, casually introduces bisexuality into a gay porn film long before the bisexual genre became fashionable during the early 1990s.
The first part of Sex Garage, like the complex sequences of L. A. Plays Itself, alternates between two distinct spaces with different musical themes, the soul song «When Tomorrow Comes» by The Emotions and «Jesu, Joy of a Man's Desiring» as transcribed for piano by Myra Hess. The camera lingers over images of money, soap suds on body hair and water flowing down the drain in a shower, calendars and «girlie» magazines found in the sort of garage where an older generation of mechanics did their work. The man in the shower later dresses and drives to the garage in his Mercedes. He scares off the woman, who flees, carrying her calf-length boots with her. The rich man begins worshipping the blonde hippie mechanic to the sound of Bach, and as he gives him head, another man rides his motorcycle to the garage. Upon the arrival of the biker, who wears long hair, a beard, a leather jacket, and under his jeans a jockstrap that looks as though it has never been washed, the sex becomes more intense. The rich man, who by now is wearing the woman's cast off panties, gets fucked by the biker and gets his head thrust into a toilet by the mechanic. The action is represented in a disjunctive montage accompanied by the bleeps and drones of an analogue synthesizer. Women in antique cheesecake photos seem to bear witness to the scene, which culminates in the biker penetrating the exhaust pipe of his motorcycle. The biker ejaculates on his motorcycle seat, «Jesu, Joy of a Man's Desiring» returns to the soundtrack, and finally, the participants leave the sex garage. Fred Halsted hoped to capitalize on the popularity of L. A. Plays Itself and Sex Garage while upping the stakes in his next feature, Sextool (1975), which was intended to have been Halsted's crossover success.
William E. Jones
This film is screened together with <filmlink id=\"2816\">L.A. Plays Itself</filmlink>.
1972, Fred Halsted
